I OWNED TWO CARS: AN OLD BEAT-UP SUBARU NAMED Betsi that ran during tech and a horrid nightmare of a truck called Karmelion. Karmelion took twenty minutes of intense chanting to warm up and made more noise than a gaggle of drunk teenage boys in a bar on a Saturday night, but it ran during magic.
Unfortunately the Beast Lord had condemned both vehicles as unsafe and instead I now leased a Pack Jeep I called Hector. Equipped with dual engines, Hector worked during magic or tech. He didn't go very fast, especially during magic, but so far he hadn't stalled on me either. As long as our high-speed chases stayed under forty-five miles an hour, we would be all set.
Andrea eyed Hector. "Where is Betsi?"
"She's back at the Keep. His Furriness made me lease Hector from the Pack instead. Betsi didn't meet with his exacting standards." I climbed into the driver's seat.
Andrea popped the passenger door open and Grendel bounded into the space behind it, where there once was a rear seat and now was space where I stored equipment. "Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. I believe the exact words he used were `a deathtrap with four wheels.' We had a glorious fight about it."
She grinned and patted Hector's dashboard. "You lost."
"No, I chose to gracefully accept the Pack's generous offer."
"Aha. Keep telling yourself that."
Careful, thin ice. "A third party explained to me in detail that when you're running a business, people judge how successful you are based on your appearance. If you're driving a shabby vehicle, they think you need money and your business is struggling."
"That sounds like Raphael," Andrea said.
And she nailed it. "Yep."
She clamped her mouth shut. I started the engine and maneuvered Hector out of the parking lot.
One ... two ... three ...
"So who is he hooked up with now?"
Three seconds. That was all she lasted. "Nobody that I know of." She stared straight through the windshield. "I find that hard to believe."
Given that Raphael was a bouda and they viewed sex as a fun recreational activity that should be practiced vigorously and often, normally I would've agreed with her. But Raphael was a special case. He hounded Andrea for months until she finally gave him a chance. For a few blissful weeks they were in love and happy, but then Andrea had to pick between the Order and the Pack and it all fell apart.
"He hasn't been with anybody since you had that fight," I told her.
She snorted. "I'm sure some cute piece of ass will catch his attention sooner or later."
"He's too busy moping."
Andrea glanced at me. "Moping?"
"Pining." I made a wide curve around a large pothole filled with odd-looking blue goo. "If he starts singing sad Irish ballads, we'll have to stage an intervention."
"Oh please." Andrea turned to her passenger window.
"He withdrew from the bouda clan."
"What?"
"Not officially, of course." I shrugged. "But he stopped doing whatever it is that the bouda alpha male does." In the bouda clan, as in nature, females were dominant. Aunt B ran that clan with steel claws, and Raphael, being her son, served as the head of the males. "He killed Tara."
Andrea's blue eyes went big. "The third female?"
"Yeah. Aunt B mentioned it in passing the last time we spoke. He was in the bouda clan house for some sort of business-related thing and Tara came up and grabbed his balls. Apparently she wanted to check if they were still there. He punched her in the face. She shifted into a warrior form and went for his throat. From what Aunt B said, he didn't just kill her, he ripped her to pieces. He hasn't been to the clan house since."
"Holy shit."
"Yeah, that's pretty much what I said." It was one of those idiotic things that could've been resolved in a split second. Tara had no right to touch Raphael, and once she did, he had every right to punch her. She should've left it at that, and now she was dead because she didn't. Bouda males voluntarily took the beta role, but in a fight they were vicious, and Raphael was the best of their lot. I wouldn't fight him unless he left me no choice. I could take him, but he'd tear me up before I finished him.
"I keep thinking about the People thing," Andrea said. "I think something went very wrong in the Casino." And we'd changed the subject. Andrea one, Kate the matchmaker zero. "How do you figure?"
"Two navigators fainted, both while piloting the same vampire."
And one of these navigators was Ghastek, who could pilot a vampire through an obstacle course studded with rotating saw blades and pits of molten lava while carrying a full glass of water and not spilling a drop. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say the People had stumbled onto something, some sort of magic that was too much for them, and it had somehow tainted the vampire. But getting to the bottom of this mystery would be impossible. And besides, nobody had hired us to resolve the People's navigation issues.
"Of course, it could be a coincidence." Andrea shrugged. "We don't know anything about the woman who fainted, except that she was supposedly pregnant. We don't know what relationship she and Ghastek had prior to this mess. Maybe they went to breakfast together and ordered a bad omelet."
"That would be a hell of an omelet."
"I don't know, have you eaten at the Grease Trap lately? Their omelets are gray."
Technically the place was called the Greek Wrap, but nobody called it by its real name. The Grease Trap served breakfast 24/7, offered token wraps that had nothing to do with Greek cuisine, and openly admitted to having rat meat on the menu. It was the kind of place you went when your earthly troubles became too much for you and you were looking for a creative way to commit suicide.
"Why the hell would anyone be eating at the Grease Trap? I've seen flies die from buzzing by that place."
Andrea crossed her arms. "Oh, I don't know, probably because your career just ended and you are depressed and don't feel like breathing, let alone going out, but your body still needs food and that's the closest place to your apartment and they don't mind if you bring a giant dog with you."
"What, you couldn't find a Dumpster that was closer?"
Andrea glared at me. "What are you implying?"
"The Dumpster would have better food in it."
"Well, excuse me, Miss Fine Dining."
"Ghastek wouldn't be caught dead at the Grease Trap."
Andrea waved her arms. "It was just an example."
I glanced into the rearview mirror at Grendel. "What kind of brave canine companion lets his human eat at the Grease Trap? You are so fired." Grendel waved his tail. Whatever horrors happened in his canine life, Grendel always bounced back with easy enthusiasm whenever some food made an appearance. A treat, a blanket in a nice warm house, an occasional pat on the head, and Grendel would be as happy as he could be.
If only people were so easy.
"Could you take a vampire away from its navigator?" Andrea asked.
I paused, thinking about it. "I could."
I could do a hell of a lot more than that. In the raw-power department, I blew even Ghastek off the scale. I could walk into the Casino right now and empty their stables, and all of the Masters of the Dead combined wouldn't be able to wrest control of their undead away from me. I wouldn't be able to do anything with my vampire horde except make it run around in 48 ILONA ANDREWS a herd, but it would be a very impressive herd. Nobody except Andrea and Julie knew I could even pilot the undead, and if I had any hope of hiding, I had to keep it that way.
Of course, after the death of my aunt, hiding was a moot point.
"If I did that, the vamp would be under my control. It wouldn't be loose. I'd asked the journeymen and both of them said they couldn't get a lock on the vamp's mind. As if they had lost their ability to navigate. I have no idea how to make a vampire's mind disappear."
Andrea frowned. "Can Roland do it?"
"I don't know." Considering that my biological father had brought the vampires into being, nothing was out of the realm of possibility.
"Don't take this the wrong way, but why isn't he here?"
I glanced at Andrea. "Who, Roland?"
"Yes. It's been two months since someone killed his near-immortal sister. You'd think he'd send someone in to investigate by now."
"He's five thousand years old. To him two months is more like a couple of minutes." I grimaced. "Erra attacked the Guild, the Order, the Pack, the civilian businesses, the Temple, basically anything she ran across, which constitutes an act of terrorism of federal proportions. Right now nothing officially ties Erra to Roland. If he claimed responsibility for her behavior, the United States would feel compelled to do something about it. I have a feeling he doesn't want a full-blown conflict, not yet. He'll send someone down once the city cools off a bit, but when is anybody's guess. It might be tomorrow, although I doubt it, or it might be in a year. Hugh's absence bothers me more."
Hugh d'Ambray was my stepfather's successor and Roland's Warlord. Hugh had also developed an unhealthy interest in me after witnessing me break one of Roland's indestructible swords. "I can solve that mystery for you," Andrea said. "I asked some very careful questions while in Virginia. Hugh is in South America."
"Why?"
"Nobody knows. He was seen leaving Miami with some of his Order of Iron Dogs goons in early January. The ship was bound for Argentina."
What the hell did Hugh want in Argentina?
"Any luck on the blood armor?" Andrea asked.
"No." My father possessed the ability to mold his own blood. He fashioned it into impenetrable armor and devastating weapons. I'd been able to control my blood a couple of times, but every time I'd done so, I was near death. "I've been practicing."
"And?"
"And nothing. I can feel the magic. I know it's there. It wants to be used. But I can't reach it. It's like there is a wall between me and the blood. If I'm really pissed off, I can make it spike into needles, but they only last a second or two."
"That sucks."
Control over blood was Roland's greatest power. Either I mastered it, or I needed to start working on my own gravestone. Except I hadn't the foggiest idea of how to go about learning the power, and nobody could teach me. Roland could do it; my aunt had done it; I had to learn to do it. There was some sort of trick to it, some secret that I didn't know.
"Hugh will come back eventually," Andrea said.
"When he does, I'll deal with it," I told her.
Hugh d'Ambray, preceptor of the Order of Iron Dogs, trained by Voron, enhanced by my father's magic.
Killing him without blood armor and blood weapons of my own would be a bitch.
We turned onto Johnson Ferry Road. After the Chattahoochee River decided to swell into a deep-water magic monster paradise, the bridge at Johnson Ferry became the fastest way to the west bank. Except today: carts and vehicles clogged the road. Donkeys brayed, horses whipped themselves with their tails, and a variety of odd vehicles belched, sneezed, and rattled, polluting the air with noise and gasoline fumes.
"What the hell?"
"Maybe the bridge is out." Andrea released her seat belt and slipped out. "I'll check." She took off, breaking into an easy jog. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. If the bridge was out, we were screwed. The closest crossing was at the old Interstate 285, five miles away, and given that I-285 and most of the area directly surrounding it lay in ruins and required mountain-climbing equipment to conquer, it would take us at least half an hour 50 ILONA ANDREWS to get there. Add another hour to wait for the ferry to carry us across the river and the morning was down the drain.
The cars roared; the beasts of burden neighed and snorted. Nobody moved an inch. I shifted the car into park and turned off the engine. Gas was expensive.
The driver of the cart in front of me leaned to the left, and I saw Andrea sprinting along the shoulder. She dashed to the car and jerked the door open. "Get your sword!"
I didn't have to get my sword--it was on my back. I pulled the keys out of the ignition, jumped out, and slapped the door shut, aborting Grendel's desperate lunge for freedom. "What's going on?"
"The Bridge Troll is out! It's rampaging on the road!"
"What happened?" Three years ago the Bridge Troll had wandered out of Sibley and onto the Johnson Ferry Bridge in an attempt to prove that the Universe indeed possessed a sense of humor. It'd proved really hard to kill and the mages had lured it under the bridge and put it under a sleep spell. The troll required magic to wake up, so during the tech he hibernated on his own, and during the magic waves the spell kept him in dreamland. The city had built a concrete bunker around him and he'd been impersonating Sleeping Beauty for years now. Unless the wards around the bunker failed somehow, he should've stayed sleeping.
Andrea took off down the shoulder. "The sleeping spell collapsed. He woke up, lay around for a while, and then decided to bash the bunker down and hulk out on the bridge. Come on, we've got to save the public."
And get paid. I chased her. "Reward?"
"A grand if we take him down before he finishes off the truck he's working on."
A shiny green truck hood shot out from behind the cars like a missile and crashed into a cart ten feet to the left of us. A dull guttural roar followed.
I put some effort into it and we sprinted along the line of cars to the bridge.
