Leo, Grégoire, Bruiser, Eli, and I rode in tense silence. Leo had something up his sleeve, something I had not been informed about. If I had been preparing security on this gig, that would have made me a tad antsy. Okay, it would have made me mad. But I was not security. I was an Enforcer. Except, not really. I had shifted enough and Beast had loosened—maybe broken—Leo’s binding on my soul, just in time to actually need some good vamp power. Go, me. My timing sucked. Bruiser had suggested I’d be safer if I was bound more tightly to Leo. I figured I’d rather be in danger, thank you very much.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Leo said softly, “The Nunnery.”
“Ah. Of course.” The Nunnery was a converted warehouse in the Warehouse District of New Orleans, and was owned by the Council of Mithrans. It was used by the clans for soirees and events, and for self-help workshops on the top ten ways to seduce a human for dinner, for all I knew. It also had a steel-barred cage in the basement suitable for holding werewolves through the full moon, or a rogue vamp until it could be dealt with. I’d seen the cage once, when I was trying to help Rick deal with his first full moon. That seemed like ages ago now.
“Are you sufficiently prepared?” Leo asked.
I wanted to screech, “No!” like Beast, but I kept it in. “I’m good,” I lied. “I’m okay.”
Bruiser had sent me instructions on the parley and my part in the two-hour meeting. Vamps in parley used a form of parliamentary procedure similar to Robert’s Rules of Order, and Bruiser had sent me the words I was supposed to say when discussion turned to the accusation of murder and the trial. I had memorized the phrases that would keep de Allyon and his scions busy for as long as it took Leo’s people to locate and rescue Katie, but that rescue was no way guaranteed, even with Reach and Alex both working on invading every cell phone carried by the enemy and tracking every GPS, call, and text made on the units in the last two days. Yet, even if everything went off without a hitch, nothing about tonight was guaranteed. I might be forced into a trial. Katie might not be found, not in only two short hours.
So I had come up with my own plan in the hours of my study of the Vampira Carta, a plan that was sure to tick off everyone but would give us adequate time to rescue Katie. Like maybe all the hours until dawn. I didn’t have to do it. I could just stand in my place and keep my mouth shut and hope for the best. I could take the easy way out. But I wouldn’t.
“Everyone, don’t forget to turn off your cells or leave them in the limo. That decreases any chance the Kid will waste valuable time tracking the wrong signals.”
Alex snorted, as if such a mistake was impossible. It probably was.
We pulled down the narrow roadway between perhaps a half dozen vehicles and up to the building. The Nunnery was an old-brick, Spanish-style warehouse with wrought-iron curlicues protecting the blown-glass windows, the lights inside wavering through like water. There were porches on each of its three floors, and the grounds were planted with semitropical flowers and shrubs. Heavy limbs of live oaks wound sinuously across the ground.
The car pulled to a stop and Eli murmured into his mic to Derek, who was not on the premises but was waiting to initiate the hunt for Katie. It felt seriously weird to have only limited access to the security channels, but I didn’t want to be distracted by com chatter, so I had elected to wear only the general channel in my earbud. I shook out my arms and rotated my head on my neck. I was tense—not healthy around vamps.
Wrassler opened the limo door and Eli was out like a flash, listening to security babble, moving fast through the night. A moment later, Wrassler assisted Leo and Grégoire out. George followed, and I was last, feeling totally off my game. Bruiser leaned in close and placed his lips at my ear, murmured, “This time, don’t play nice.”
My mouth curled up in the first real smile all day. His command was the exact opposite of the one he gave the last time we had attended an event at the Nunnery. “Are you telling me to do something really stupid, or really violent?”
“You are anything but stupid, Jane Yellowrock. Anything but. And you look dangerous and gorgeous and violent and deadly tonight.”
I knew it was absurd, and way too girlie for me, but I could I feel my nerves settle with his words. It was a description I could live with, even if the gorgeous part made no sense whatsoever.
Wrassler led the way, Leo behind him, and the rest of us followed like good little servants. Beast padded to the forefront of my mind and flooded me with her strength, speed, and night vision. The world went sharp and bright, full of greens and silvers and oddly tinted blues. The shadows lightened until I could see the men standing in them, Derek’s boys—one of whom might be a traitor. As we ascended the short steps, other cars began to arrive, the rest of Leo’s vamps and blood-servants showing up for the parley.
Inside, warm, dry air fought the sudden cool spell, dropping from overhead vents. The smell of vamp was muted but distinct, and it made my hackles rise. Beast peeled back her lips and showed me her teeth, hissing softly, eager and powerful. For this night, the Nunnery was neutral territory, where Leo might meet and parley with the invading master vamp.
The front half of the building was one huge open area with three-foot-thick brick walls, slate floor, and thirty-inch-diameter brick pillars holding up the second floor, which was fifteen feet overhead. As always, gas-flame sconces lit the area, flickering in the artificial breeze. The entry floor was used for entertaining, with a dining area to the right big enough to seat a hundred at the long table, which was pushed against the wall.
The last time I was here for a party, the air had been redolent of meat and spices. Tonight it just smelled empty, vampy, slightly moldy, and the chill that wafted off the old brick would have been uncomfortable except for Beast’s energy pulsing through me.
To the left of the entrance, where usually there was an area set up like a parlor with couches, chairs, tables, and a fireplace scaled to fit the warehouse, tonight there were two dozen chairs set up in two Vs, twelve facing twelve, with the apex chairs only six feet apart. The twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chairs were between them, set back, on the opposite ends of a square. One was the place for Sabina, the priestess. The other one was for . . . I had no idea.
Before I could ask, I smelled the priestess arrive, her scent the aroma of old blood and dried rose petals and wind from a desert, stripped of moisture. It caught on the air currents and filled the lower floor. Her nunlike white robes swishing, her hands held clasped at her waist, hidden in her voluminous sleeves, she stepped through the doorway and Leo moved to her. He bowed from the waist in an old-world gesture, like something he might have done to royalty in his youth hundreds of years ago.
When he was at the lowest point of his bow, Sabina said, “Tonight, I am not your outclan priestess, Leonard Eugène Zacharie Pellissier, Blood Master of New Orleans. I am the emissary of the Outclan Council of Mithrans.”
If Leo had been human, he would have started. As he was a vamp, he just did that still-as-death thing they do. I knew Leo had contacted the council, but I’d thought it would be a long time before they responded. Until last night, I hadn’t known that Sabina had a phone line or cell at the cemetery where she slept by day. Now she talked to the council? By his slight pause, I knew Leo had been factoring this new info into his plans for the evening, plans that included trickery and deceit. Things one did not do when the Outclan Council was involved. Only a heartbeat too slowly, he rose and smiled at her. I had no clue if all this was a good thing or a bad thing.
I slid my eyes to Bruiser, but he was watching Leo like a hawk, and then his gaze moved to the entrance, and his eyes widened. I felt de Allyon as much as saw him, his power firing into the room like a torch, like a dozen lasers, like a flashbang going off. His energies prickled against my skin and made the hair on the back of my neck want to curl up and hide. And then I smelled him, that odd, beery scent that seemed all wrong for vamps, the scent on the man I’d killed in my hotel room, the death of the Enforcer that had started all this. Crap. I knew what it was. It was the scent of a blood-drunk master vamp. A Naturaleza who had been drinking his fill of humans for centuries was going up against Leo, who had been drained to the point of insanity recently. I remembered the note he’d left on the dead body in the Learjet: “You killed my Enforcer, Ramondo Pitri. You will die with your Master, in a massacre such as you have never seen. This, at a time of my choosing.”