“You mean the masters?” We’d hit a back stairwell, where the crowd was thinner. But even up top, I’d seen fewer masters than I’d expected at what had suddenly become vamp central.
“No. Just older. Like no longer babies. The kind of Joes—and Janes—that used to make appointments and supervise the cleaning crew and answer the phones.”
“What?”
He nodded. “They have the cook down there, from what I hear. Well, the guy who orders the food, anyway. The chef and his boys are human—”
“What are they doing with the cook?”
“You tell me. I mean, seriously, if you find out, you tell me. I’m dying to know.”
The stairs finally ended in a narrow corridor, five floors down. Unlike the swanky areas up top, this was completely Spartan. Just a metal handrail on the stairs, unadorned concrete block walls, and a few bare bulbs overhead, now dark. And a dinged-up metal door at the end of the hall, with two large vamps standing in front of it.
No one was trying to impress anyone down here, which was clearly a staff area. And that included the staff. Who didn’t so much as blink when we approached.
“Put me down,” I told my ride, who immediately did as he was told.
God, I could get used to baby vamps.
The others, of course, continued to ignore my existence. I was too tired to try and read the clues, and figure out how old they were, not that it mattered. Old enough to lift the hair on my arms from the power they were putting off. Old enough to not bother being polite to some human who’d gotten lost. Old enough to be a problem.
Until Jules piped up. “Does the Pythia fight alone?” he demanded—oddly.
Even more oddly, it got a reaction. One of the hulking mountains, bald and stacked and jeans clad—like he wasn’t supposed to be seen by the kind of people who would have his attire as their chief worry—blinked once. And looked at me.
His eyes narrowed.
“No,” he said. And that was it.
“No what?” Jules demanded, because despite being a member of Mircea’s tribe, he’d never been great with diplomacy.
Or with remembering that he wasn’t a vampire anymore, and could be squashed like a bug if he touched that door.
I pulled him back.
“No what?” he repeated. “No, she can’t get in? Because she can get in. She can get in any damn place she—”
“Jules!” I said, and he shut up.
The vamp didn’t say anything, either. For a moment, we all just stood there, not talking. Which they were perfectly capable of doing all day, but I didn’t have the time.
“I could shift through the door, but I’m tired,” I finally said to Mr. Clean. “I need my strength for other things.”
This, of course, also got no response. I sometimes forgot, dealing mostly with Mircea’s crew, that vamps didn’t tend to waste effort talking to humans. It was one reason they and the mages didn’t get on. Mages would talk; vamps would look at them like they were bugs, assuming they acknowledged them at all; mages would get pissed. Unfortunate things ensued.
But I wasn’t up to unfortunate things, not with feet that were killing me and a headache that was starting to pound at my temples again and a day that might not qualify for worst ever, considering the competition, but sure as hell hadn’t been good.
“Let me rephrase,” I said grimly. “I am tired. So, if I have to use power, I’m not going to use it to shift through a door that you could just open for me. I am going to use it to shift you. You will not like where I shift you to.”
Mr. Clean remained impassive, but his buddy didn’t seem quite so sanguine. He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then reached into his back pocket—I would have thought for a gun except he didn’t need a gun. And, sure enough, he came back with something else.
Something like a folded-up newspaper.
“Yeah, okay,” Jules said. “See?” He tapped the paper.
The vamp, who was just as big as his partner, but who had varied the Hulk imitation to include a buzz cut, scowled.
Jules stopped tapping the paper.
The vamp unfolded it and took a look.
I would have asked him what he was doing, but I didn’t need to. Because the whole of the front page was taken up with a picture of my face, blood-streaked and snarling, hovering over Rhea as she lay sprawled on the drag.
Because somebody, in the middle of all that, had thought to take a picture.
Reporters.
They might just be the craziest group I’d met yet.
“Not her,” the other vamp said, glancing at the paper.
Buzz Cut frowned, taking his time. Or maybe it just took that long for the elevator to make it all the way to the top floor. Finally, he looked up at me, squinted, and then looked back down at his paper again. “Dunno.”
“Oh, for—it’s her. It’s obviously her!” Jules said, which got him another scowl.
Warning number two.
I pulled him behind me.
“I don’t have a driver’s license on me,” I began. And then stopped. Because the top of the paper had fallen over, revealing the headline. The massive headline that bisected the entire front page, in roughly the same size letters that had been used to announce the end of World War II.
DOES THE PYTHIA FIGHT ALONE?
“What is that?” I asked, taking the paper before I thought about it.
Strangely, the vamp let me have it.
“Graphology,” Jules told me, with relish. “With a Carla Torres byline.”
“Which means?”
He blinked. “Carla Torres. Graphology. It’s . . . a major paper, okay? Like our version of the New York Times. And she’s a senior editor.”
“I remember her from this morning,” I said, thinking of frizzy hair and cute glasses. And more of what the older vamps at Tony’s had called moxie than most vamps I knew had.
“She remembers you, too,” Jules said dryly. “And she went off—on the senate, the Circle . . . Hell, she was even bitching at the Weres for a while—”
“Bitching about what?”
“Read the title.” He was staring at it over my shoulder. “I don’t know what happened this morning, but according to her, you basically fought off the entire Black Circle on your own. Except for some probably exaggerated help from a valiant group of reporters,” he added, mouth twisting.
“It wasn’t.”
“What?”
“Exaggerated.”
“You haven’t even read it yet.”
“I don’t have to read it for that. I’d have been dead without them. And without Marco and the others. Even the Circle showed up . . . eventually.”
“Well, not soon enough for her,” Jules said gleefully. “And she’s pissed. That’s the evening paper, so she must have spent all day writing it. You can read it for yourself, but her main line was that, prior to yesterday, she didn’t know what to think about you. She vacillated between some kind of nut who’d gotten into a dangerous position of power, to a stuck-up vampire protégée, to a dangerous rebel intent on upending the system. Or possibly all three. But now . . .”