“Technically your second installed it, but it was my idea.”
Eli snorted, and I got the feeling that Edmund’s contribution was more in the vamp’s head than in reality. “It isn’t tied into the system. I’ll pull the drive now and insert another. We can take it to Alex for review.” Eli went to a spot next to the door and peeled back a length of tape that was the same color as the wall. Behind the tape, Eli had cut into the wallboard and planted a small camera. He removed a tiny drive, inserted another, and closed the tape over it. Unless someone was looking for a small hole next to the door, it was invisible. “It’s in real time, so it will take a while.”
I walked to Adriana, who had been watching us avidly. “Give me blood,” she demanded.
“No,” I said. “I won’t. Edmund, will you liaise with Sabina and Bethany and get that bracelet off her?” My primo went still, that undead thing they do when they display all the life of a wax mannequin. I grinned at the wall, not looking at him directly, my Beast playing. “What? You thought being my primo was going to be all bloody fun and games? There’s politics too.”
Eli said to me, “He could bring in enough minor vamps to take it off her and deliver it to the house. Up to you.”
Regally, I nodded my head at Edmund. “I am not averse to either method. Make it so, Number One.”
Edmund went from still as wax to staring at me. “You are . . . teasing me?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “I still need that bracelet, but it’s up to you how I get it.” I stepped to Adrianna’s cage and rattled the gate. It was secure.
There was a faint pop of sound. Blood stench billowed into the room. I whirled to see a blood-splattered Leo in the open doorway. Blood ran in rivulets over his crimson clothing. Adrianna moaned.
“Leo?”
“Où étais-tu?” he whispered, the words strangled.
“What—”
“They have taken him!” he screamed. “They took my Grégoire. You were not here. You were supposed to be here.” Leo dropped to his knees. Tried to catch himself with a hand on the jamb but slipped in his blood. He had lost two fingers on his right hand. He face-planted and lay still. His shirt was cut to ribbons, as was the flesh beneath. There was a knife sticking from between his shoulder blades. Behind me, Adrianna laughed, the sound low and mocking.
? ? ?
Things moved fast. Katie, Leo’s heir, with the most powerful blood in the city, Dacy Mooney, the visiting heir of the Shaddock blood clan from Asheville, and others gathered to feed their master. Someone sent for Sabina to help feed him. Bethany, the other priestess, raced down the hallway to feed Leo, opening the flesh of her fingertips and smearing it over the MOC, sticking the same fingers into wounds I hadn’t noticed. When he was at least stable, the vamps carried the MOC to his rooms. I followed behind, useless, and I finally got to see where Leo spent his private time.
The room was unlike the one Grégoire slept in, with its tapestries and fancy antiques and carpets. Leo’s room had wooden floors, pale blue walls, and a four-poster bed with intricate carvings. There were three armoires, all closed; a single chair, a small table, and a bookshelf full of old books and scrolls and wax tablets, of the sort he had owned before his former home burned to the ground. Some things had been saved from the flames, perhaps these.
I pulled the chair into the corner and sat, silent, watching, a nine-mil in one hand. Just in case.
Katie entered after me, bringing Leo’s dismembered fingers for reattachment. A hand reached out and snatched away the dagger in Leo’s back. Edmund brought gray silk thread and a medical bag for sewing. Someone else took a liquor bottle off Leo’s shelf and cleaned the fingers, dousing them in copious amounts of ethanol. Edmund grabbed the bottle and shoved it away, saying, “One does not use a thirty-year-old Macallan for dismembered Mithran limbs. One uses vodka.”
I heard the words coming out of my mouth before I could help it. “Doesn’t that cause cell damage?”
On his bed, Leo laughed, as if at my na?veté, and clasped Edmund’s hand with his own. “I wish a taste of that elixir before you put it away. It’s obscene to open that bottle and not taste.” Someone found two cut crystal glasses and poured some of the Macallan in each, added a splash of water, and the two men clinked glasses. Sipped. Edmund sighed, the sound so longing that I had to figure he’d had nothing so nice since he lost his own clan. Lesser vamps probably didn’t get the good stuff.
“Sire,” Edmund said in thanks.
Around him other, even lesser vamps opened ancient surgery supplies from Edmund’s medical bag and doused them with vodka. There was nothing in sterile packets, and the part of me that remembered my emergency medical classes cringed. But then, vamp physiology was not human in any way. So what did I know?
“Do you remember the last time I replaced a body part?” Edmund went on. “You offered a much less fine drink.”
“We were on a battlefield,” Leo said, his voice regaining something akin to the mellifluous tones it usually carried. “Scotch doesn’t travel well, not in saddlebags in summer.”
“Rotgut,” Edmund said. “Swill.”
“’Twas all we had, mon amie,” Leo said, his laughter containing a faint wheeze of pain and grief over Grégoiré’s kidnapping. Leo looked at me. “Save him.” I nodded.
“Let’s flip you over, sire, so the priestesses can heal your back. Removing that blade was unwise, whoever did it. Blades should be removed from bodies—even Mithran bodies—in the presence of a skilled surgeon or a master with particularly potent blood. Even a master can bleed out if the placement was especially skilled.”
“What if the blade was silvered?” a voice asked from the corner of the room.
Edmund looked up at that. Sipped, while surveying the onlookers. Perhaps he was remembering his own brush with silvered death only a day or so past. “In that case, yank it out and bleed yourself inside the wound. Feed the Mithran. And pray.”
If anyone thought the order to pray was odd, no one said so. In fact, a tiny vamp at the edge of the bed dropped to her knees and started praying to a handful of beads. It wasn’t a prayer like I remembered from the Christian children’s home where I grew up, and it was full of stuff about Mary. I figured it was Catholic and I had been wrong about her praying to the beads themselves. Another person dropped and started praying too, also with beads, this one talking to Allah.