I stomped back to my room and dragged Adrianna’s body and the other vamp’s body into the shower so they could drain. Cleanup crew should have been by. It seemed the Enforcer wasn’t at the top of the night’s to-do list. Stepping across puddles of goopy blood, I toured my house. Clearly Adrianna had fed well and deeply in the short time since she had escaped HQ, because the fresher blood was everywhere, tracked all over the dried, tacky blood. I was so not mopping this all up. I located another unofficial cell and called Scrappy.
“Lee Williams Watts,” she answered. “Mr. Pellissier’s personal assistant. How may I help you?”
“Jane Yellowrock,” I identified myself. “Alex called for a cleanup crew ages ago. They. Are. Not. Here. Send a cleanup team and some bloodsucker healers to my home, now. I want them here in thirty minutes even if they have to fly. Got it? There’s blood everywhere, a wounded security team, a re-dead rev in the living room, and two dead vamp bodies in the downstairs bathroom.”
“Just the two?” she asked, sounding perky.
I looked at the cell. Considering my history, I guessed it was a legit question. I put the cell back to my ear. “Just the two. And the revenant. But there’s a lot of blood. And I need two sets of leathers cleaned. They’re soaked. And I need a new mattress. It’s bloody too.”
“I’ll check the files for the brand and model and have a new mattress delivered by nightfall.” I heard soft tapping as she worked. “A cleanup team with an armor expert has been dispatched with an ETA of forty minutes to an hour, due to the weather. I’ll enter this number in as your new official cell phone and upload it with all pertinent data.” She paused. “And I’ll order you several more. According to my inventory, you’ve gone through a lot of them lately.”
I sighed. I hated perky people. And fangheads. And blood. To my more-sensitive-than-human nose, it was already starting to stink, that sickly sweet reek of decay. “I’ll also need a new security team on my house, and Leo’s medical team to heal the ones that were on duty when the house was attacked. Tell Derek to send two vamps in a sealed car and a new team of”—I started to say four but changed it—“six. ASAP.”
“Done. Anything else?”
She might be annoyingly perky but she was efficient. “Nothing. Thanks,” I added grudgingly. I closed the cell just in time to hear Edmund retch. Wet leathers squeaking, I went back to the entry. He had his fangs buried in Alex’s throat, but it didn’t look as if he was enjoying it much. He was pale and shaking and he kept making gagging sounds. “Ed?”
He withdrew his fangs from Alex’s neck and his fingers from the wound there. “I refuse to heal this child again. Not so long as he continues to drink poison.”
“Poison?”
“The foul energy drink. That beverage comes directly from hell.” He retched his way to the kitchen and propped his elbows on the counter, hanging his head over the sink.
“Vamps can puke?”
I spun to Alex, still lying in his own blood. “Hey, Kid. You’re alive?”
“Halfway.” He gripped his throat with one hand, tracing the scar on one side with his finger and the site of the punctures, now closed, with his thumb. “I didn’t see a bright light. No angels. Didn’t see fire and brimstone either, so that was good. But the last thing I remember was Adrianna attacking. I think she tried to cut off my head. Like I was a vamp or something.”
Relief scoured through me like coiled steel and white light. “Yeah.” I held down a hand and he took it, allowing me to draw him upright. “Question. If you had been too far gone to be healed, would you want to be turned?” I put an arm around his waist and gripped the top of his bloody pants to hold him standing. He was shaking and paler than any ghost was reputed to be.
“Until today, I’d have said no. I’d be too long out of the field. Woulda lost my edge. But now? I’m leaning toward signing the papers.” He fingered his throat. “Hurts.” He looked around him on the floor, at the amount of blood. “All that mine?”
My own throat nearly closed up on my reply. The blood was everywhere. It looked like gallons. “Yeah.”
“Eli’s gonna go apeshit.”
I didn’t fuss about the language because my new cell rang. It was Eli. I filled him in. My partner went dead silent and when I was finished, he disconnected. Without a word. To Bruiser, I said, “I’m changing and going to fanghead central. You coming?”
Expression blank, he looked up from the adoring blonde and said, “I’ll stay here.” It could be his natural reticence. Or more storm and magic. “Will report as soon I have everything.”
There was something about the emptiness of his expression that reminded me of the lying, sneaky, former boyfriend, Rick LaFleur, but I knew that Bruiser wouldn’t cheat on me, so the lack of emotion was something else. “You want to talk about it?” I asked.
He looked at the curvy vampette on my kitchen table and then back to me. “I now have a bond scion,” he said unhappily.
“Another superpower?”
“Yes.” He said, “And I have no place for her to sleep.”
Edmund said, “I’ll care for her. She can sleep with me.”
“I’ll change then and go with you,” Bruiser said, his voice still empty. “Nicolle. Go with Edmund. He is the primo of Jane Yellowrock. You will do as he says and obey him in all things so long as they do not conflict with your service and vows to me.”
“Yes, my master.” She released his arm and slid her feet to the floor, standing, all vampy and slinky, like a rain-damp sex goddess. To Edmund she asked, “May we share blood?”
“I was counting on it. This way, Nicolle,” Edmund said, leading the way to the weapons room hidden behind the bookshelf. They disappeared into the dark cavern and the shelf clicked shut.
My sweetcheeks and I eased around the puddles and splatters of blood, stripped, toweled off, and changed clothes in the laundry, the only clean room in the downstairs. There was nothing romantic in the process, but I couldn’t help but see Bruiser in my peripheral vision. Long and muscled, yet lean and hard. Every inch of him. His face was haggard, however. “You want to talk about it?”
He paused in the act of pulling a long-sleeved T-shirt over his head, his skin pale in the darkness of the storm-shadows. His brown eyes were troubled. “I didn’t mean to bind her. I have no place to keep a blood-bound scion. And no desire to keep her. I only want you.”
For a moment my heart warmed, and then I figured out why he was so upset and all my happy-happy-joy-joy leaked away. “She’s going to want to sleep with you.”
“Yes. Constantly.”
Part of me wanted to laugh. Another part wanted to go drag her out of the weapons room and into the daylight and watch her burn. Beast murmured into my mind, Mine. My mate. Her claws extruded and she milked my brain. It hurt but the pain helped me to think. To Bruiser, I said, “Can you give her away?” She’s a thinking sentient being, not a slave, I thought. But if she was bound, that was exactly what Bruiser had created. No wonder he was upset. I had bound Edmund. I hated that. What were we two becoming?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I need to talk to Brandon and Brian. I’m still . . . new? . . . to the powers of an Onorio.” He pulled the tee into place and slid jeans up his legs and buttoned them. Tight and fitted to his butt. Bruiser had the best butt. And the best nose, Romanesque and proud.
I finished dressing in jeans and rubberized boots and layered tees. And all my weapons. It was daylight, which made us—mostly—safe from vamps, but not humans, though they were far easier to dispatch than vamps.
Kill, I thought, suddenly, stopping in the act of pulling my weapons harness over my shoulders. Not dispatched. Humans weren’t errands. Or targets. They were people, and if they fought for one side or the other it was because they were bound, not free-willed. And I had killed five tonight. There was a time when I’d never have killed a human. New Orleans had changed me. Being around vamps had changed me. Having things, possessions, friends, family had changed me. I now had people in my life worth killing over. Bruiser had changed too, in a positive way, no longer a brainwashed vamp tool, blood-meal, and plaything.