Cold Reign

“In Europe?”

“No.”

A frisson of excitement sluiced through me. “Here in New Orleans?”

“Yes.”

I realized the last word was nearly sobbed. “You just earned yourself some new words. How many hostages are we talking? Do you know where they are?”

“Two. Yes.” A pale pinkish tear trickled down his cheek.

What was it with people crying lately? “If I can save them, will you stop the magic?”

“Yes. If you will pledge on your honor to save them I will end the working now.”

Honor. That was a weighty word among vamps. It came with repercussions. The way he had phrased it meant that I couldn’t fail. If I failed, my own life would be forfeit. “Provided you give me accurate locations, and they’re on land, and not among a nest of hungry vamps, and not already dead when I get there.”

“And you will feed me.”

“I will take you, in shackles, to Leo Pellissier, and the Master of the City of New Orleans will provide food.”

“You bargain like a Mithran, but you are not.” Adan drew in a long slow breath, the air whistling against the pressure of my arm on his trachea. “Oh. Oh, yes,” he said.

I knew he hadn’t just been hanging in my arms. He had been drawing conclusions and sniffing with each breath.

“You are Jane Yellowrock. Leo’s Enforcer.”

“Got it in one.”

“I have not been fed. I will not have my usual control. Which was impeccable.”

“We’re not finished bargaining. I want to know everything about Ka Nvista. Everything you know. Every story she told, every single thing.”

Adan thrashed and I eased up more on the pressure. “She was my blood-servant,” he whispered. “Was my primo before I was stripped of my power and placed in this cage. I will tell you what you desire to hear.”

I wasn’t sure that he had agreed to tell me the truth, but I said, “Done,” before I thought it through.

“Done,” he agreed. “I lift my hands, say one phrase, and the storm will begin to diminish. It will begin to follow normal weather patterns and not the artificially created one of my making.”

“Go for it.” Adan didn’t respond and I figured he didn’t understand the modern cant. “Make it happen,” I revised.

Adan extended one taloned hand in front of us. “Et tempestate mortis.”

I waited, watching the magics on the cage, over the twins, across the ceiling to Sabina’s chair, still empty. It took what would have been a dozen breaths in real time, before I saw a flicker. An almost insubstantial alteration in the flow of magics happening outside of bubbled time.

“Your part of the bargain is satisfied,” I said.

Adan made a sound that might have been laughter. Took a breath. “I thirst. I smell human blood.” His fangs schnicked down.

“About that lack of control you mentioned?” I dropped the blade and it started to fall, hitting real time and hanging about two inches from my hand.

“You must—”

I placed my hands on Adan’s head and twisted it with a ferocious jerk. His neck snapped. Adan went limp. I said into his ear, “Leo will heal you, never fear.” I tossed him over my shoulder, reacquired my blade, and carried him beneath the open garage door and out of the warehouse. Outside, the weather was frightful, which had a Christmas song meandering its way through my head. Dang it. Sleet had piled up in corners, in crevices, and partially covered the face of the cold dead guy beside a food truck. Not one of ours so I didn’t linger. I brushed through the sleet hanging in the air and up to the fence near the banana trees. Bending my knees, I tossed Adan up into the air. As he left my touch he entered real time and hung in the sleet like a sad sack of potatoes. His trajectory should take him over the fence to crash-land on the sidewalk. Derek would know what to do.

I raced back into the building and knelt near the crystal of quartz. I placed my hands on the cold concrete floor and said to the dragon, “I haven’t forgotten you.” To Beast, I said, “Okay. Now.”

The transformation was fast and more painful. My spine snapped. Hips shifted, becoming more narrow. Knuckles and elbows and ankles swelled. The bones in my fingers elongated. I blacked out. Came to, still in bubbled time, something shoving up into my ribs. I rolled over, catching a glimpse of my body—half-form—and the crystal that had been sticking into me. “Oh,” I moaned. “Owww.”

I was furry but at least I wasn’t quite so sick to my stomach now. And this was my Gray Between, a place where magic looked like it should, silver, gray, and sparkly. I rolled to my feet, feeling powerful and lithe, all the things that Beast liked about her own form but with opposable thumbs. I picked up the crystal and carried it to the garage door. Standing in the halted sleet, I stared down at the dragon sprite inside. She was back in her winged lizard form, a look of what I might describe as hunger on her face as she pressed on the stone. She stared into the cold night, her entire body shaking with need. “I’m setting you free,” I said, my voice now a scratchy hoarse sound, half-growl. “You bite me and I’ll get Adan back here to call you into the geode. We clear on that?”

She swiveled her head and hissed at me.

I chuckled, the sound nasty. “I asked you a question,” I ground out.

The dragon nodded, her frill wafting back and forth.

“Good. Your sisters are up in the clouds. Get them away from here. To a safe place. Maybe underwater in the Gulf, someplace deep. There’s a rift below Cuba that’s supposed to be deep. Stay away from here for a while.” With that last bit of advice I slammed the quartz crystal onto the ground. The quartz busted into thousands of shards. The blue arcenciel leaped free. She was stuck in real time, a shimmering bit of legend, catching all the light, her scales iridescent, wings unexpectedly feathered. I looked at the clouds and saw that all the arcenciels were still stuck in real time, still caught in the magical storm. Shouldn’t it have dissipated by now? That worry wriggled in the back of my mind like a worm on a hook.

Before I dunked myself back into normal time, I needed to see where the vamps had been hiding. And what and who else were at the other end of the hallway.

I passed the four combatants and scooted along the wall into the shadows. In the back was a small room, maybe ten by ten. The space had been constructed differently from the outer rooms, which were made of traditional wallboard and studs. This space had been bricked up, each wall two bricks deep. Rebar poked up along the top of the brick wall, showing that it had been reinforced. The bricks themselves were level, but the mortar between them was rough and had been left to dry in coarse clumps. There were iron rings in the brick, holding narrow metal frames to the walls, bed frames stacked three high, bunk bed style. Six beds, each with a prisoner on it. Vampires. Four of them were raging, faces contorted, vamped out, fangs snapped down on the little hinges in their mouths, some just needle-teeth, others longer, wider, thicker. They were hungry mad things. The long-chained.

But two of the six were aware, alert, sharing a glance across the distance of their beds. They had been healed. Recently, if the iron shackles on their arms were an indication. I’d bet good money they had drunk from Amy Lynn Brown. Eli would have said that early sorties were often for multiple purposes—to create destruction and lay groundwork, test the defenses, and take what they wanted. Because that was surely all this was, from the revs rising, the magical storm, the kidnappings of Sabina and Amy and Grégoire, everything. To lay the groundwork for a precipitate arrival of the full contingent of the EuroVamps.

Unless Del was right and there were factions among the EVs? And maybe the Deadly Duo had decided to jump ship early and take over before Titus Flavius Vespasianus landed? Or Titus had sent them on a sortie and they decided to take over instead? A double cross? Attempt a coup over Leo and Titus?

Holy crap. That was it. And Leo had to have known it from the very first, because he was good at the political mumbo jumbo. And that meant he had intended for me to deal with it from the very beginning. All by myself. While he cavorted in his office with his lovers. “We are not doomed,” Leo had said, with that faint smile, his eyes on me. “We are quite safe. All is according to plan.” A bitter taste laced through me, dark and harsh. I was Leo’s secret weapon.