The primo, Adelaide Mooney, opened the meeting with the info that Leo and Gee were being treated by the priestesses. She assured us that they would both be okay, but it would be tomorrow night before we’d see them again. With the fast healing of vampires and whatever species an Anzû was, that sounded pretty ominous. Del looked haggard but elegant, dressed in a monochrome blend of blond tones that matched her hair, which was down and curling on her shoulders. I remembered seeing her at some point in the gym, sword raised. It had been only a glimpse, but it looked as if Del knew her way around sharp objects.
When she finished her report, I asked, “Can you tell us what Leo was saying when the thing flew into the room? It sounded like, Lepree lumyear. Larcencel. Larcencel.”
Del’s eyes flicked down and back to me. I wasn’t sure what the reaction meant, other than she wanted to be done and outta here. She stood and said, “The Master of the City said to give you this.” She passed a folded scrap of paper to me. On it was written in a shaky hand, with what looked like a ballpoint pen, the words, Grand danger, mon cour. L’esprit lumière. L’arcenciel.
It wasn’t Leo’s usual fancy, calligraphy-like script, and I’d never seen him use a ballpoint pen or write on a torn piece of paper, but the words on it had the right Ls in them to be his handwriting. “Okay. What’s it say?”
Toneless, she replied. “It says, ‘Great danger, my heart. The light spirit. The rainbow.’”
“What’s wrong with his heart? Did the bite damage it?” For that matter, did Leo even have a heart? Fortunately I got my mouth closed before I said those words.
“I believe that Leo is calling you his heart,” Bruiser said, his tone droll.
“Oh. Okay. No.” I looked at Del and finally was able to deduce her expression as an unwilling possessiveness. Del and Leo had begun a relationship that included more than just blood sharing, and this read like I was poaching on her territory. Though how that all worked when Leo was still sleeping with Grégoire, I had no idea. “I’m not his heart. He just calls me that to tick me off.”
“I see. Well . . . if you need me, I’ll have my cell and in-house radio.” She turned on her expensive two-inch heels and left the room. I followed her into the hallway, but she cut me off with a terse, “I don’t have time now, Jane.”
I stepped back fast at her abrupt words. An embarrassed flush shocked through me. I don’t make friends easily and—
“Sorry,” Del said. Her shoulders slumped and she rubbed her forehead. I didn’t get headaches much but Del looked like she was in pain. “It’s been a difficult week.”
Tentatively, I said, “Leo giving you a hard time?”
She dropped her hand. “I’m not the primo he’s used to working with,” she said stiffly, as if she had heard the words once too often recently. “He’s still grieving for George, and there’s nothing I can do to take away the fact that he’s lost his right-hand man. It’s also taking me a while to get up to speed. I don’t know where things are located, filed, or stored. I made a mistake ordering wine for a small gala Leo has planned. We got a delivery of ‘substandard, even for American swill,’ wine that I liked and that cost a small fortune. He broke every bottle. Every single one. Quesnel was horrified.”
Which sounded like underling-speak for the boss was being a pain in the butt. Was the jealousy a misread on my part? I said, “Ouch. Sooo, because you don’t have instant recall and superpsychic powers of vamp-omniscience, Leo bites your head off?”
She smiled slightly. “Metaphorically speaking.”
“Want me to stake him for you?”
Del spluttered with laughter, which was what I had hoped for, her pale complexion brightening. “I think not. Job security, you know.”
“Yeah. I bet it’d be hard to find a new position as primo in today’s job market.” The words felt familiar, as if I’d said them before. To Del? To Bruiser? Both had changed jobs recently.
Still chuckling, Del stretched her shoulders back and then let them relax. She said, “I’m sorry about my tone in there. Girls’ day out soon? I know this town has excellent spas and I’m dying to try one out.”
I didn’t do girlie stuff, manis and pedis and facials, but I’d had a massage once and it had been fantastic. “Soon,” I promised her with a nod, and then added, “Leo doesn’t understand the concept of monogamous. He’ll protect you with his life and give you anything you want except that.” Without watching for her reaction, I opened the conference room door and slipped back inside.
The lights were off in the room, security footage up on the oversized central monitor screen. A voice in the darkness said, “Legs, I’ll look over the footage again later for anything we might have missed, but so far, nothing shows on the cameras until the rainbow thing, whatever Leo called it, entered the gym.”
“Okay,” I said as I slid into a chair at the head of the table. Belatedly I identified the voice as Angel Tit, one of Derek’s men, a former active-duty marine and IT security specialist. And the scent beside me was Bruiser, silent, watching. He must have come back in through the other entrance. I could feel his eyes on me in the dark. “What?”
“That,” he said. That was digital footage from four cameras, taking up half of the screen, two by two. I’d installed the cameras to cover all aspects of the workout room and its two entrances. The screens showed footage that had been aligned by time stamp to show the moment the creature entered the gym in a flash of light. Instantly, all the cameras had splotches of white-out and partial white-out, in the blocky shapes of ruined digital feed.
Angel said, “I’m piecing together sections of footage that are still okay, so we can get a view of the fight. This is all I got at this time.”
A fifth screen appeared on the far right of the TV and showed the creature entering the room. It was a blister of light, a halo of nothingness with glistening movement to the side that could have been wings, followed by a smoky cloud of out-of-focus, thrashing tail. The camera angle changed, and changed again as it flew across the room. It whipped to Gee and bit him.
“It went straight to Gee,” I said. “I thought it was angling for Leo and got Gee instead. But it targeted Gee DiMercy first. Anybody have any ideas about that?” No one answered, but I could feel a growing discomfort in the room as the snake thing attacked Leo, fought, and finally flew away, then did it again, and again, as Angel replayed the footage. The uneasiness might have been the result of the appearance of what would have passed for a dragon in mythology, or maybe the part where Bruiser and I both vanished from the screen into a haze of gray energies, but whatever caused it, the humans in the room were not happy campers. Fortunately, no footage appeared showing me in half-cat form, and though it was strange that no one brought that up, I decided not to mention it. Discretion being the better part of valor, or I am a scaredy cat, or something like that.