My job wasn’t to prevent the conflict. That problem was for people higher up the political chain than me. I only had to save a couple of lives. For once. Which meant . . . one more round with the injured, pissed-off Weres. Thanks a lot, boss.
But I smiled inside. I so liked this part of him. Even a lot of humans I knew wouldn’t have given a second thought to the welfare of those wounded moon-changers. But he’d made it part of our mission to ensure their survival.
“Will you be okay?” I asked Dave, knowing the question would piss him off. As expected, he launched out of his chair and grabbed his crossbow. “Aw, for chrissake, it’s just a scratch! I’ll be fine!”
I smirked. It had been a mean move. But I was sick of seeing him mope. Better to have him hurt and yelling than feeling crappy and keeping mum.
As Dave went to the bathroom to wash up, Vayl took me aside. “When I return, we need to talk.”
Though he kept his voice low, I was sure Marcon could overhear us. So it seemed strange that he’d even bring up a private conversation for the Trust vamp to get curious about. “Yeah?” I said.
“I did not realize Disa was alive, much less living here still. Otherwise I would have told you of our history much sooner.”
“Ah.” Suddenly that word, “history,” meant so much more than boring stories involving stuffy wig-wearing lawyer types.
“I am sure it is nothing to be concerned about, now that I have you, my avhar.” Vayl’s eyes searched my face, almost like he was memorizing it.
But I couldn’t stifle the creeping sense of dread I felt as we went our separate ways. Marcon gave me directions that I didn’t need and led the guys away. I kept looking over my shoulder until they were out of sight. And then, realizing a divided focus could be the death of me, I shoved my concern to one corner of my mind and put all my effort into the job at hand.
I went back out to the courtyard. But I didn’t try the vine-framed door; despite the villa’s covered windows, I still suspected someone might see me from the inside. Instead I left through the open gate. Rather than hiking up the hill to where our SUV was parked, I followed the wall that circled the villa to the back. It stopped at the garage, which hadn’t even existed in Vayl’s time. When he’d drawn the layout of the place for us to memorize, he’d left it out completely, instead penciling in a one-room stone building he called the Gardener’s Hut. He’d told us in his time it had been used as a sort of halfway house for newly recruited vampires.
“You had to keep them at such a distance?” Dave had asked incredulously. “What, were you afraid they were going to rise a half hour before everybody else, steal all the silver, and run off with the kitchen help?”
Vayl’s chuckle, which usually sounded more like a guy choking on his porterhouse, flew round and full from his upturned lips. “You keep forgetting what a suspicious old wretch Hamon Eryx is. While he knows the Trust must grow if it is to survive, he still believes every other Trust is trying to infiltrate him and learn all his secrets, thereby stealing everything he has worked so hard to build.”
“So why doesn’t he just turn people?” Dave asked. When I gaped at him, he raised his hands. “Not that I’m advocating the practice. God knows—” He shook his head at me. “No, I’d never be okay with that, Jaz.”
My heart, which had twisted painfully at his question, relaxed. His wife had been turned before showing up at my back door, begging entry, planning violence. I’d ended Jessie’s undeath, because I’d made her that promise long before either of us dreamed our fates could actually unwind that way. I nodded at Dave, grateful his forgiveness still held true.
He went on. “All I’m saying is, looking at it from Eryx’s perspective, he’d have to think he’d get a more loyal brand of member that way.”
“A valid view,” Vayl replied. “But no one in the Trust is allowed to turn another. In fact, it is an offense punishable by execution.”
That conversation seemed even more significant as I scoped out the back of the garage. I whispered to myself, “They kill their vamps for turning humans. Wonder what they do to humans for turning Weres loose?” I pulled Grief. “What do you say we don’t find out?”
Outside the garage, on a wide concrete pad that stretched from the building to the lane, sat the vehicles Tarasios had moved. A BMW 523i that made my mouth water. A Porsche Boxster two seater that caused me to think things my Corvette would’ve considered adulterous. And a blue Fiat Scudo minibus that I could only assume the Trust used for field trips. It seated nine and looked like it had one of those tootie-toot horns that warn you all the passengers carry disposable cameras and close their shoes with Velcro straps.
The garage was windowless and the only other entrances were the shut and locked bay doors. So far the only close presence I’d detected was that of the werewolf inside. Since the locks were somewhat intricate, requiring time and possibly noise to defeat, I decided to check out the wagon house first. If I could free the bear more easily, so much the better for all of us.
The wagon house, surrounded on three sides by a confused mass of herbage that included chestnut trees and wild primroses, was a square, tile-roofed echo of the villa. To my relief, it held no vampires. All I felt was the prickling at the base of my brain that told me whatever lurked behind its extra-wide, barnlike door had a two-edged psyche, one of which was a beast.
This is just stupid, I told myself as I holstered Grief and pulled my coral necklace out from beneath my shirt. That damn bear is probably waiting right inside, licking his chops at the thought of a little grain-fed American for his midnight snack.
The shark’s tooth at the necklace’s center fit perfectly into the padlock that held the sliding door shut. I could almost see the tooth melding to the form of the key the lock required. You know, Bergman may be too good. Sometimes it would be nice if I couldn’t get into places. Like this one.
The padlock clicked open. A voice sounding oddly like South Park’s Cartman echoed through my quivering brain. Goddammit!
Grief came back to my hand as if attached by a spring. I switched to crossbow mode for silence. Keeping my shoulder to the outer wall, I braced my foot against the door’s edge and shoved. It slid a couple of feet to the left, opening a twenty-foot-tall crack that felt like a hole in the universe.
Nothing happened.
Is he in there waiting for me? Or is he unconscious? Why doesn’t Vayl ever give me the easy jobs? I swear, if one of us was ever forced to get a massage, or watch the whole first season of Futurama for Uncle Sam’s sake—he’d assign that one to himself!
“Would you get the hell home already?” I snapped. “I don’t have all night!”
“Okay, okay, sorry if I thought maybe you’d come to kill me.” I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when the werebear, now fully transformed to a towering hulk of humanity, came shuffling out of the barn with his hands raised. Well, one hand. The other was covering his manly parts, since the vamps hadn’t seen fit to throw his clothes into captivity with him.
Though thick hair covered his chest, the pink puckered marks where Dave and I had wounded him practically glowed. And he’d been bitten so many times on the neck he looked like he was wearing a red chain.
“Do you remember anything that happened before you were brought here?” I asked.
He shook his head, his long brown curls bouncing like fishing pole bobbers as he moved. “Not much. I was flirting with a girl in the bar at the Hotel Patra. And then . . . nothing.”
“What did the girl look like?”