I could have told them that no one had been there in months, but they’d have still gone through the procedure. The place had that kind of atmosphere. We separated and the guys started quartering the downstairs.
I trailed after Eli, moving slowly, letting my mind wander again through the history of Clan Mearkanis. The clan had been led by Ming, who disappeared from her sleep lair and was presumed dead. Immanuel was believed to be her killer. Which was oddly like what had happened to the Son of Darkness. Rafael Torres, her heir, had taken over as blood-master and immediately launched a covert war against Leo. He had wanted to be master of the city.
Neither of Clan Mearkanis’ leaders had reputations of happy-happy, joy-joy, and the house vibes said it had been a painful and difficult place to live for a long time, even before all the blood was spilled. And then Ming disappeared and Rafael took over. Rafael had not been a nice man and had taken an instant dislike to me. And I mean, really. What’s not to like? When he was taken out in the vamp war, his clan had been disbanded and subjugated into the surviving clans.
More important, Rafael had been Adrianna’s blood-master and mind joined to her. She had suffered horribly when he died. And when she was staked. Most vamps wouldn’t have survived either, let alone both. And Rafe had been behind her original attack on me. Crap. So much to remember. Vampire relationships were all tangled and snarled into a bloody and politically disruptive history. Keeping track of all the enemies I had made and the ones I had gained by proxy was getting to be really difficult. I needed an outline tree of them all. Maybe I’d get the Kid to make me one.
The Mearkanis house was huge, with a living room, a dining room, a great room that opened into a kitchen with a sitting area around a gas fireplace, and another sitting area with a breakfast table in a bay window and planters on low shelves and hanging from a tarnished bar in the ceiling, all full of dead plants. There was a tea bar, coffee bar, and wet bar, and in the kitchen proper were marble countertops above fancy painted cabinets and top-of-the-line appliances and a brick oven, like you might find in a pizzeria. There was a big mudroom off the back that opened onto a laundry room. There were back stairs switchbacking up that I presumed were servants’ stairs.
And everywhere I looked were bloodstains. In the foyer, on the dining room table, splattered all along the living room wall’s bookcases, in the brick oven, for Pete’s sake. It was worse on the stairs, as if a group had been herded there and systematically killed off. And by the smell, it wasn’t only vamps who had died. Humans had died there. Adrianna had survived the massacre and the war itself. I didn’t smell her blood or her presence anywhere.
I hadn’t been part of the vamp war. If I had, would all these people have died? Could I have kept them alive? I crossed my arms over my chest and tucked my hands under my armpits against the pervasive cold. This sucked. I started up the stairs, pausing at the bloodstains on the landing. The stains didn’t make sense. Just from the grouping, I was guessing four vamps had died there, but the scents said only two had died. It didn’t make sense.
The second story was marginally better, decorated the way a whorehouse might have looked in gold-rush days with silk, antiques, and lots of bedrooms. There were only a few bloodstains, these behind doors, in closets, in bathrooms, places where vamps had hidden. In one room two humans had died protecting a vamp, part of a defensive action behind a barricade of bullet-shattered furniture. The master suite no longer had Ming’s tastes, having been transformed into a man cave for the new blood-master, all heavy furniture, with hunting trophies hanging on the walls: deer, elk, and one moose head over the bed. I closed the door and opened the one next to it; this one belonged to Adrianna, her scent flooding out. And she had been there recently. But not through the hallway. Not through the house at all, or I’d have smelled her.
I walked in and stopped, taking in her room. It was long and narrow, the walls painted a deep rose shade and centered with a canopy bed laden with silk sheets and draperies and tasseled ties in half a dozen shades of pale shell pink, with a silk rug on the floor in the shape of an ammonite shell. It was pale shell pink too. Not colors I’d have associated with Adrianna. Scarlet or royal blue, maybe even gold, but not pink.
There were no bloodstains there. I bent over the bed and caught the scent of Adrianna, fresh and strong. She had slept there within the last week, and not alone. I pulled down the comforter to see several long scarlet hairs on the pillow, entangled with as many blond hairs. The feather mattress beneath was shaped into one depression wide enough for two bodies, yet no scent of human wafted from the sheets. She’d been there without her human blood-servants, which was odd behavior for a vamp unless the assignation was with another vamp and it was secret. I breathed deeply of the mingled scents. Adrianna had taken a vampire lover. The scent was familiar, but mixed with Adrianna’s scent and her perfume, it was difficult to distinguish at first. It almost smelled like . . . Dominique. Dominique, who was heir to Clan Arceneau, second to Grégoire, Leo’s lover. If I was right, then this horrible situation was about to get sticky in the political and vamp-bedroom sense.
Dominique had reason to detest me, for not understanding a stilted invitation once upon a time, leaving her chained in silver and starving. Old history to me. Probably like yesterday to her.
At the closet I opened the doors to see a line of hanging dresses, skirts, and blouses, all in silk. Folded on slender, stacked shelves were rows of silk knit T-shirts. Shoes were tucked in little pockets hanging on the back of the doors, the heels sticking out for easy color coordinating, and three sets of shoe pockets were empty, matching the number of pairs found in Adrianna’s room at HQ.
I felt around, running the clothing through my hands, checking every seam, every pocket, every hem. I pulled out every pair of shoes, checking the toes, and in the bottoms of the hanging shoe pockets. I reached around everything on the shelves, bunching my hands on the silk for anything hidden. The upper shelf of the closet held hats, and I checked each one. Nothing.
In the narrow bureau beside the closet were drawers full of underthings, in lace and more silk. Adrianna had a serious silk fetish. The bottom drawer was empty, and I dropped to one knee so I could sniff the drawer. Until recently, paper had been stored there, along with something faintly magical, like maybe Adrianna’s gold jewelry that was now, and still, in the SUV. Maybe the gold jewelry Santana had escaped with. Beside the bureau was an indented place on the rug, roughly rectangular, like the shape of the bottom of Adrianna’s suitcase, found in HQ.