Death's Rival (25 page)

His work on the safe room would become a long-term project, not something to use for
today’s crisis. Leo and his vamps had other places they could hole up tomorrow, like
the warehouse where Leo had attacked me. I still got an empty feeling at that thought,
but Beast, the pragmatic one, simply yawned and milked my mind with her claws.
We are not dead. We are not caged. We will soon be free of him,
she thought. Which was the truth, as cats saw it, and would be something I could
live with, eventually.
And if he needs to be staked,
she added,
we will stake him. And eat his heart.

Which was a whole ’nother kettle of fish entirely.

* * *

Leo’s old limo was a charred shell, and so we borrowed Grégoire’s brand-new, heavily
armored, slightly stretched Lincoln. I had helped design the bespoke limo from the
ground up, taking ideas from a limo owned by one of Leo’s scions, and from the latest
defense industry specs. It had a three-quarter-inch steel plate underneath to protect
the occupants from possible bombs, and dark, polycarbonate-armored glass windows to
protect them from daylight and gunfire. The car had a special braking system and heavy-duty
suspension to accommodate the weight.

Inside, it was a work of art, with a long U-shaped steel-construction seat covered
with cream-colored, butter-soft leather, a bar, flat-screen TV, satellite phone and
Internet uplink, and cool weaponry that would rival anything Q would have designed
for James Bond, including a Mossberg 590 twelve-gauge shotgun mounted under the longest
section of window seat that ran along the driver’s side. There were three handguns
on mounts near the bar, hidden along the passenger-side windows, all of them nine
millimeter, with plenty of extra magazines secured in pockets along the sidewall.

The limo was black, low-slung, and totally cool. It only got about six miles to the
gallon, but I hadn’t been worried about being green; I had been worried about being
alive. I also hadn’t thought this through or I’d have ridden Bitsa. Or ridden in the
gear truck that followed, just me and the driver. Instead, it was Eli and Alex. And
Bruiser. And me. In a limo. Together. Driven by Wrassler.

Alex rode shotgun, occupied with video games and a music collection of head-banging
rock, playing while search programs ran in the background on three laptops. I took
the far backseat, facing forward, slouching, with my legs half on the seat, one foot
on the floor. Studying the two men. They were as different as possible and all I could
do was compare and contrast them.

Bruiser, on the long side seat, was wearing brown dress pants that had been made to
order, polished Italian leather dress shoes, with a starched dress shirt, the sleeves
rolled up to reveal tanned, corded arms. He was even wearing a tie, silk, of course,
though it was loose at the neck. His legs were stretched out, crossed at the ankles,
and he sat with his hands laced together across his lap. He was wearing a tiny gold
pinky ring, and he was the picture of elegance, marred only by the compact handgun
under his arm.

Eli took the seat facing backward, and was wearing button jeans, scuffed combat boots,
and a skintight T, with a shoulder holster, an ankle holster, and probably three or
four blades concealed on him somewhere. A wrinkled denim jacket lay on the seat near
him. All in black. He looked dangerous and in control. Yet, in a hand-to-hand fight,
Bruiser would win. Despite his casual and relaxed demeanor, he was full of vamp blood.
He’d be faster, stronger, meaner, and though I’d never fought Bruiser—except the first
time I ever saw him, when I’d gotten the drop on him—he’d had a hundred years to practice
martial arts, and I was betting he fought like he danced. Perfectly balanced, and
totally in control.

As we pulled away from the curb, Bruiser swiveled his head to me. And looked at the
floor. Reminding me of the times we had landed on a limo floor. And almost done something
I’d likely never regret. I tilted my head and slammed down hard on the blush that
wanted to rise. Eli looked back and forth between us, taking in everything and drawing
his own conclusions.

Fortunately, before I could feel too uncomfortable, Eli reached for the remote and
turned on the television to Fox. The two men started into a discussion of politics
and I closed my eyes and feigned sleep as we hit the road out of New Orleans.

The surfaces of most major highways in Louisiana are horrible, composed of concrete
with expansion joints every ten feet or so. The joints rose in the heat of summer
and stayed deformed forever, creating a rocking, bumpy ride, noisy and unpleasant
even in the limo. But for me, it felt soothing, like a rocking chair, and my fake
sleep quickly turned into real sleep. We were rolling into Natchez when I woke and
I stretched, touching my mouth to make sure I hadn’t drooled in my sleep.

I didn’t know much about the town. Natchez, named after the tribe of Indians sold
into slavery by the Europeans, was the first major Mississippi port city north of
New Orleans, and had once been a major hub of steamboat travel and trade. It had been
a bigger place before the war—the Civil War—and had struggled to hang on since. Union
troops hadn’t burned it to the ground, and after the war ended, Natchez had been left
with swamp, forest, bayous, a checkered and notorious past—all set high upon a bluff
above the Mississippi. It also had lots of fancy, prewar buildings, antebellum homes,
churches, graveyards, and old live oak trees swathed in moss. After the war, the town
also had hundreds of freed slaves needing work and carpetbaggers by the dozens bringing
in an influx of cash. Its location and history allowed it to survive and thrive when
most other towns around the South had suffered.

Natchez was rife with gossip. The locals knew everything. When we stopped for gas,
Wrassler chatted up a local girl working inside behind the counter. In minutes, he’d
learned most everything that had happened to the town in the last twenty years. Back
in the limo, Wrassler moved his massive bulk into the car, shut the door, and said,
“You were right, Kid.” To the rest of us, he said, “De Allyon has been hiding in plain
sight here, having taken over from the local MOC, Hieronymus—who owes Leo allegiance
and loyalty and who did not call his boss to report the presence of an enemy.” He
started the limo and pulled into the street. “Funny how Leo’s research guy didn’t
know any of this. Not you, Kid,” he said to Alex, “but that other guy the master uses.”

I laid my head back on the leather upholstery and thought about our leak. Leaks. Whatever.
Not only was someone sharing info with our enemy, but our own intel sources had left
us high and dry on what was happening in Leo’s organization. That needed to be addressed,
eventually, once this crisis was over. With vamps, there was always something.* * *

As for this little out-of-town gig, the possibility that there was more than one leak—Angel
Tit
and
a snitch in Leo’s camp—came back and perched in the forefront of my brain, like a
buzzard over roadkill. Was there a chance that the spy was Reach himself? Reach had
electronic fingers in everything, and he was nearly paranoid about security. If he
was the spy, he’d already have taken down Leo’s security and finances and, well, just
about everything. Reach had that kind of . . . reach. I let a bit of humor bubble
up through my worries and forced my shoulders to relax. They had crawled up my neck
to my ears with tension at the thought of Reach as a traitor.

“It isn’t Reach,” I said politely. “Go on, please?” Who said I didn’t have class?

Wrassler met my eyes again in the rearview, and I couldn’t see enough of his face
to tell what he was thinking, but he went on. “According to my date, Hieronymus initially
billed himself as a producer, which was a new one for vamps, but fit the town perfectly.”

“How so?” Eli asked.

“Look around,” Wrassler said, his eyes back on the road. “On the backs of slaves and
then cheap manual labor, the town fathers kept the place looking both spiffy and old.
To supplement tax revenues, the good-ol’-boy town fathers have always looked outside
farming, shipping, and transportation. Mississippi might be rife with the usual blunders
and nepotism and thievery of any bureaucratic government, but their film commission
pushed the beauty of the town to the outside world.”

My brows went up at his vocabulary. I’d had no idea Wrassler could pronounce the words,
let alone use them right.

“Natchez made a name in Hollywood. Movies, TV, and documentaries have been made here
and the politicians were hoping that the new residents would bring another—the new
residents being the owners of a newly renovated three-story building in the middle
of historic downtown. Or maybe they call it uptown here.” He glanced up at me again
and this time I could see his grin. “All that and I get to go dancing. I am a happy
man.”

Wrassler danced? Somehow the muscle-bound burly guy didn’t strike me as the dancing
type. “Wrassler, you have a way with words and a way with women,” I said.

We rode toward town, past shacks, trailer parks, and advertisements for tours of plantation
homes, and took in the sights. The place was like something out of a Civil War movie,
and we spotted some magnificent antebellum homes between the huge trunks and trailing
limbs of live oaks. Most of the old homes were the traditional, Tara-in-
Gone-with-the-Wind
–style of whiteboard with lots of pediments and architectural elements made out of
marble and wood, and wraparound porches. Two-story, sometimes with fancy gabled windows
in the roofline. Some of the sprawling monstrosities had iron or brick privacy walls,
horses prancing in the whiteboarded fields out back, and multicar garages with living
space—presumably for servants—overhead. Even in town we saw homes that belonged on
the covers of magazines.

We started at Canal Street and worked our way in. For blocks, the town had businesses
in old buildings from the eighteen hundreds: art galleries, restaurants, grills, boutiques,
a bookstore, and in the middle, we passed by the town’s most recently refurbished
three-story building, restored, revamped (pun intended), and once owned by Hieronymus,
Blood Master of Clan Hieronymus, now owned by a dead man, and being refurbished by
Lucas Vazquez de Allyon, who was soon to be a true-dead vamp.

As we circled the block, Eli slid down the window and took dozens of shots of the
building with a camera set on burst mode. The old windows on the ground floor were
swathed in silver velvet draperies, hiding the building’s interior. The windows in
the two upper stories had functioning copper shutters, all closed. If not for the
plans on file with the county, we’d have no idea what the interior was like.

We circled back around and followed GPS instructions to the bed-and-breakfast we had
rented on the outskirts of town. It was a huge, three-story place landscaped with
the ubiquitous live oaks and magnolias, acres of pecan trees, azaleas, and even flowering
trees, which was odd for this time of year. Bruiser leaned close to the dark-tinted
windows and said, “Japanese apricot and Higan cherry. Lovely.”

Eli grunted and said, “This place is gonna be a bugger to secure.”

“Yeah,” I said to them both. That’s me, full of chatter.

I left the men to unload and I knocked on the door. I was let in by the owner, a skinny,
wrinkled woman with shocking red hair and no fashion sense. She was wearing gray velour
elastic-waist pants pulled up over her tiny, rounded belly, a purple shirt, yellow
house shoes, and an olive green scarf printed with red and blue flowers. A string
of pearls that had to be at least fifty inches long was wound around her neck and
rested across her belly.

“You must be Esmee,” Bruiser said from behind me. He leaned past to take her hand
and insinuated himself into the foyer. “I’m George Dumas.”

“Ohhhh, Mr. Dumas,” she twittered. “I am so honored to meet you. Anyone who knows
the president is always welcome here.”

“He was very complimentary about your home and domestic servants, and I understand
that you took very good care of him and Nancy while they were here.”

“Such a nice couple,” she said, her voice high-pitched and girlish. “And even though
they were Hollywood types, they seemed quite well bred.”

A Hollywood president, married to Nancy? The
Reagans
? And Bruiser knew them? Sometimes I forgot that he was over a hundred years old.
While he took care of the particulars, I reconnoitered the house. The downstairs was
something like out of a movie set or the way really rich people lived, with antique
wood furniture juxtaposed with more modern comforts, parquet floors in tri-colored
woods, silk rugs, copper-coffered twelve-foot ceilings, and a maid and chef, which
meant we wouldn’t leave a mess or have to cook. There was a living room, dining room,
kitchen, butler’s pantry, wine closet, coffee bar, wet bar, billiards room, music
room, TV room, servant’s toilet, powder room for guests, a coat closet bigger than
a small garage, and a mudroom with a full bath off the back entrance. I stuck my head
out and saw a six-car garage to the left and a pool in the center of the enclosed
garden. The wall around the backyard was over eight feet tall. No one would be getting
in unless they could jump like I could or pole-vault in. The upstairs had eight bedrooms
and five baths, and slept sixteen easily, more in a pinch—plenty of room for the rest
of the men when the gear truck got here. The third story, up under the eaves, was
where the servants slept and I backed out quickly when I realized I was in private
quarters.

The place was amazing. I did not fit in here. Not at all. But I wasn’t complaining.

I picked the smallest room and crawled into the bed. It was like lying down on air,
and I punched the mattress. It swallowed my fist and then slowly returned to a flat
plane. It was that memory foam stuff. I kicked off my boots, tossed my bra to the
side and my weapons on the bed, curling up next to them. I had a feeling that I would
get no sleep while I was here, so I was going to catnap when I got the chance. I was
asleep in minutes.