Not that he was a dumb jock, or dumb at all. But he was honorable—to a fault. And honest and decent and straightforward, none of which were traits that adapted well to the world of court intrigue. Not in Europe, where scheming Anthony ruled with an iron fist, and not at the court of courts that our own consul was putting together. Which, as luck would have it, had just become the focus of the entire vampire world.
The usually somewhat-turgid and uber-traditional vamp society had gotten a shake-up recently, when the long-running war in Faerie spilled over into Earth. And quickly became enough of a threat to cause the unthinkable: an alliance of the world’s six vampire senates for the first time ever, since for the first time ever they had a common enemy. Other than themselves, of course.
Nobody knew how this was going to work, or if it was, since the senates mostly hated one another. So, normally, I’d have been worried about Louis-Cesare in that unholy snake pit, which was now more like an unholy canyon filling up with opportunists from all over the world, eager to make whatever they could out of the war and the chaos it provided. Because they wouldn’t get another chance like this.
Opportunities for advancement were pretty damned rare in vamp society, since immortal butts don’t often vacate seats. That was especially true for the highest positions, which had waiting lists that could span centuries. But the war had changed all that, causing previously despised outcasts with useful skills to suddenly be looked at with new eyes.
Outcasts like me.
It was why I wasn’t as worried for Louis-Cesare as I might have been, since I was right down there in the snake pit with him. Because, believe it or not—and I still mostly didn’t—the newest member of the illustrious North American Vampire Senate, the ruling body of millions of vampires at home and the leading force of the coalition abroad, was . . .
Me.
No, seriously.
No, seriously.
Okay, it was actually Dorina, who Mircea had somehow managed to convince people was a first-level master vamp wearing a human suit.
And, yeah, under normal circumstances, that sort of carefree manipulation of the facts would have gotten him a padded cell—or a stake, since vamps don’t bother warehousing their problems. But these circumstances weren’t normal. The war had taken the lives of half of the old Senate members and new ones had been needed stat, preferably ones who might be useful in the upcoming fight.
Of course, there were plenty of people who fit that description and would seem a more logical choice than me. Hell, the garbage boy would have seemed a more logical choice than me. Dhampirs and vampires are natural enemies, and while I’d recently come to have a slightly more . . . progressive . . . view on the matter, most of them still hissed at the sight of me. Yet the consul had given me the nod anyway, for the same reason that she’d snapped up Louis-Cesare: daddy dearest had promised her that I’d vote the way she wanted.
And with a bunch of new senators on board and not all of her choosing, and with rival consuls and their entourages flooding in to discuss the war, and with everybody watching her every move, just waiting for a chance to replace her as the newly appointed leader of the vampire world . . .
Well, even a dhampir’s support had started to look pretty good.
Of course, I could have declined the honor and the Mack truck of excrement probably headed toward the fan of my life as a result. But the family had needed help, Louis-Cesare had needed an ally, and I had kind of wanted to go on living. Something that wasn’t likely if the fey flooded through a bunch of illegal portals and murdered us all.
So I’d said okay.
I just hadn’t stopped to wonder how a chick who’d spent most of her life as a pariah, scrounging up a living on the fringes of vamp society, was supposed to fit in at the court of courts.
Where people were tipped in gold.
“You’re going to need some friends, too,” Louis-Cesare told me, as if he’d been following my thoughts. And the next thing I knew, my hands were full of coins, old ones with a smirking guy on the front with a big nose and a wig. And before I could respond to that, a roar went up, one that made the former bedlam sound like a day at the park and seemed to be coming from directly overhead. I looked up—
And promptly forgot everything else.
Holy shit, I thought, caught flat-footed for the second time in one night.
We’d reached the ruined lobby, which was a working sea of people below, and above . . . was crazy town. It was also mostly missing. The fire damage hadn’t looked that bad from outside, where the sturdy exterior walls had masked the carnage within, but now I could see that the entire center was gutted. As if it had acted like a chimney, pulling the fire up and out, and leaving us staring at fifteen floors of mostly open space, bisected by half-fallen girders and ropes of electrical lines, forming a giant echo chamber.
And it had plenty to echo. Hordes of spectators were clustered in working knots on the floors that could still support their weight, jostling for space on the cracked and burnt remains of people’s apartments. Thousands had already beaten us to the punch, staking out prime spots while we were goofing off outside, and now they were shouting and stomping their feet and banging on things, which I didn’t think was too smart considering the state of this place. And which was sending siftings of black ash down like evil snow, covering everything in drifts of soot nobody cared about, because the fight was about to begin.
Although where it was I had no idea. I didn’t see anything that even vaguely resembled a ring, or so much as a cordoned-off section of floor. Of course, it was possible that it was buried somewhere under the massive crowd, which covered every square inch of the lobby, and seemed to want ours, too, judging by the amount of abuse we were taking.
“Dory!” I somehow heard the shout, which seemed to be coming from a towering pile of ruined furniture by a wall.
There were some more stalls over there—the usual T-shirts, hats, and water bottles. And one selling nothing but flashlights in all shapes and sizes, along with ropes of batteries in garlic-string-like bunches festooned everywhere. I almost bought one; it was gloomy as shit in here.
Which was why I couldn’t tell who was calling me.
“Dory!”
I finally noticed that the spray-painter had been at work here, too, with neon green arrows flickering in the scattered torchlight, high on smoky black walls. They pointed the way to everything from booze to food to areas designated as toilets that I didn’t want to know any more about. To a dripping line that said merely FIN.
There was no further explanation offered, but then, one wasn’t needed. The hoi polloi of bookmakers might have set up outside, in the mud and muck, and managed to nab some business. But those in the know had bypassed them, because they knew better odds were to be found within.
They knew to look for Fin.
And, sure enough, the face peering at me over the side of the furniture pile was familiar. It was also full of nose, because Fin was of the troll persuasion. But unlike the mountain variety, who sort of resembled their namesake, he was an itty-bitty forest troll. One with a serious admiration for Olga, and no, I didn’t know how that worked, but I assumed it was the reason he was beckoning us over.
Fin usually operated his business out of his bar, where you could get a bet down on anything from human and nonhuman sports to how fast a spider could traverse a girder. Fin covered it all, and had a rep for paying up promptly when he lost, which was probably why his makeshift perch looked like it was being besieged. We fought our way through to him anyway, using the bears as battering ram and buffer in one, which allowed us to reach the bottom of the pile more or less intact.
“Been trying to reach you all day!” Fin yelled, while continuing to accept money and write slips. “You kill another phone or what?”
I held it up. “Got it on me!”
“Well, turn it on once in a while! I got news!”
“A job?” I yelled, because Fin had been known to shoot work my way. And while I didn’t think moonlighting was normal for a senator, neither was starvation. And nobody had bothered to mention before I took my shiny new Senate job that it didn’t come with a salary.
A girl needed to get paid.