And my thoughts fractured, the room spun, and I came with a sound of pure desperation.
Which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t the best idea when you live with a bunch of sensorially gifted creatures. Who, it seemed, couldn’t tell the difference between a cry of passion and a cry of pain. As was demonstrated when the bedroom door suddenly blew off its hinges and Louis-Cesare flew backward and disappeared.
Leaving me blinking in confusion at the new, vampire-shaped hole in my dresser.
And my closet.
And my wall.
Which were less noticeable than you might think with an eight-hundred-pound dragon taking up most of the space in the room.
For a moment, it looked at me, and I looked at it, and the dozen or so blond-haired fey swarming into the room through the door looked at both of us. And then a slight tinge of amethyst slowly suffused the delicate scales covering the beast’s cheekbones as it took in my lack of clothes—and blood and gore and missing limbs. “Oops?” it said gruffly, before melting back into my very embarrassed redheaded roommate.
I snatched my robe closed and plunged through my destroyed furniture and fluttering bits of wallpaper, into a closet that was now a wreck of plaster and hanging two-by-fours. And found that, yes, the hole did go completely through the house. Parts of my wardrobe were scattered all over the side lawn, with most of my bras for some reason decorating the neighbor’s fence. But that was better than what had happened to my boyfriend, who had ended up—
Oh, shit.
“Dory, what—oh,” Claire said in a small voice, coming to stand beside me.
Being two stories up, we had a perfect view of the car that had just pulled into the grassy drive along the side of the house, probably because it couldn’t fit anywhere else since it was a stretch limo. A stretch limo that now had a naked vampire sticking out of the ruined windshield, firmly wedged between the wipers and the mirror. Right in front of a driver whose usual icy sangfroid had been shattered by an up-close-and-personal view of the world’s greatest ass.
At least it can’t get any worse, I thought, and then three more vamps piled out of the backseat. And came around the car. And looked at Louis-Cesare, who was ignoring them in favor of staring up at me, an unreadable expression on his face.
“Should I apologize?” Claire asked, sounding worried.
“That…probably wouldn’t be the best idea right now,” I said calmly, looking down at two Senate members and a senator’s brother.
I was debating the odds that I could come up with some story to explain an underwear-strewn yard and a naked master vampire, when the brother looked up. “Oh, they do this sort of thing all the time,” he said, responding to some question I hadn’t heard. He shaded his eyes, and then a smile broke out over his handsome features. “Oh, there you are. Hello, Dory!”
He waved.
The other vampires turned to look at me, and I gave up. I went back into the bedroom, which had miraculously cleared of fey. Except for the one behind me, biting her lip.
“Dory—”
“It’s okay.”
“But the room—”
“It’s fine.”
“And your clothes—”
“I’ll get them later.”
“Later?” She frowned, watching me climb into the bed that I never should have left, earthquake be damned. “What are you going to do now?”
“Go back to sleep,” I told her, dragging a pillow over my face.
And a moment later I heard her gently shut the door.
Chapter Five
Of course, I didn’t really get any sleep. That would have been a little hard with a largish hole in the wall letting in the sounds of bass thumping out of a car radio, a neighbor mowing his lawn and a bunch of lilting fey voices laughing to each other as they chased my underwear. And somebody screaming bloody murder.
The pillow stayed over my face for a few minutes, anyway, because I really didn’t want to know. But I finally faced reality. If I didn’t go down soon, someone would come up, and I preferred to deal with whatever this was properly dressed.
I chose black—tank top, jeans, boots. Because that was what the cataclysm had left me and because it seemed appropriate. And then I had a drink, or two, from the bottle stashed under my bed, because this was going to be no kind of fun.
That had been a given from the moment I saw a certain curly-haired vamp climbing out of the back of the limo. The others might be explained away as family on a visit, although that was hardly a regular occurrence. But Kit Marlowe was the dreaded spymaster for the North American Vampire Senate, and he didn’t pay social calls.
So I knew this was going to suck even before I found a smoking vampire in the hallway.
He wasn’t Marlowe, or one of the other illustrious types who, by the sound of things, were camped out in the kitchen. He was about a foot too short, for one thing, and completely lacking in sartorial splendor for another. And the overlarge nose and pointed face were a bit too ratlike.
And then there was the smoke, which wasn’t coming from a cigarette.
He caught sight of me heading down the stairs and immediately turned around and showed me his rear. “Is my ass on fire?”
“Good morning to you, too.”
“Screw that and look at my butt!”
“Do I have to?”
“Damn it, yes! I’m dying here!”
I checked out the part in question, because today was already shot to hell, and found it covered by a scorched pair of khakis. They looked a little weird, and I finally figured out why. The scorching was coming from the inside.
I grinned. It wasn’t the worst predicament I’d seen him in. The vampire’s name was Ray, and he’d been a slimy nightclub owner when I met him—and soon thereafter beheaded him—on the order of the Senate, who didn’t care if he watered the drinks but did care very much about the illegal weapons he was smuggling in from Faerie. That should have been all she wrote, but one of the items he’d recently brought in happened to be the talisman now decorating the chubby body of Claire’s young son.
It was why she was visiting. The talisman had been stolen from the royal house Claire was shortly to join, and she’d come chasing it—because it gave its wearer almost complete invincibility. And although we’d finally managed to get it back, for a while, Ray had been that owner. Only it looked like whatever residual help he’d gotten had worn off.
“Your butt’s on fire,” I agreed, and had an evil blue gaze aimed at me from over his shoulder.
“Well, don’t just stand there! Do something!”
I edged around him and went into the kitchen, where, sure enough, four master vampires were hanging out, trying to pretend they belonged. That was despite the fact that one of them was wearing Claire’s terry-cloth bathrobe, which was knee-length and roomy on her, but which hit him midthigh and showed a distractingly large wedge of chest. It didn’t matter, since only one of them had a hope in hell of blending in anyway, and Louis-Cesare wasn’t that guy.
Neither was the vamp he was glaring at for some reason. Kit Marlowe had the aforementioned curly brown hair, a pretentious little goatee and an attitude problem. He was currently leaning against the sink, arms crossed, face stuck in a snarl that showed a tiny bit of fang. That might have had something to do with the fact that he was visiting a dhampir, a creature he ranked slightly below rodentia. Or because the window he’d parked himself in front of was streaming sunlight onto the back of his head, slowly roasting his brains.
But he didn’t move because he was badass like that.
“Is there a reason Ray is smelling up the hallway?” I asked, filling a jug from the tap.
“Because he’s an idiot?” Marlowe snapped.
“I’m not the one who dragged me out here in the middle of the damned day!” came floating in the door.
“No, you’re the one who panicked and ran screaming down the middle of the damned road.”
“Because somebody broke the damned windshield!”
“With his body, which plugged the damned hole nicely,” observed the fabulous creature at the kitchen table. Unlike Marlowe, he was sitting well out of the sun, because he wasn’t badass at all and didn’t care who knew it. He accepted a cup of coffee from Claire, who was looking faintly appalled. “Thank you, my dear.”
I wasn’t sure if Claire’s expression had more to do with fear that a guest was about to combust or awe at the spectacle that was my uncle Radu. Because that blending-in thing? That really wasn’t Radu’s style.
Not that his current outfit was showing him to best advantage. He looked like he’d been plucked from his lab at vamp HQ, where he did nefarious things he wasn’t allowed to talk about, without being given time to change. Because he was in boring old work clothes. Of course, for him, that translated into head-to-toe sapphire satin to complement his glossy dark hair, white silk hose to show off his fine calves, and no-doubt-genuine diamond buckles on his high-heeled shoes. He looked like the Blue Boy all grown up and fabulous.
His attire had been the height of male fashion in the mid-seventeenth century, which was the last time Radu had bothered to update his wardrobe. But sitting in a circa 1950s-era kitchen, drinking Sanka out of a chipped New York Giants mug, he was breathtakingly out of place. Like a curious peacock slumming with the pigeons in Central Park.
“And when he climbed out, what was I supposed to do then?” Ray demanded.
“Preferably something that did not involve running into the middle of a public highway to cower under your jacket with your ass in the air,” Marlowe said drily.
“Hey! Not everybody is almighty first level, you know. Some of us still burn up in sunlight!”
“If only.”
“Oh, sure. Insult me while I’m on fire. And while we wait for my master to come kill me. And if that don’t work—”
“I’m going to kill you,” Marlowe muttered.
“Hey, come at me, bro!” Ray said, appearing in the doorway, all spiky black hair and outraged expression. And then dodging back into the darkened hall, before anything else started smoldering. “What you got, huh? What you got?” drifted around the doorframe.
