I looked up to find two unhappy vamps looking at me. “Okay,” I said, “it’s all the same to me. I just want my check.”
Mircea took out a leather-covered checkbook and started writing, while Marlowe regarded Vleck thoughtfully. “I’ve always wondered, how do you get out?”
“What?”
“Of the club or the house or what have you.” He waved a hand. “As soon as a master-level vampire dies, every one of his children knows it. Even if they are old enough and powerful enough to have been emancipated, they feel it here”—he tapped his chest—“like a blow. Yet you regularly kill such vampires and escape the premises without your own head ending up on a pike. So I ask again, how do you get out?”
“I walk.”
He frowned. “I am serious. I would like to know.”
“I’m sure you would,” I said sarcastically, as Mircea tore off the check. Marlowe ran the Senate’s intelligence organization, and he’d probably vastly prefer to keep matters like Vleck in the hands of his own deadly little hit squad. But he couldn’t afford to risk them in wartime on nonessential missions.
The conflict between the Silver Circle of light mages and their dark counterpart had been going on for a while now, and just to confuse the hell out of everyone, the vamps had decided to ally with the light. But it stretched their manpower, and they seemed to have more trouble taking care of the Vlecks of this world than I did.
I intended to keep it that way. This was the best money I’d made in years.
“Every vampire in that nightclub knew the moment their master died, yet you simply walked out,” he said resentfully, refusing to let it go.
I put on my innocent face, which seems to annoy him about as much as those damn smiles do me. “Yeah. I guess I got lucky.”
“You do it every time!”
“Really lucky,” I amended, trying to take the check.
But Mircea held on to the other end.
“Have you by any chance seen Louis-Cesare recently?”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Why can you never answer a simple question?”
“Maybe because you never ask any. And what would the darling of the European Senate want with me?”
Louis-Cesare and I had met only recently, despite being members of the same dysfunctional clan. It wasn’t too surprising since we came from opposite ends of the vampire world. I was the dhampir daughter of the family patriarch, the little-known stain on an otherwise immaculate record. Dhampirs are feared and loathed by vampires for obvious reasons, and most families who accidentally end up with one quickly bury the error. Why Mircea hadn’t done so was still something of a mystery. Maybe because I occasionally proved useful.
Louis-Cesare, on the other hand, was vamp royalty. The only made Child of Mircea’s younger and far stranger brother, Radu, he had been breaking records almost since birth. He’d become a master, a rank many vamps never reached, before he’d been dead half a century. Another century had elevated him to first-level status, on par with the top players in the vamp world. And within a decade after that, he’d become the darling of the European Senate, feted for his looks, his wealth and his ability on the dueling field, which had gotten them out of many sticky situations.
A month ago, the prince and the pariah had crossed paths because we had one thing in common: we were both very good at killing things. And Mircea’s bug-eyed, crazy brother Vlad had needed killing if anyone ever had. But our collaboration had had a rough start. Louis-Cesare didn’t like taking orders from a dhampir, and I didn’t like having a partner, period. But we eventually sorted things out and got the job done. He’d even learned some manners, before the end. And I had started to think that it was kind of . . . nice, having someone to watch my back for a change.
Sometimes I could be really stupid.
“Radu mentioned that the two of you had grown . . . close,” Mircea said carefully.
“Radu was mistaken.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” Marlowe observed. “Have you seen or had any contact with Louis-Cesare in the last few weeks?”
“Why? What’s he done?”
“Nothing . . . yet.”
“Okay, what are you afraid he’ll do?”
Marlowe glanced at Mircea, and they held one of those silent conversations vampires sometimes have, the kind I’m not supposed to know about. “I would merely like to ask him about a family matter,” Mircea said, after a moment.
“As you’re constantly reminding me, I’m family. Tell me and maybe I can help. Or does the family thing only work when you want something?”
Mircea took a deep breath, which he didn’t need, to show me how much of a pain I was being. “It’s about his family, Dorina, and is not my story to tell. Now, have you seen him?”
“I haven’t heard from him in a month,” I said flatly, suddenly tiring of the game. I didn’t need another reminder that, as far as my status as family was concerned, it was and always would be second-class.