“A pleasure,” Lucien said unsmilingly.
“It’s all mine,” Gregory Bane said, his eyelids fluttering nervously.
Lucien wondered how long it had been since the boy had turned and who’d turned him. Not Dimitri, surely. His brother was many things…but not that. More than likely he’d seen an opportunity and had one of his many paramours do it. The boy was, Lucien supposed, good looking by the standard set by his current crop of female students, who tended to be slim and unwashed.
The other boy, who wore his dragon like Dimitri’s, in the form of an iron symbol on a leather wristband, stood and extended his right hand…
“Uncle Lucien,” Stefan said a little diffidently.
But then again, the boy had never been all there, Lucien thought as he shook his nephew’s hand.
Whether that was because he’d seen his father murder his mother before his very eyes-it had been a different time and place, when uxoricide hadn’t been all that uncommon, but still, Lucien hadn’t approved-or because he’d been turned too young, Lucien had never been sure.
The young man was a definite disappointment. Dimitri was forever formulating some scheme or another to give him some direction. But he’d never even allowed the boy to use his last name. How could he expect Stefan to exercise any sort of career initiative?
What game was Dimitri playing at now? Lucien wondered. And what did the paunchy financial analysts from TransCarta have to do with it, if anything? Was it all really just part of his half brother’s new “business venture”?
Or something more insidious?
Oh, Dimitri acted the part of welcoming family, all open arms… He even ordered bottles of Veuve for the table, though champagne was never Lucien’s favorite. He’d never been fond of bubbles, which vanished immediately on the tongue. He preferred heavier, meatier wines that coated the mouth like…well, a meal.
But it all seemed a little like the champagne, or the young human women who’d draped themselves over Gregory Bane and the hapless Stefan-not to mention over the hedge fund managers in the booth next door-who said nothing but disappeared often to go to the ladies’ room, then came back wiping their noses, their minds as empty as that of the girl who’d tried to get him to dance with her.
Too showy. Not enough substance. Just a lot of air.
After a while, Lucien felt he had seen enough. If there were answers at his half brother’s club, he wasn’t going to get them this way.
He excused himself, saying that he had to go.
Dimitri showed him out through a back exit, since the front was now too crowded with drug-addled partygoers for him to leave without having to push his way through.
“Where are you staying while you’re here?” Dimitri asked-too casually-blowing smoke from his cigar toward the starry night sky, which was just visible from the dark alley in which they stood.
“Emil found me a place,” Lucien said. The less said about where, Lucien figured, the better. He trusted his brother…
But only to a point.
Dimitri gave a chuckle. “Emil,” he said. “Is he still with that idiotic wife of his?”
“He is,” Lucien said.
“Marriage,” Dimitri said. “Now that is the one thing you and I do have in common. No need to get tangled up in that. Well. Again.”
“It’s never seemed prudent,” Lucien carefully agreed.
Dimitri stared at him for a second or two before bursting into surprised laughter.
“Prudent,” he cried. “Listen to you! You haven’t changed, have you? Not in all this time.”
Lucien shot him an appraising look.
“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose either of us has.”
Dimitri stopped laughing abruptly and pointed at Lucien.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” he said in a deep voice. “I hope you didn’t come here to stir up trouble, Lucien. Because we’ve been doing perfectly fine on this side of the Atlantic without even a hint of trouble from the Palatine…and without any interference from you.”
His eyes, normally every bit as dark as his half brother’s, glowed as red as his cigar as he said the word interference.
A second later, a layer of the trash, dirt, gravel, and broken glass lining the alley floor just in front of Lucien began to rise into the air, then swirl more and more rapidly together until it was a towering, violently destructive tornado headed straight at him.
Lucien threw an arm up to guard his face from the debris.
That was when Dimitri found himself thrown back against the side of a Dumpster, as if an unseen wind had lifted him and blown him there. His fall was broken by some empty liquor boxes someone had flattened and stacked before the Dumpster for recycling. Otherwise, he would have slammed against the steel receptacle with as much force as if he’d been shot from a nail gun.
As he lay there, stunned, the vortex Dimitri had created died as abruptly as he’d crumbled, all the pieces of glass and trash falling back to the alley floor.
Lucien strolled up to where his brother lay, pausing on his way to carefully stamp out the cigar Dimitri had dropped, then lift it and deposit it in the Dumpster behind him.
Lucien was furious…but even when furious, he was still conscientious about litter.
“I have no idea what kind of game you’re playing here, Dimitri,” Lucien said, leaning an elbow on the side of the Dumpster and speaking down to his brother in a voice that was almost eerie in its calmness after the violence that had erupted just seconds before. “Nightclubs filled with investment bankers and drug-addicted young women. That’s your business, and I agreed long ago I’d stay out of Dracul business, so long as there weren’t any human deaths from loss of blood. But now…it’s not the Palatine you need to fear…it’s me.”
Dimitri, slumped against the side of the Dumpster like a piece of garbage waiting to be picked up, winced up at his brother.
“I know that,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’ve always known that. You didn’t have to hit me so hard, you know.”
“These dead girls,” Lucien said, ignoring his brother. “What do you know about them?”
“I told you,” Dimitri said. “I don’t know anything about them.”
A stainless steel countertop that lay abandoned to one side of the Dumpster suddenly rose several feet into the air and dangled threateningly above Dimitri’s head.
“Wait,” Dimitri cried, throwing an arm over his face to protect his handsome features from destruction. “All right, all right. Yes, I’ve heard talk-”
Lucien let the countertop fall harmlessly to one side. The clatter it made was deafeningly loud, and the two men could hear rats squeak and scurry away. Dimitri, still seated in the muck on the alley floor, made a face.
“But you can’t think I know who’s doing it, Lucien,” he said. “Obviously if I did, I’d put a stop to it. I don’t even know why you’d think it’s one of us. It’s clearly some sick pervert.”
“Who drinks human blood,” Lucien said calmly.
“Well, lots of people do,” Dimitri said. “It’s quite stylish to be a vampire these days. Or act like one, anyway.”
Lucien studied his younger brother. He would have liked to have believed Dimitri was as innocent as he claimed.
But Lucien had made the mistake of believing in his brother’s innocence in times past.
And it had nearly cost him his life.
He wouldn’t make that same mistake again, especially when it might now involve human lives.
“If I find out you know anything about these murders,” Lucien said, “and you didn’t tell me or do anything to stop the killer-or happen to be behind the killings yourself-I will destroy you, and everything and everyone you care about, Dimitri. Do you understand?”
Dimitri, trying to struggle to his feet and out of the garbage and slime, said, “Brother! We’ve obviously gotten off on the wrong foot again. I’m sorry about that little misunderstanding back there. Can’t we-”