I tried to rip free from his grip, but this time, nothing happened. My pack was across the room, near the back door where I’d dropped it after seeing the carnage, but I didn’t really need it. I had no fewer than three stakes on me at the moment, and I needed only a slim opportunity to slip one between his ribs. Unfortunately, that would leave me with no backup at all and a seriously pissed-off Mircea. I didn’t know if reasoning with this lunatic was likely to work, but if not, I could always stake him later.

“Whether you, me or Mircea likes it, he is my father. Believe me, I’m not proud of it.”

Louis-Cesare laughed bitterly. “No, why should you be proud? Do you have any idea how very fortunate you are? To have a connection with the Basarab line, to have Lord Mircea himself defend you and claim you as his own? If you weren’t under his protection, you would have been killed years ago! And what do you do in return? Mock him, belittle him, speak as if he were your equal! You, who have doubtless killed dozens of our kind—”

“Thousands,” I corrected, and saw his eyes flash silver. The next second, I was pinned by some invisible hand to the bloody wall, while a psycho vamp stalked toward me. Did the family never make any sane vampires? They really shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce at all.

“Some would give all they possess to have what you throw away,” he hissed. I tried to move, but got nowhere. That was the problem with the really old vamps. You never knew what kind of extra powers they’d picked up through the years.

“And they’d be welcome to it,” I told him frankly. “I don’t know what your stake in this is, but I’m here to save a friend. I don’t owe Mircea, or you, a damn thing. As for your question, I would guess that Kristie told Drac’s guys where she’d agreed to meet us, after some persuasion.” For her sake, I hoped she’d talked quickly.

“How did he know to ask her?” I found that when Louis-Cesare had to split his concentration between me and a problem, I got a tiny bit of wiggle room. I started to move my right hand into my pocket. “We have a traitor,” he declared, as if this was news.

“No shit. Boy, am I glad you’re along to point out these things,” I said before I could stop myself. Luckily, he wasn’t paying me much attention.

“We have to inform the Senate immediately.”

I managed to touch the tiny plastic cylinder of my Bic with one finger. “Yeah, sure, that’s the ticket. We’ll let the traitor know our next move, so he can tell Drac how to arrange the welcome party.”

“And what is the alternative?” Louis-Cesare demanded.

“I’m working on that. All I know right now is that the traitor could be anywhere—in the family, at vamp central, or someone who figured out how to spy on us—we can’t be sure.” I looked down to see the janitor’s lifeless eyes staring up at me, his lips set in a line that almost looked like a sarcastic grin. I hoped it wasn’t a sign.

“I promised Lord Mircea that I would keep him informed—”

“He knows me better than to expect that.”

“Then it is as well that you are not in command of this mission.”

“If we’re back to that again, we may as well throw in the towel right now.” He looked confused at the idiom. “We may as well quit,” I rephrased.

“You may do as you like,” Louis-Cesare said, his sneer informing me that he’d expected no better. “But I do not take my word so lightly.”

“You don’t know me, but you do know Mircea. Presumably you trust his judgment, right?” My fingers finally got a grip on the slippery plastic.

“Of course—”

“He called me into this because he knew you’d need help. Uncle doesn’t fight fair. He uses whatever tactics work. He isn’t going to stand there and agree to duel you, best vamp take all. If we’re going to beat him, we have to think like him. And besides Mircea, I’m the one most likely to be able to do that.”

“You are trying to take control of this assignment,” he said stubbornly.

“No, I’m trying to get you to realize that I’m already there. You wouldn’t last ten minutes with Drac, no matter how good you think you are.”

He looked at me, splayed against the wall, with understandable condescension. “And you would?”

“I have one thing in common with the family.”

“And what is that?”

I smiled and flicked the tiny flame to life. “I’m tricky.”

Louis-Cesare’s response was lost in the roar of flames that caught on the tequila-soaked pile of humanity beneath us and quickly spread across the floor. I suddenly found myself released, and barely managed to avoid falling on top of the burning pile of rags and flesh at my feet. Fire spread through the ruined Hog, licking at my heels as I booked it out the door. I glanced back at the smoke billowing out behind me. “Round one to Uncle,” I murmured.

Chapter Six

The Senate’s jet sat on the runway, looking pure and innocent under a brilliant blue sky. It gleamed a blinding white, like someone had recently washed it. A fuel truck was rumbling away as we watched, so it was all gassed up and ready to go. It gave me the creeps.

“Are you coming?” Louis-Cesare was impatient, and I couldn’t really blame him. I’d been standing behind an empty luggage van for almost twenty minutes, waiting for the refueling to finish, trying to tell myself that it was perfectly okay to go ahead. But the base of my spine wasn’t having it. The tingle that had initially made me stop and wait on the humans to exit the area had now become a full-fledged shudder. There was something wrong with the airplane.

I stared at it, ignoring the look on Louis-Cesare’s face. It said that he frankly couldn’t care less whether I liked it, and was about to go without me. Since wrestling him to the ground was the only way to keep him from doing so, and that hadn’t been working so well lately, I was resigned to dealing with whatever or whoever was waiting for us. But I didn’t have to like it.

Not that I thought Drac would kill us, even if he was waiting inside. He enjoyed cat-and-mouse games, and he’d only begun to play. He’d want me to pay for those long years he’d spent in captivity, something a quick death wouldn’t begin to cover in his estimation. In the old days, he’d had people impaled on blunt, well-oiled stakes, ensuring that it took them a couple of days to die, and that was when he wasn’t even all that annoyed. I was pretty sure he had something much more inventive planned for me. But then, that was the problem with maniacs: you could never be entirely certain what they’d do. Maybe he was in a hurry to get to Radu and would mow us down at the first opportunity. I didn’t think it likely, but I wasn’t willing to risk my life on it.

“We discussed this,” Louis-Cesare reminded me, more calmly than I would have expected. “We must contact Lord Mircea and inquire what he wishes to do.”

I didn’t give a damn what Mircea wanted. My hand stayed on Louis-Cesare’s arm, just above the elbow, where I’d instinctively gripped him when he started to leave. “I think there’s a problem with the plane.”

He tried to shrug off my hand, but I held on. “You are being ridiculous! That is the only secure line to the Senate available to us.”

Actually, it wasn’t. We could drive out to MAGIC, the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation, and speak to Marlowe in person. Mircea probably wasn’t there, but I wasn’t nearly as concerned about keeping Daddy informed as Louis-Cesare seemed to be. Keeping my head firmly attached to my shoulders was more on my mind at the moment, and for that, I needed backup. Marlowe could provide it, and although he’d doubtless give me a hard time first, it was nothing to what I could expect from Drac. But Louis-Cesare didn’t want to leave the area where Dracula’s men had been sighted to drive all the way to the isolated canyon near Vegas where MAGIC was located.

“I’m telling you, getting anywhere near that plane is a bad idea. They knew we were meeting at the Hog. Kristie could have told them we were getting there by plane, and that thing is hard to miss.”

His lip curled back slightly from his teeth. It made him look more like the predator he was instead of Mr. January. “You’re afraid.”

I shrugged. “Call it what you want, but I didn’t last five hundred years by being stupid. You go in there and you aren’t coming out.”

“And this would bother you?”

“Not especially,” I admitted, “except that I could use help stealing a car.”

“For the last time, we are not driving to Las Vegas! It would take all day.”

“Not the way I drive.”

Louis-Cesare pulled away from me in an abrupt movement that almost left me lying on the concrete. I guess he was tired of arguing. He stepped out of the narrow strip of shade cast by the luggage van and flinched when the sunlight fell directly on him. “Stay here if you are concerned. This will not take long.”

I watched him stride away, knowing I wasn’t strong enough to stop him. It was an unaccustomed sensation, and not one I liked. Damn stiff-necked vampire. If he was jumped when he got on board, there’d be no way for me to reach him in time. On the other hand, dying alongside him wouldn’t help either of us. I suddenly recalled all the reasons I hated working with vamps. Hunting them was a hell of a lot more satisfying.

I watched him walk through the heat haze shimmering over the tarmac and tried to ignore the prickle of worry that had its teeth in my guts. For a moment after he entered the jet, nothing happened, and I began to think that maybe I was being even more paranoid than usual. Then he reemerged, dragging the pilot and steward with him. The steward was motionless, and I didn’t like the way his neck was lolling about. He was either dead or giving a good impression of it. The pilot was mostly out of my line of sight, having been slung over Louis-Cesare’s shoulder, so all I could see was his uniformed rear and a blood-soaked left pant leg.