I would find her—I had no doubt of that—but Mircea, damn him, was right. I might not manage it in time. Michael was only a low-level master, sixth at a guess, who ran errands for a couple of vamp bosses in Brooklyn. He was nothing I couldn’t deal with half-asleep, but the information I’d gotten from his thugs was that he’d recently skipped town. No one knew where he was, and tracking him with only my own resources to draw on was going to take time. Time Claire might not have.
Mircea, on the other hand, could put an organization on the search that made the CIA, the FBI and Interpol look like a bunch of retarded children—even more so than they usually do. By this time tomorrow, she could be back in our dilapidated house, clucking over her herb garden and two spoiled cats. And, if the pregnancy thing wasn’t a figment of Kyle’s warped imagination, I’d have time to talk with her and explain a few hard truths.
I glanced at the other vamp, only to see him regarding me with faint contempt. He probably thought he was hiding it, but I’d learned a few things about reading expressions over the years. Or maybe he didn’t care if I knew he thought me a coward. He was, after all, quite correct, at least when it came to my scary uncle. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of him was either a lunatic or really stupid. I wondered which type Mircea was trying to foist off on me.
“I’d want her back first. Payment only on delivery.”
“No.” Mircea didn’t even bother to look regretful. “Vlad has been on the loose for over a week. To give him more time to lay his plans is folly.”
“He’s had more than a century to plan already,” I pointed out. I didn’t like the Vlad reference. If Mircea would just once forget that the monster we were discussing was his brother, it would make things so much easier. But he has this weird affection for family that I’ve never understood. It ensured that he tracked me down every few decades, even knowing we’d end up in the usual knock-down, drag-out, and it had kept him from staking Dracula when he’d had the chance.
“True, but we dismantled his support network, if you recall. Unless he plans to move entirely on his own, he will need time to find followers. At the moment, he should be vulnerable. But he will not stay that way for long.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that “vulnerable” and “Dracula” really didn’t belong in the same sentence. At no point in time had he ever been anything but utterly capable and completely ruthless. But Mircea had a point. If I had to take on Drac, I’d vastly prefer for him not to have found any helpers. He was bad enough on his own, but the stable he used to control had been another source of nightmares, to the point that I’d spent more than a decade hunting the worst of them down. It had let me sleep a little better afterward, although only a little. Knowing that their lord and master was only one step away from being back in business had never gone down well. I felt my temper rising at the thought that if, just once, Mircea the perpetually hardheaded had listened to me, Dracula would be in a coffin permanently right now and none of this would be necessary. Of course, in that case, I wouldn’t have help with Claire.
“Fine. But if I start hunting him tonight, I want the search for Claire to start at the same time.”
“Done.”
I didn’t ask for surety. Mircea is a lot of things, but he keeps his word when he gives it. You just better be damn sure you know what that word is, because he is one of the slipperiest bastards out there when he wants to be. I decided I wanted things spelled out a little more. “If she’s alive, I want her back. If not…”
“Would you prefer to deal with the parties responsible yourself, or have us do so?”
“What do you think?”
Mircea smiled slightly. “I will order them held for you. I take it we have an agreement?”
I looked at the French guy and wasn’t pleased at what I saw. Yeah, there was enough power emanating off him to rival Mircea’s aura, which raised hairs on my arms every time I got within five feet of him, but taking down someone like Dracula was going to require more than raw power. A whole lot more. “Yes, but I’d prefer a partner I already know,” I said, trying to blunt the insult. “We won’t have time to learn each other’s styles. What’s Marlowe doing?”
Kit Marlowe, vamp, playwright and onetime Elizabethan bad boy, was head of intelligence for the Senate. He was one evil son of a bitch, as I could testify on a personal level, and we weren’t exactly buddies. But if I had to track the meanest vamp on the planet, I’d like to have one of the runners-up at my back. As long as he wasn’t gunning for me this time.
“We are on a wartime footing, Dorina. I can hardly pull the chief of security away for a personal errand at such a moment.”
“It’s not gonna stay personal for long,” I pointed out. “Our names may head Uncle’s list, but we’re hardly the only ones on it. The war may seem like a sideshow if he really gets going.”
“Nonetheless, the Consul would never permit it.” Even Mircea would think twice about bucking the Senate leader’s orders, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d met her only once, and that had been more than sufficient. My personal opinion was that she was crazier than Drac, but no one had asked me.
“So who is going with us, then?” I hoped he had some better backup in mind than the guys I normally used. One or two could handle themselves in some pretty tough situations, but nothing like this. The only connections I had who might have been useful were currently incommunicado—locked away for crimes the vamps or mages didn’t like, but hadn’t viewed as being serious enough to merit a cell six feet under. And since the war had intervened, their trials were on permanent hold—there’s no such thing as habeas corpus in the supernatural world.
“I would prefer to keep this in the family,” Mircea said.
I snorted. I didn’t doubt it. Anyone not under his direct command would have no compunction about staking good old Drac at the first opportunity. It was certainly my plan. Assuming he didn’t get me first.
Something occurred to me. “So what’s he doing here?” I jerked a thumb at the fashion plate. I wasn’t on great terms with the family, but at least I knew who was who. And Mr. Lack of Congeniality wasn’t on the list.
“I told you,” Mircea said in that überpatient voice he reserves for me and the mentally challenged. “This is Louis-Cesare.” I looked expectant. He sighed. “Radu’s get.”
I gave the pretty vamp another, more interested look. “I wasn’t aware my marginally sane uncle had any offspring.”
I was being kind. Radu—Mircea and Dracula’s younger brother—was a real weirdo. Not in the contender-for-homicidal-heavyweight-title kind of way like Drac, but almost as creepy. For one thing, he insisted on dressing like a reject from a Three Musketeers film, only reluctantly putting on up-to-date clothes when strong-armed into it. Some vamps liked to dress as they’d done in life when out of sight of humans, but Radu had been brought up in fifteenth-century Romania, not seventeenth-century France—hence, the weird. For another, he’d never, or so I’d thought, made another vamp in his life, although he had been a second-level master for centuries. Someone that powerful without a stable was unprecedented. Followers gave you income as well as protection, and who would voluntarily forgo both? He used Mircea’s stable almost like it was his own, but sponging off elder brother would have gotten tiresome to me. But then, nobody much cared what the skeleton in the closet thought.