He was one of the few vamps to ever fool me completely about his age. I'd underestimated his age by over half. I'd judged by power and was just beginning to learn that power was not the only thing to judge by.
Jean-Claude had bargained with Damian's old master for his freedom to come here and play second banana.
"What have you done to Damian?" Jean-Claude asked.
"I, nothing, but is he dead?" Padma smiled and took Vivian's hand. "That is a question only his master may answer." He walked down the hallway, leading the wereleopard by the hand. Vivian looked back at me, watching me with wide, frightened eyes until they were lost to sight. The black leopard lingered, watching me.
I spoke before I thought, instinct almost. "How could you have given them over to that thing?"
She snarled at me, tail twitching.
"You are weak, Elizabeth. Gabriel knew that and despised you for it."
She let out a coughing roar. Padma's voice cut across the sound like a knife blade. "Elizabeth, come to me now or I shall be very angry."
The leopard gave me a last snarl and padded out of sight.
"Did Gabriel tell you she was weak, ma petite?"
I shook my head. "She wouldn't have brought them here if she were stronger. He called and she came, but she should have come alone."
"Perhaps she did her best, ma petite."
"Then her best isn't good enough." I looked at Jean-Claude's careful, unreadable face. His body was still, calm. I laid my hand above his heart underneath his shirt. His heart was pounding.
"You think Damian's dead," I said.
"I know he is dead." He stared down at me. "Whether it is permanent, that is the question."
"Dead is dead," I said.
He laughed then and hugged me to him. "Oh, ma petite, you above all should know that is not true."
"I thought you said they couldn't kill us tonight," I said.
"So I thought," he said.
Great. Every time I thought I understood the rules, they changed. Why was it that the damn rules always seemed to change for the worse?
17
Willie came over to us, leading Hannah by the hand. "Thank you, master, Anita."
There were gashes in his thin face, part of the initial fight for the Circus, I guess. They were already healing. He looked awful, even more like the walking dead than usual. "You look like hell," I said.
He grinned at me, flashing fang. He hadn't been dead three years yet. It takes a little practice to smile without flashing fang. "I'm okay." He looked at Jean-Claude. "I tried to stop them. We all did."
Jean-Claude had tucked his shirt back in his pants. He smoothed his hands down the front of the shirt and touched Willie's shoulder. "You fought the council, Willie. Win or lose, you did well."
"Thanks, master."
Jean-Claude usually corrected anyone when they called him master, but tonight, I guess we were going formal.
"Come, we must attend Damian." He offered me his wrist, and when I didn't know quite what he wanted, he laid my fingertips over the pulse. "You touch me as if you were taking my pulse."
"Is there some significance to this?"
"It shows that you are more than my servant or my bed partner. It shows I consider you an equal."
"What will the council think about that?" I asked.
"It will force them to negotiate not only with me, but with you. It will complicate things for them and give us more options."
I rested my hand on his wrist. His pulse was steady under my fingers. "Confusion to our enemies, eh?"
He nodded, making it almost a bow. "Indeed, ma petite, indeed."
I walked beside him towards the hallway, my right hand in my pocket on the Browning, which I'd rescued from the floor. When we got a clear view of the hallway, Jean-Claude's pulse sped under my fingers.
Damian lay on his side curled around a sword. Blood had soaked around the blade into the dark material of the vest he wore as a shirt. The point came out his back. He'd been spitted. Hard to be a hundred percent sure, but it looked like a heart blow.
There was a new vampire standing beside him. He held a two-handed sword in his hands, point down, like a cane. I recognized the sword. It was the one Damian slept with in his coffin.
The new vamp was tall, six foot six or more, broad-shouldered. His hair was cut like a bowl of yellow ringlets around his face, leaving his ears bare. He wore a white tunic, white trousers, white on white in layers. He stood rigid, at attention, like a soldier.
"Warrick," Jean-Claude said. "I had hoped you escaped Yvette's tender mercies."
The tall vampire looked at us. His eyes flicked to my hand on Jean-Claude's wrist. He dropped to one knee and held Damian's sword across his hands. He bowed his head and offered the sword to us. "He fought well. It had been too long since I had such an opponent. I forgot myself and slew him. I would not have wished death on such a warrior. His final death is a great loss."
Jean-Claude took the sword from the vampire's hands. "Save your apologies, Warrick. I come to save Damian, not to bury him."
Warrick raised pale blue eyes to us. "But I have pierced his heart. If you were the master that had made him, then there would be a chance, but you did not call him from his grave to his second life."
"But I am Master of the City, and Damian took a blood oath."
Warrick laid the sword on the ground near Damian's still form. "Your blood may call to him. I pray that it will be enough."
I stared at him. I'd never heard a vampire say "I pray." Vampires, for obvious reasons, didn't pray a lot. I mean, who was going to answer? Oh, yeah, there was the Church of Eternal Life, but they were more a humanist religion, sort of New Wavey. I'm not sure they talked much about God.
Damian's hair was nearly blood-red, a startling color against the alabaster whiteness of his skin. I knew his eyes were a green that any cat would envy, but tonight his eyes were closed, and if things went badly, they'd never open again.
Jean-Claude knelt beside Damian. He laid his hand on Damian's chest, near the sword. "If I pull out the sword and his heart does not beat, his eyes do not open, then he is gone. One chance, and one chance only. We could put him in a hole somewhere for a hundred years and until the sword was pulled out of his heart, there would still be a chance. If we do it here and now, we risk losing him forever."
That last bit of lore is why you never ever remove a stake from a corpse's heart no matter how dead it appears to be.
I knelt beside them. "Is there a ritual for it?"
He shook his head. "I will invoke the blood oath he took. That will help call him back, but Warrick is correct. I did not make Damian. I am not his true master."
"No, he's older than you are by about six hundred years." I looked down at the vampire, spitted on the sword, lying in a pool of his own dark blood. He was wearing a pair of dress pants that matched the vest. Without a conservative shirt under the vest it looked strangely erotic. I could still feel Damian in my head. His power, the beat and the pulse of centuries flowed through him. He wasn't dead, or at least not completely dead. I could still feel his aura, something.
"I can still feel Damian," I said.