“Do you think Laurel killed Ike?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. God, I’m so cold.”
“Just one more thing. Does the club have some sort of an air freshening system?”
The question jarred Donita. “What does that have to do with someone killing Ike?”
Saber shrugged. “Probably nothing. Just a loose end.”
Donita shook her head. “There’s nothing but central heat and air conditioning that I know of.”
“All right. The paramedics need to take you to the hospital now, but Cesca and I will check on you later.”
“Can we call anyone for you?” I asked. “Your girlfriends?”
“No, I’ll do it.”
She wouldn’t call them, though. I was still just connected enough to hear that she didn’t care about anything at the moment. Who could blame her?
Jackson, who’d stood by and listened, motioned to an officer as the paramedics helped Donita onto a gurney. I knew he was putting the man on hospital guard duty, but I didn’t object. Sure, it was ludicrous to think Donita could’ve taken out a vampire, but she’d been his lover, and she’d found the body. That gave her two tickets to suspect city. We headed for the club’s back entrance, Jackson in the lead. I didn’t see Pandora, but supposed she was on shape-shifter stealth reconnaissance.
“I doubt we’ll get anything useful,” Jackson was saying, “but we’ve seized the computer to check the security feed. I figured you should be here when we questioned the vamps, so my guys took statements from the humans.”
“I suppose no one saw a thing,” Saber said.
“Not that they’d admit to.”
“Have you released them?”
“Yeah, even the waitstaff. We’ll have to question them away from the club, because they’re too frightened to say a word against a vampire.”
When we stepped into the club proper, it was obvious that humans weren’t the only ones who seemed frightened into silence. Tower and Zena, Coach, Suzy, and Ray—the Antonio Banderas look-alike vamp who had been Ike’s attorney—sat at a table in the center of the room. Suzy dabbed her eyes with a napkin, and Ray looked grim, but the rest were deadpan and dead still. That is, except when Laurel, dressed like a slutty biker vamp, brushed behind them as she paced. Then I saw the tiniest twitch of an eye or tightening of a mouth. Ike’s vamps might not be grieving him, but they didn’t look overjoyed that he was forever dead, either. Charles and Miranda weren’t present, but then they had likely gone back to their jobs at Ike’s residence after Laurel was released from punishment. I wondered if Jackson had thought to search the lair.
I’d scanned the men Jackson had fanned out around the room when my skin prickled and I knew Laurel had spotted us.
“Fires of hell,” she screeched, startling half of Jackson’s people into drawing their weapons. “Ike told you two never to come here again.”
From twenty feet away, she flowed across the room in a one-second rush, but I was ready. I pulled hard at her aura, her life force, took it into myself and held it. Laurel, though, stopped fast enough to send a whiplash of energy through the air and through me. I held what I’d already taken and pulled again.
“No!” She threw up a hand and backed up a few paces, her mocha skin gleaming with a fine sheen, bone beads in her cornrows clacking. “You will not humiliate me again, bitch.”
“I don’t want to humiliate you, Laurel.” Which was true, since I’d just as soon see her shipped to the Antarctic. “I don’t want you in my face.”
“And I do not wish you in this club.” Her flat black eyes narrowed. “Why are you here?”
“They’re assisting in the investigation,” Jackson said.
Laurel flipped a hand. “Arrest Ike’s little whore and be done with it.”
“Come on, Laurel,” Saber said as he strolled toward the table of vamps. “Donita didn’t kill your boss.”
Laurel spun on Saber, those damn beads clacking again. “And you presume that why? Because she is a weakling human? Fool. She ensnared the affections of Lord Ike by trickery. She could easily have killed him the same way.”
“You don’t believe that, do you, Tower?” Saber asked.
Jackson and I had taken advantage of Laurel’s distraction to approach the table of vamps from the other side, but no one missed Tower jerk in his chair.
“Lady Laurel is the new mistress,” the ebony-skinned Tower said carefully.
“Lady Laurel?” I blurted.
She moved closer to the vamps she now ruled.
“It is not so exalted a title as yours, Princess Ci,” she drawled snidely, “but it is a customary one.”
“It’s also one more reason to move you to the top of the suspect list,” Saber said.
“What do you mean?”
He caught my gaze and jerked his head ever so slightly. Smell the vamps. I sensed his message more than heard him, and began a slow pace behind each chair, pausing to sniff, while Saber kept pressure on Laurel.