He shrugged, his frame moving under my hands as I wrapped his chest. The mellow blue, lavender, and pink energies swirled over my skin. In Beast-vision, I saw them crawl over my hands and up my arms. Beast pressed her paw onto me and her retractile claws punched deeply, pulling me out of his glamour. I growled and pinched him, hard. “Stop that.”
He flinched away with that mesmeric laughter burbling in his voice. “Forgive me, senorita.” He covered my hands with his. “I cannot help myself in the presence of such beauty.”
“Cut the crap, Zorro, or I’ll leave you here to bleed.” The energies receded. His glamour might have worked if not for Beast and for the fact that I knew I wasn’t a beauty. Interesting, maybe. Not beautiful. And then I realized that my jacket was unzipped. He’d unzipped my jacket ... I held out one zippered side and said, “You unzipped my riding leathers. Just how much were you unable to help yourself in the presence of my beauty?”
“I would never take advantage, senorita. Well, not much. I peeked, I admit,” he said, his tone roguish and teasing.
I wanted to belt him one, but it seemed ungracious to punish a guy after he’d saved my life. Just for looking. Nothing was unbuttoned or unsnapped or missing. I touched my gold nugget necklace, finding it hanging around my neck just like it was supposed to be. But painful abrasions marred my nape, in the shape of wolf fangs, where Fire Truck had tried to rip out my throat and gotten the silver necklace instead.
“You are lovely all over,” Gee whispered. He lifted a hand and smoothed a strand of hair back from my face. “We could have such delightful times together.”
“Not gonna happen. What are you? You aren’t anything I’ve ever smelled before.”
He breathed out his disappointment. The energies of the spell he wove withdrew as he stood, picking his shirt off the ground and using it to button away all that luscious skin. The glamour faded further when he had himself covered. “Nor I you, though you smell of times long gone and beings long dead.”
“You’re Leo’s persona non grata, yes?” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Fine. Why were you in the ceiling, watching, and why did you help me when things got hairy? And for that matter why did you wait so freaking long to help me?”
“I was watching to see if Leo would really come to the place he was invited. To see if old loves and old enemies might have lost their hold over him. The enemies have not, it seems. I must wait to determine about the loves.”
It clicked into place. Leo had been invited here, alone, to meet Zorro—something he had left out of my orders and explanations and maps and addresses—and Zorro had also invited the weres. As if he was doing an intervention, or something. “Go on.”
“I am Girrard DiMercy,” he shrugged, “once Leo’s misericorde, the blood-servant who brought peace to the clans’ long-chained scions when they did not wake from devoveo.”
“Peace ...” I added that to the foreign word misericorde, a picture forming. The word was the name of a weapon, the mercy stroke or mercy blade, a long knife used in medieval times to deliver the death stroke to a knight who had received mortal wounds but would lie dying, in great pain, for a long time. But a mercy blade in conjunction with the devoveo was something new to me.
When first turned, vamps went into a state of prolonged insanity, forcing them to be restrained and imprisoned for years, sometimes decades, until they regained their sanity and self-awareness. It was a mental state from which some did not ever return. “You killed the long-chained,” I breathed.
He nodded once, the gesture formal as a bow. “When the decade of devoveo, or sometimes two, had passed for a Mithran scion to regain sanity, the Master of the City would summon me, sending me to the scion-lair of the master whose child would never recover. I would seduce the master to drink of my sweet blood. It has been said”—he splayed a hand over his chest—“to be as intoxicating as the finest wine. And they would sleep while I performed the onerous duty and put the scion out of his misery.”
Gee lifted his swords and began to reweapon. That was the first moment I noticed my own were missing. A hot flush of anger and fear shot through me, a painful jolt. And then I saw my weapons lined up neatly on the grass, the blades shining and clean, the shotgun and handguns beside them, even the stakes from my hair that I’d never had time to draw.
Stiffly, I stood and reclawed, putting the blades into their respective sheaths and loops, the stakes into my hair. Several were missing; I wasn’t surprised. Beside the weapons was a card. The light was too dim to read, but it felt like a business card, and I tucked it into a pocket. I pulled the Benelli’s harness over my jacket, pain lancing up and out from my partially healed elbow. As we both worked, Gee talked.
“Before the last vampire war in 1915, the Master of the City, Amaury Pellissier, who was Leo’s uncle in the human flesh, called me to bring peace to Leo’s daughter. The girl had not found herself; she had raved for over twenty years. But Leo met me at his scion-lair. He resisted the taste of my blood, resisted the seduction that would have made the loss of his child easier to bear, and he fought me.” A trace of surprise flowed beneath the words. “No one had ever fought me before. Begged, yes. Pleaded or raged, yes. But never fought.
“Leo refused the proper dueling tools of swords or pistols, and attacked me with his bare hands.” Gee shook his head in wonder. “He wounded me. Rather badly.” He cocked his head at me and I felt his magics questing out; I wondered briefly what he looked like beneath the spell that covered him. “Would you care to see my scars?” he asked as if he had read my mind.
“No.” I said dryly. I was beginning to sense Gee’s magic was all about sex, compulsion, and glamour—in opposition to the job he’d described, which was all about death.
“Pity. I was forced to leave for a time to heal.”
“Leave this earth.”
“Precisely,” he said with that lilt of laughter. But his delight died when he continued, “By the time I returned, the war had begun and ended and Leo was Master of the City, his uncle and most of the previous clan masters dead. The ones who remained were not of the old ways. Like Leo, the new masters did not wish their young brought to true death by the blade of a stranger, at a time chosen by another. They wished to face that mercy-gift alone. The old ways were dying away.
“Leo banished me. He banished the weres. There were many reasons for his enmity,” he said. “They sided with the wrong faction in the war. They broke their own were-laws with impunity, as wolves have always done.”
I wondered which law they had broken. Maybe the one about biting humans, because they sure had bitten the crap out of me.
“Perhaps it was partly a whim; he had always hated the two-natured and Leo was always the passionate one, sensitive, fervent, full of intense emotions. Perhaps he will never allow them to return.”
I gave a half shrug, remembering Leo raving mad after I killed the thing masquerading as his son. But before that he had healed me from a wound that would have maimed a human. I had seen a different kind of passion then. I set my hair-stick stakes in place, the silver tips scraping my scalp. I picked up my cell, checked to see that I had missed three calls and several text messages. Those I ignored for now and brought up my location on the GPS map app and then brought up directions to see me back to a main road. I was only a mile from Booger’s. It was a handy little device.
“When I left, Leo’s prime blood-servant went with me.”
“Uh-huh.” I checked my ammo. Not much left.
“Magnolia Sweets. His sweet Magnolia.” When I didn’t react to the name, he went on, while I changed out empty magazines for full ones. “He loved her to distraction, but she could not stay with him. Within the year, she was gone.”
Blood-servants who no longer sip of their master’s blood age rapidly. Magnolia would have died of old age soon after leaving. Gee however, a self-proclaimed blood-servant, had lived. Yet, he didn’t smell of vamp blood, so his longevity wasn’t part of a new vampire relationship. The youth was his alone and not something he had shared with Magnolia to keep her alive. Maybe it didn’t work that way. What’d I know?
“Leo brought his daughter to peace some few years later, but he never summoned me back. And since that time, the Mithrans have suffered greatly.”
I straddled Bitsa and sat. “How so?”
“To kill their own children? Would it not bring you to the brink of insanity?”
I saw an image from Beast’s past, a vision of dead kits. Their bodies had been ripped and torn apart by claws and teeth. I started. She had never shown me this, and at first I thought, wolves. But then I saw the prints in the soft soil and pooled blood. Mountain lion. A big one. And I smelled his scent in her memory. Our memories. We had tracked the male. Leaped down upon him from a high rock as he lapped at a river, the roaring water and cold wind hiding our presence from him.
I felt the impact as we landed. Driving the breath from both of us. Felt the fierce delight as our claws dug into his flesh. As our fangs bit into his spinal column just above his shoulders. And shook once, hard. The sound/feel/taste as his spine broke. The body collapsing beneath us falling into the water. The shock of cold as we followed him in and under. Released the kill and swam up through hated cold water to the surface. To the bank. Where we shook. And screamed our conquest to the jagged rocks above.
The memory faded and dispersed like a mist under a hot sun, leaving me with the taste of the kit killer in my mouth and the fury of vengeance in my mind. “Yes,” I said softly. “It would.” I puffed out a breath, not liking my next words even before they left my mouth. “But Leo isn’t ready to ask you back. He sent me to tell you to get out of his territory or face the consequences.” I couldn’t read his expression, but giving him that message after he saved my life was wrong on every level I could name. “He said to use whatever measures I thought necessary to make sure you left. That part of the message I’m refusing.” I tried to smile and couldn’t, as something akin to survivor’s guilt trapped me. “I’m sorry.”
