The vamp put me on the sofa.
He had a watch on his wrist, which I might have noticed sooner if he hadn’t been screaming at me. “Four a.m.?” I asked Jules—carefully, with one eye on the vamp. But there was no reaction this time.
Jules nodded. “Yes, why?”
“What day?”
He looked at me in amusement. “That would sound weird coming from anyone else.”
“Just tell me—please.”
He did. And I relaxed back against the cushions, feeling like my spine had just turned to water. I must have only slept for a few hours. The second day Rosier had promised was still young.
I opened my eyes after a moment, to notice that the vamp wasn’t looking nearly so relieved. He was standing beside the sofa, hands wringing, Adam’s apple working. And glancing nervously at Jules, like he had no idea who he was.
“Jules Fortescue,” Jules told him, extending a hand, which was strange.
Even stranger, the vamp took it.
It caught me by surprise, because vamps didn’t usually shake hands. It was one of those human affectations that slipped away after death, maybe because it didn’t apply to all the cultures and eras they came from. Or maybe because touching another vampire could cause auras to spark, and be taken for a challenge. Most vamps would have looked at Jules—who ought to know better—with disdain for even offering, but this one seemed almost . . . relieved.
Jules smiled and released him. “All right, that’s a lie,” he confessed. “It’s actually Jimmy Tucker. My agent just thought it sounded more dignified the other way.”
The vamp blinked.
“Yeah, used to be an actor,” Jules said, sitting down. “It’s okay if you’ve never heard of me. It was a long time ago.” He hooked another chair with his foot, dragging it a few feet closer. “Go ahead, sit down.”
The vamp sat. His eyes were still flicking around—at me, at a painting of a rustic hillside, at a rodeo rider cast in bronze on a bucking bronco. “Mine,” Jules said, seeing the direction of his gaze. “This is going to be my office if anybody ever brings me a desk.”
“Office?” I said. “Then they finally let you out?”
The last time I’d seen Jules, he’d been a sort of prisoner of the senate, although not because he’d done anything wrong. But because he’d done something unique, something that no vampire had ever done, at least as far as anybody knew. He’d turned human.
Or, to be more precise, I’d turned him human, in an attempt to save his life. He’d blundered into a terrible curse, one of the ones Augustine had been working up for the senate, and it didn’t have a cure yet. So I’d lobbed a Hail Mary and tried de-aging him, to turn the clock back to before he was cursed, hoping that would lift it. And, for once, something had actually worked out—sort of.
I still didn’t fully understand it, considering that physical wounds weren’t similarly affected. A stabbed human just became a younger stabbed human, for example, but in Jules’ case he’d ended up curse free. And that included the curse of vampirism, which had been lifted right along with the other, when he aged back to before it was laid.
It was what had given the senate the idea for their army. Because, if I could de-age someone, why not the reverse? It had also put Jules in a bad position, in a big way. Before the change, he had been one of my bodyguards, a master of Mircea’s family line, someone with power, money, and influence. Afterward, he was a self-professed lab rat, and one I’d promised to help spring from his cage.
Only it looked like he’d already done that.
“For the moment,” he agreed. “I’m their liaison to all the new vamps they’re bringing in.”
“What new vamps?”
“Ones like this guy.” Jules leaned forward, elbows on knees, his usually expressive hands hanging down, calm and quiet. Like the casual smile in his blue eyes as he looked at the twitchy vamp. “I’m not going to ask you any questions,” he told him slowly. “Neither of us is. Right?” He looked at me.
“Right.”
The vamp looked seriously relieved.
“I’m just going to talk to Cassie for a bit. That’s Cassie.” He nodded at me. The vamp looked my way, and his face reddened. I wasn’t sure why. For once, I was properly attired in tan capris and a pink blouse. There had been little pink ballerina flats in the room, too, arranged on the carpet, but with my feet, I wasn’t sorry I’d left them.
“Hi,” I said, wondering if that was safe.
Guess so.
“Any questions we ask are not meant for you,” Jules told him. “Just relax for a bit.”
The vamp visibly relaxed.
“So,” Jules asked me. “What happened?”
“I have no idea.”
He nodded. “Let me guess. You were with a vamp—someone more than a few days old.”
It took me a minute, before my eyes cut to Twitchy. “A few days?”
Jules glanced at the guy again, who seemed to be taking the relaxation thing seriously. He was slumped in his chair, staring at cows. “Okay, maybe a few weeks. Definitely not over a month.”
“A few— What is he doing here?”
It was a fair question, because baby vamps were, well, pretty useless. They were mostly carried for the first few years in any family, being given easy, human-level tasks that didn’t require thinking anywhere close to morning, when their brains got all fuzzy. And which utilized the few things they were good at: lifting heavy items, running fast, and, uh, that was about it.
They weren’t even trained much at first, because it took time for their senses to sort themselves out. You can’t just go from a human nose to one like a bloodhound’s and not have it throw you. Or from human hearing to suddenly hearing everything, including conversations a mile off. Or from human sight to vision that could act like a camera’s zoom lens at will—or randomly, if you didn’t know how to control it.
Which was probably why Twitchy had just grabbed the arms of his chair and jumped back—
At a sudden attack of cow.
“Oh, for— I said relax,” Jules snapped, and then sighed when the guy promptly went limp.
“Sorry,” he said as Twitchy slid off the chair and onto the floor, almost like he was boneless.
“You’re not even one of them anymore,” I pointed out, as Jules grabbed him and stuffed him back in his chair. And turned it to face the nice, blank wall to his left, huffing a little with the effort. “Why is he following your commands?”