I needed to check the kitchen when I got home.
I repaired the damage as best I could with only the shiny metal doors for a mirror. Luckily, the dust didn’t stick to the slick material any more than the trash had. Damn, I needed to get me some of this.
Marlowe straightened up and looked me over. “You’ll do. What about me?”
He still looked a little dusty and a little rumpled, and the guy he’d borrowed the clothes from had been a good deal thinner across the chest. So neither the shirt nor the coat fit properly. Marlowe had solved that problem by letting them both gape open, and by leaving the tie askew under one ear. And by subtly altering his expression.
A minute before, he’d been a focused, furious master vamp jonesing for some payback. Now he was a jolly, slightly inebriated playboy, ready to finish his night of debauchery with a spot of…well, whatever Slava had on the menu. It was actually pretty impressive.
Especially since he wasn’t using a glamourie. The features were the same—the stubborn chin, the too-sharp nose, the dark brown eyes that usually looked small due to being narrowed in suspicion. Now they were big and slightly glazed, the nose and high cheekbones were flushed a rosy color, and the brown curls were artfully unkempt. In a matter of a few seconds, and without any magic that I was able to detect, he’d gone from 007 to Arthur.
“Not bad,” I admitted. “If nobody gets too close. We both smell like we fell into the grill at a barbecue.”
“Not for long,” he said, pulling a flask out of his hip pocket. He took a swig, and then threw a palm full of whiskey all over me.
Great.
He sprinkled some on his coat, and slapped more on his face like cologne. “How about now?”
“Now we smell like a drunk barbecue.”
“Have to do,” he told me, as the elevator slid to a halt.
I started for the door, but Marlowe hit the button, keeping the doors closed.
“What happened to no time?” I asked, as he put out an arm, trapping me in a corner.
He didn’t answer, and his dark eyes were serious. “Remember—no mistakes.”
“Get out of my way.”
I started to push past, but he grabbed my arm. “I mean it.”
“And you think I don’t?”
“I think you are good at killing things. But he’s no good to me dead. I need to know who’s behind this, and it isn’t a two-bit pimp like Slava.”
“His boys will know—”
“He was always a suspicious little shit,” said the Paranoid King, cutting me off. “We can’t know what, if anything, he shared with his people. He dies and we could get sod all.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“For your sake, I hope so. Help me get him out of here—alive—and there will be a nice bonus in it for you. Kill him, I will make it a personal project to see that you never work for us again.”
“Let go of me,” I said flatly, because I didn’t feel like trying to explain to Marlowe that this wasn’t just about the money. “This isn’t just about the money,” I added, because I’m perverse like that.
“Then what is it about?”
“You know what.”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
I scowled. Revisiting personal failures isn’t my favorite thing. Particularly not personal failures that had gotten someone killed.
And all right, yes, I hadn’t actually gotten Lawrence killed. I knew that. He was an upper-level master and they did what they damned well pleased.
But it still felt like my fault.
It had ever since Mircea let me relive it in glorious color in my head. Maybe that was why I couldn’t shake it. I could see it as vividly as if it had just happened: the blue-black dock, the dark red blood, and Lawrence’s bright, desperate eyes as I tried to drag him to the water, to get him out of the line of fire.
Tried and failed.
So, yeah, it felt like my fault. And I didn’t like that feeling. I didn’t know if I would feel any better once I ripped into the guys who had ripped into him, but I was looking forward to finding out.
At least, I would be if Marlowe ever got out of my way.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Lawrence, all right?” I snapped.
Marlowe’s face abruptly blanked, and something shifted behind his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was actually going to attack me. I think maybe he did, too, because he froze, and when he spoke again, his voice had changed, deepened, roughened. “I’m supposed to believe you give a damn about a vampire you barely knew?”
“He was my partner—”
“He was a vampire. Just like a thousand others you’ve killed. Don’t insult my intelligence—”
“Is that possible?”
“—by telling me you’re here for him!”
“Fine. I won’t.” Why the hell I ever tried to explain anything to Marlowe, I didn’t know. I must be going senile. I started for the door again, but the arm didn’t budge.
“You may have Mircea fooled,” he told me, getting in my face. “May have won over Radu, may have seduced Louis-Cesare. But I know what you are.”
“Then you know better than to piss me off.”
“Damn it! I want an answer!”
“About what?” I demanded. “About the fact that I should have kept him from going in there? Or followed him in faster? Or done something other than stand there while they blasted him full of holes? Because I know that, all right?”
I jerked out of Marlowe’s grip.
“If he’d been with a vampire he knew—hell, even one he didn’t—he wouldn’t have gone off like that,” I said bitterly. “He’d have waited for her, explained what he was doing, included her. But he wasn’t with another vampire, was he? He was with a dhampir. And he didn’t expect me to have his back anyway, so why not go off on his own? He probably thought he’d be safer that way. Probably thought you had it in for him, to partner him up with a creature as dangerous as whatever he was hunting!”
I pushed past him, furious, guilty, humiliated—and found myself hauled back. I was about to register my displeasure—forcibly—when Marlowe stopped me by saying the last words I expected to hear. “He requested you.”
I glared at him. “What?”
“He requested to be assigned to you. Several of them did.”
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask them. My guess would be…curiosity. Until recently, many of them didn’t even believe that dhampirs existed. Thought your kind were merely myth. Then they find out that not only do they exist but that one is in their midst, and of Mircea’s family line at that.…”
“Then curiosity got him killed!”
“No. Pride got him killed. He should have waited for you, he should have—” His jaw clenched. “I knew it was trouble when he received a second major gift before reaching first level.…That is rarely a good thing.”
“He was powerful—”
“Not enough! As I tried to tell him, on more than one occasion. But he’d never been in a position that his abilities couldn’t overcome. What the physical couldn’t handle, the mental got him out of, and vice versa. He never had his back against a wall. He never—”
He broke off but I knew what he meant. “He never failed.”
“No. And sometimes, they need to fail. They need the lessons it teaches. Or the first time they do may be their last!” He looked at me, his eyes dark and implacable. “But not tonight. We don’t fail tonight.”
“You’ll have Slava alive,” I told him simply.
He looked at me for a few long seconds, searching my face for something that I guess he found. Or maybe we were just out of time. “Then let’s go get him.”
Chapter Twenty-two
The elevator doors opened and we stumbled out—onto the wrong floor. At least, that’s what I thought at first. Because whatever I’d been expecting, this wasn’t it.
The human S&M community may occasionally get tired of the Gothic stereotype, but they play into it often enough. Lots of black and red, lots of whips and chains, lots of deliberately scary props wielded by deliberately scary people. Which made sense, I supposed. If the idea was to test limits, to push boundaries, to ride the knife edge between pain and fear and pleasure, then you went with whatever worked.
Unless you were Slava, apparently.
Slava had gone with highly polished blond woods, chrome modernist furniture and art glass, with pretty white and gold fixtures hovering over a reception desk and a water feature trickling away on the opposite wall. It looked like a Norwegian day spa. And the weird thing was, his version was actually more intimidating. Like he was saying “I don’t need the props; I have the real thing.”
Only the real thing must have been inside, because the guy standing up behind the desk wasn’t scary at all.
He also wasn’t vampire. He was garden-variety human—a nice, reassuringly bland presence to welcome the more skittish types—but I was betting there was a call button conveniently located under the desk. And what would respond wouldn’t be nice, human or particularly welcoming.
But the button didn’t get pushed because Marlowe staggered through the lobby with his arm around my waist, flashing some kind of card at the guy. He did it so fast that I didn’t see what it was, and I doubt the guy did, either. But enough of a suggestion rippled through the air along with it to have him settling back against his chair, unconcerned.
And then we were pushing past some frosted-glass doors and into—
Damn.
The penthouse had either come with a full semicircle of fifteen-foot windows, or they’d been added later. Probably at the same time that it had been gutted, leaving a huge open area for maybe a couple hundred guests. And a group of performers in the place of chandeliers, executing flowing, sensual acrobatics in body sequins and some not-so-strategically-placed feathers.
