And then I realized that we were sprinting along the trunks, hitting the ground only occasionally on a rock or a root or who-knew-what because we were moving almost too fast to see, as was everyone else. Like they were playing some crazy kind of swamp parkour. And they were damned good. Not a single foot touched the dark water below.
Until we did. Our foot hit a particularly slimy rock and slid out of control—just for a second, and just barely stirring the water. But a second was enough.
Something huge and old and cracked like the trunk of an oak, broke the surface, too fast for me to see much besides a few tons’ worth of terror coming right at us. A massive tail slashed down, sending an arc of greenish water ten feet into the air; huge yellowed teeth gleamed and lunged; and we came within a hairbreadth of losing a foot before another vamp caught us, swinging us high, high out over the water—
And then I was back, breathing hard, although I hadn’t moved an inch.
“Oh,” I swallowed. “Those kind of problems.”
Ray’s eyes widened. “Hey. Did you just see—”
“So how many portals did you make?” I interrupted. Because I didn’t like to talk about the glimpses the wine occasionally gave me into other people’s heads. Ray might act like it was no big deal, but I wasn’t used to it and I didn’t like it.
“I—” Ray stopped. “You mean, like total or just that time?”
“That time? How many times were there?”
“Well, it’s like this.”
“Shit.”
“Once I got the shipment in, of course the boss wanted to know how. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“And you told him. And he thought, why stop with one?”
“Right. Because the fey, they don’t travel much. Not the ones you got around here, they’re freaky or something, I don’t know. But most fey, they don’t want to move much from where they were born. So if you want their stuff, you gotta go to them. And the boss wanted, oh, a lot of stuff.”
“So he had you cutting portals like a mad weasel,” I said grimly.
And why not? Ray wasn’t exactly high in the power structure at Cheung enterprises. So Cheung wasn’t really risking anything. Ray gets vaporized and it’s no big loss. Ray gets caught and Cheung disavows all knowledge of his activities.
Which was probably exactly what he had done, or the Senate would have nabbed him already. The last people they wanted to have taking some of those vacant Senate seats were Cheung and his buddy with the messed-up face. They were an unknown quantity with possible ties to the Chinese empress, the leader of the East Asian Senate. Who just happened to be the biggest rival for power that the North American Consul had.
No, if Ray had given the Senate anything on Cheung, they’d have used it. On the other hand, it was in Cheung’s best interest to stay as far from his disgraced servant as possible at this vital juncture. Yet here he was, trying to lure him back into the fold.
I didn’t know what Cheung was planning to bring in, but obviously he wanted it pretty bad.
I looked up to find Ray sulking. “What?”
“Can we stop it with the names?” he demanded.
“I didn’t call you any names.”
“What about ‘weasel’? That supposed to be complimentary?”
“It was more of an expression.”
“And ‘butthead’?”
“That was you. You called yourself—” I shut my eyes. “Never mind. Just tell me what happened.”
“What you think happened?” he asked grumpily. “I kept cutting portals and making deals with the people I found on the other end.”
“And nobody ever noticed anything? None of those other smugglers ever saw a bunch of people lugging out truckloads full of suspicious-looking merchandise right across the street from them?”
“Well, sure, they might have. If we’d been dumb enough to be across the street.”
“But you just said—”
“I said I had to be near their portal to hack into it. I didn’t say I had to stay there.”
“Then how did you—” I stopped. Because a horrible suspicion had just formed. A really, really horrible suspicion. But I had to be wrong. I had to be. Because not even Ray would have.…Would he?
“Ray,” I said carefully. “How did you get the stuff out?”
He looked up from contemplating his navel or whatever he’d been doing, and blinked at me. “Same way I got it in. Some masters have more guys, you know? So they can patrol more. I couldn’t be seen moving a lot of stuff right by where they had a portal. These guys aren’t too bright, most of ’em anyway, but they are paranoid. If they caught me with a bunch of stuff near their gate, they might have gotten suspicious.”
“So…”
“So sometimes I had to link another portal to the first one,” he said, oh so reasonably. “So I could cut into another line and divert the stuff away from the area.”
“You cut a hack, from the hack you’d just made, into another portal?” I asked, sure I’d gotten it wrong.
“Yeah,” he said brightly. “Or sometimes two, because it’s like the subway, every train isn’t going where you need. But link enough of ’em, and sooner or later—”
“Link enough of them? How many of the portals in Manhattan have you drawn into this bastardized system of yours?”
“I don’t know. Maybe half?”
“Half?” I stared at him in disbelief.
“Well, it’s not like I used all of ’em, but like I said, it wasn’t always possible to know where a portal was going when I hacked into it. There was a certain amount of trial and error in—”
“Does the Senate know?” I interrupted.
“Of course they do. I mean, I had to tell ’em, right? They were planning to blow up the illegal portals, but some of them were linked to legal ones through some of my hacks, and that could have caused…oh, a lot of problems. I mean, can you see their faces if they’d blown up one of theirs?”
I didn’t even react to that. I wasn’t even surprised anymore. Maybe I was going numb.
I drained the rest of my beer.
“You hacked into the Senate’s portals,” I said flatly.
“Well, it wasn’t like I was using their gateways, was it?” he said, frowning. Like he’d expected to be patted on the back for his ingenuity, and all he was getting was dull-eyed horror. “They got so many protections on those things, a guy’d have to be crazy to try to break in. And even say you did, whaddya got? A bunch of pissed-off masters who’ll end you before you can blink. And I didn’t need their gateways anyway, just some of the space in between. You know, to bridge the gap between some of my other lines.”
I just stared at him for a moment, actually speechless. “Why are you still alive?” I finally demanded.
“’Cause that was the deal. I tell ’em everything, spill my guts, not hold anything back. And then they don’t kill me. And they had to deal; they never would have found all of ’em on their own. I mean, seriously, we’re talking years—”
“And they just let you walk.”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course. Why not? They assumed Cheung was gonna kill me as soon as they tossed me out onto the sidewalk anyway. Save ’em the trouble.”
“But they didn’t toss you out,” I said, remembering a certain limo ride from this morning. True, nobody had seemed too interested in helping Ray not to go up in flames. But considering everything, I’d have expected them to be pouring on gasoline and lighting a match.
But he wasn’t listening.
“It really bites my ass, you know?” he told me. “I’m why Cheung ended up a big-time player in the smuggling trade in the first place, when we used to be small potatoes. It was me. It was all me. But did I get any credit, any respect, for any of it? Hell no. I’m still Ray the screwup, Ray the joke, Ray the butthead. Only the joke’s on him now, ’cause I got a new master, and he can bite me.”
“A new master?” I frowned. “I thought you’ve been in the Senate’s custod
y this whole time.”
“Yeah, well.” He fidgeted and stubbed out his cigarette, even though it was only halfway down. “You know how it was. I wanted to just go home. Go back to the way things were. But that’s a little hard with the master trying to kill me so I couldn’t give away the locations of all the hacks I’d done. And possibly incriminate him in the bargain. So where was I gonna go? I had to go to the Senate.”
“Yeah, you said you were going to sing like a canary,” I recalled.
Cheung had only allowed Raymond to fall into the Senate’s hands in the first place because he’d assumed that his erstwhile employee, who had been sans head at the time, wasn’t going to last long enough to tell anyone anything. But once he realized that Ray, who’d turned out to be unusually hardy thanks to Claire’s missing talisman, was still alive, the hunt had been on. He’d caught up with him a week or so ago, and Ray had used me to get him out of trouble.
The last thing I’d seen, other than the bird he’d shot me as a thank-you, was him pelting for the Senate’s dubious protection as fast as his legs could carry him. It had been a smart move. Not that the Senate was any kinder than his old boss, but they’d had a reason to keep Ray alive and Cheung hadn’t. At least not then. And, as the old saying goes, life means hope—and schemes and intrigue and wiggle room. Which I guessed Ray had used, since he was still here.
“Oh, yeah,” he confirmed. “I kept my part of the bargain. The way I figured it, if I didn’t talk, the boss’d kill me to make sure I never did, and if I did talk, he’d kill me for betraying him. Either way, it ended with me dead. And since the Senate had me…well, they won that round.”
“And then one of them decided to pick you up?” I asked in disbelief. I was having a hard time seeing a senator—any senator—taking on a train wreck like Ray.
“Hell no,” he said bitterly. “They laughed in my face when I brought it up! Anyway, they said they had to send me back to my master. Cheung never emancipated me, so I was still his property, and if they weren’t going to execute me, they had to return me. That’s the law.”
And yes, it was. It was the sort of thing that often failed to get mentioned to all those hopeful humans lining up to join the eternity club: that the majority of its members never made it to the upper levels. That most of them stayed essentially slaves for life, and nobody cared much what a master did with his slaves—or, by vampire law, could do anything about it if they did.
“But they didn’t return you,” I said, wondering why I suddenly had a weird feeling.
“Damned right, they didn’t. But only because I figured a way out. Just like with the portal mess.” He sat back, scowling, setting the swing to rocking madly. “You know, when you’re a low-level master, you keep hoping that, one of these days, you’re gonna go up a rank. It’s like a short guy who keeps looking at basketball players and thinking, one of these days, that’ll be me. I might be five-two right now, but in a year, or two, or three, I’m Michael Jordan. Only in a year, or two or three, you’re still five-two. And one day, it dawns on you, that it’s all you’re ever gonna be.”
“Ray—”
“So, you learn to deal with it. You say, okay, maybe I won’t ever be a basketball star. But maybe I can be Bill Gates and make more money than all of them. Or maybe—”
“Ray—”
“—I’ll be somebody else, somebody important. ’Cause size isn’t everything and power isn’t everything, no matter how much the big guys think it is. And so I learned to use my head.”
I tried to break in again, but Ray was on a roll, the words flooding out of him now.
“That’s something the big guys don’t have to do—like Zheng-zi. He’s got more power in his little finger than I got in my whole body, but it hurts as much as it helps. Look at tonight. He don’t bother to think, how am I gonna take down this chick who already kicked my butt a couple times. He don’t worry about it because he’s Zheng-freaking-zi and he don’t have to. He assumes he’ll just overpower you. But you’re like me; you use your head. And so who ended up in pieces and who didn’t? We got a lot in common, you and me.” He finally stopped, dead still, and stared at the ground. “Maybe that’s what made me think of it.”
“Think of what?”
“That the Senate couldn’t turn me over to Cheung, ’cause he wasn’t really my master anymore. ’Cause a master can sell a servant to somebody who needs their talents, or trade ’em for somebody they like more, or, hell, lose ’em in a freaking card game.” He looked up, and blue eyes met mine. “Or…he can give them away.”
“Give them away?” I repeated, feeling a little dizzy. But I was wrong; I wasn’t thinking clearly either, because he couldn’t be saying what I thought he was.
Ray didn’t answer. He just got up and picked up my now empty beer bottle. “You’re out. Shall I get another one of those for you…master?”
Chapter Sixteen
Twenty minutes or so later, I was sitting with my head in my hands, a second empty beer bottle by my side and a throbbing headache at my temples. I felt rather than heard someone come up behind me and I didn’t have to wonder who. My vagina had just gotten a heartbeat.
Big palms spread out large and warm on my shoulders and I dropped my head forward, because it seemed like something nice might happen if I did.
“Hard night?” Louis-Cesare murmured, thumbs going unerringly to the worst spots with just the right amount of pressure.
“I seem to have acquired a vampire servant,” I mumbled into the tabletop. “Who made a Frankenportal system all over the city. That somebody’s using as a dumping ground for dead smugglers.”
He had been working his way up the back of my neck, making gooseflesh rise all over my arms. But at that he stopped. “I beg your pardon?”
I sighed.
“You have a vampire servant?” he asked, apparently deciding to break it down.
“Ray,” I confirmed, without lifting my head. Because I was kind of hoping he’d start up again. “You know how Cheung said we could take him, for all he cared, and he never wanted to see him again?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, Ray remembered it verbatim. And convinced the Senate that it meant Cheung had given him away. To me.”
“But…you are not a vampire.”
“Yeah, I mentioned that. But Ray checked on it and there’s nothing in the rule books about what species the giftee has to be.”
“Possibly due to it being understood.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, because he’d started the massage again, and it felt really, really good. Sinfully good. “But understood isn’t stated, which means the Senate can interpret the rule however they like.”
“And they chose to interpret it in Raymond’s favor due to his knowledge of the portal system.”
“Which they thought they might possibly need again. Yeah.” Sticking me on unpaid babysitting duty so Cheung couldn’t reclaim his property.
Typical.
Louis-Cesare was silent for a moment. “Where is Raymond now?”
I shrugged. “Marlowe dragged him off a few minutes ago.”
“But he just released him this morning.”
“Yeah, but that was before bodies started showing up in people’s basements. The Senate wants Ray to help them trace the currents and figure out where they were dumped into the system. They’re hoping for an eyewitness.”
“That seems…unlikely.”
“Uh-huh.” Not least of which because I didn’t think Ray really remembered all his tunnels. He didn’t strike me as an organized kind of guy. He struck me as the kind of guy who’d make a good stoner if he didn’t like money and bitching so much.
Louis-Cesare didn’t ask any more questions, which was fine with me since I didn’t feel like talking. Not with his knuckles pushing gobs of fiery pain up each side of my neck. Up and out, leaving behind a streak of absence-of-pain that was better than pleasure.
And he groaned right along with me.
It should have pisse
d me off, because it almost certainly meant he was picking up on my feelings, if not more. But I was having trouble getting worked up about it. Maybe because it was dark and the fey were singing something soft and sweet on the far side of the yard and the scent of weed was drifting on the air, probably from the same source. Or because the muscles along my spine were slowly liquefying as more pain I hadn’t even known I had was ruthlessly hunted down and pushed out.
I stayed put.
That was even true when a hand made its way up through my hair and over to my hurt cheek. I froze in anticipation of more pain, but the touch was so light, there wasn’t any. And he didn’t move his fingers, so there was no friction. They were cooler than my skin tonight, maybe because he hadn’t fed recently, or because the wound was hotter than my normal body temperature. Either way, they felt good.
They stayed in place for a long moment, as though he was gathering information by touch. And for all I knew, he could do that now. Then, without moving them, he bent his head over my shoulder and kissed the side of my neck.
“No,” I whispered, with no conviction whatsoever.
I wasn’t too surprised when he ignored me.
He kissed another spot, and then another, none of them too close to the swelling, all of them desperately sensitive and long ignored, because there were a lot of things you could do for yourself, but you couldn’t nibble your own neck. None of it was designed to be arousing—soft lips, no tongue, sticking close to some comfort boundary he’d intuited—but it was anyway. It was also odd, for some reason I couldn’t quite name, until it suddenly hit me.
People didn’t just come up and touch a dhampir.
Sure, enemies grabbed me in combat, and Claire touched me in emergencies. But casual, friendly contact had always been in short supply. Even my former lovers had been cautious, and not just the vampire ones. Humans could feel it, too—that there was something strange about me, something different, something off. And they tended to keep their distance.
The only creature who had just never seemed to notice was Stinky. His long, stick-like fingers and toes allowed him to climb people as easily as trees, furniture and anything else that didn’t run off fast enough. And he liked human contact—even mine. Maybe especially mine, because he regularly crawled into my lap or invaded my bed, with the unconscious arrogance of children and puppies everywhere.