Leo started in with his names and titles. “Leonard Eugène Zacharie Pellissier, Master of Clan Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans ...” I blanked him out. Heard it all before. When he finished, he started in on the names and titles of Sabina and Bethany.
“Names are important to weres,” Bruiser said softly beside me. He had maneuvered close while Kemnebi spoke and I slid my eyes to him and back to the action on the floor, where Leo and the black were-leopard were shaking hands and sizing each other up. And both were sniffing the air, as if scenting was part of their recognition process.
“Is that so?” I murmured.
“Kemnebi is Egyptian for black leopard. Safia means lion’s share.”
On the ballroom floor, the vamps were forming a formal reception line, to pass in front of the were-guests and the vamp VIPs. Sabina and Bethany stood first, Leo next, with Kemnebi and Safia last. The female were’s head was down, her eyes on her hands clasped in front of her.
“Titles instead of personal names, maybe? And the woman—what?—belongs to him?” I had strong antislavery beliefs, but knew it still took place in many countries, parts of Africa included.
“Probably to both questions.” He changed the subject. “Leo wants you in the line, behind the Mithrans of Clan Arceneau, and in front of their blood-servants.”
I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice when I said, “I’m the hired help, not a guest.”
“As I explained to him,” Bruiser said, his voice tight. “Leo has his reasons.”
I thought about that. Leo knew I wasn’t human, though he didn’t know what I was. He thought I smelled like sex candy and a challenge all at once, something the vamps had a hard time resisting, though it hadn’t always been that way. Until Leo accepted me, the vamps had thought I smelled like an encroaching predator. I was betting Leo wanted to see what Kem did when the were-cat got a whiff of me. While I let that thought simmer, I said, “Where’s the little green guy?”
“In his room. Unless he found a way out past your men and the heat signature cameras they set up. They are exceptionally well trained.”
“They’re independents, mercenaries. I just get to pay for their services from time to time,” I said.
“Now,” Bruiser said. He touched the small of my back, just below the holster and just above my buttocks, and gave me a gentle push.
I wasn’t willing to be Leo’s experiment, but I didn’t feel like I could say no either. This might fall under the heading of security, to know how a were-cat reacted to me, and if so, that made it part of my job description. Leo was a bastard but he was a smart bastard.
I slid into place in the line just after Karimu, offering apologies to the blood-servant behind her, who would have objected, by saying, “Mr. Pellissier wants me here.” Then I added, to salve the man’s pride, “He wanted his Rogue Hunter in line with you and your clan as a ... sign of approval,” I improvised quickly. I felt brilliant when the man nodded and stepped back a half step out of my personal space. I usually stank at social situations, but his reaction was an indication that I hadn’t trespassed on blood-servant sensibilities. Karimu’s only response was a twitch of his lips. A vamp with a sense of humor.
I shook Bethany’s hand, and she didn’t react to my being in the receiving line, almost as if she didn’t recognize me, which made me all kinds of happy. I’d rather not be on her radar. Sabina took my hand, and hers was cold with the exact flaccid, loss-of-elasticity flesh of the dead, which made my skin crawl, but I shoved down on the reaction. She raised her eyes to mine. “You still retain possession of the sliver of the weapon?” she asked, referring to the sliver of the vamps’ Blood Cross she had lent me to kill a dangerous vamp. I had tried to return the artifact but found her gone from her chapel-lair in the vamp graveyard. I nodded, and saw from the corner of my eye, Leo look my way in surprise. “You will bring it to me. Soon.” She slipped her hand from mine, looking away.
Leo, next in line, took my hand. His was warm with another’s blood. “Leo,” I said. It should have been “Mr. Pellissier” in a formal receiving line and in the line of duty, but I was halfway ticked off with the MOC, and didn’t mind him knowing it. He showed me a lot of tooth and fang by way of reply and handed me off to Kemnebi. “Our fearsome Rogue Hunter,” he said, by way of introduction.
The visiting dignitary took my hand, looked into my face, inhaled, and froze. It wasn’t vamp immobility, but it was dang close. He spoiled it when his pupils widened and nostrils fluttered just a bit. And when he took a second breath, he inhaled through nose and parted lips with a scree of sound, flehmen behavior, the way I do when scenting someone.
“What is this woman?” he asked Leo. “What is she?” When Leo didn’t answer, Kemnebi tightened his grip on my wrist and yanked me to him. One arm went around my waist, hard as iron. His open mouth was at my throat. His breath hot and moist. His magic sought and quested at me like a big-cat twining around my body, but this was deeper, sharper, more intimate. Hot prickles of power sparked against my skin, painful and electric. Beast hunched down, pelt rising with alarm. She showed teeth and hissed.
“A beautiful woman,” Leo said, “one worthy of your bed.”
“What?” I tried to step back but were-cats are strong. Kemnebi resisted. A growl snarled out of me. I felt claws in my mind, piercing. Power leaped into my consciousness. Strength flooded my system as my Beast poured adrenaline into me. “Beast is not prey.”
In an instant I was three steps back; the visiting envoy was staring at me wide-eyed. The room had fallen silent. That dead silence of terrible affront. Crap. I had spoken aloud.
Some silent, logical part of me played back over what I had done to break free. Basic moves. Stepped to my right. Twisting, dropping motion of my left arm to break his grip, the strength of my arm against the comparative weakness of his fingertips. Simple. But Kemnebi had not been expecting me to resist or to be armed. When his encircling arm had encountered the H&K at my back, he had reacted with broken hesitation.
Leo had just offered me to Kemmy-boy as a bedmate. I glared at Leo, remembering his Dark Right of Kings, which he employed to sleep with any vamp or blood-servant he wanted. Not me. I wasn’t a blood-servant or blood-slave he could order around. I wasn’t his to use or to give away. And he wasn’t going to pimp me out. Not gonna happen.
“My Rogue Hunter is, indeed, not prey,” Leo said smoothly. “As to what she is, I think, and my shamans think, that she herself does not know.”
It might have been nice to know that one, I thought. And then I smelled blood. Strange and pungent. The odor filled my scent receptors, big-cat and human, intermixed and prickly. I looked at Kemnebi’s wrist. There were claw marks across the inside of his wrist. Big-cat claw marks, bleeding. And I had no idea how I had given them to him. I glanced at my hands. Human. Perfectly human.
Kemnebi lifted his wrist and sniffed it, his eyes widening further. The woman beside him was staring at me, her lips parted in shock, her nose wrinkled back like a cat. Scenting me. “I do not like the way this woman smells,” Kemmy said.
He is dangerous. He is my enemy, Beast spat at me. But I kept it inside, silent and contained. I didn’t answer his comment with the insulting rejoinder on the tip of my tongue, “You stink too, dude.” It would have been a childish insult, on top of drawing his blood.
On the periphery of my vision I caught movement, a slight shift of darkness, and glanced that way, to see Bruiser. He had deliberately moved to attract my attention in the room of immobile bloodsuckers. His hand made a “move along” gesture toward the woman last in line, like an usher in a movie house. I shoved down Beast’s volatile reactions to Kemmy and held out a hand to Safia. I said something inane before moving away and to the safety of wallflower status, my mind whirling, figuring things out.
Leo had wanted me in the reception line to see how Kemnebi would react to me. Bruiser had known and not warned me. Leo had planned to offer me as a sex toy to the were-cat. Knowing Leo, he might have just been curious how Kem would react, but if the were-cat had agreed, Leo would have expected me to follow through just on his say-so. Bruiser had known and not warned me. Leo was an ass with the worldview of a feudal lord of the fourteenth century and felt that people were his to do with and give away as he pleased. Bruiser was an ass of a different sort, and I intended to see that his nickname was a description of his skin tone. Soon.
I spent the next two hours avoiding the prime blood-servant, doing my job. I made sure there was plenty of food and drink for the humans. I ordered coffee brewed as a secondary choice to the alcohol being served. I assisted in finding chairs and bringing them in from the rooms off the hallway when the vamps wanted to sit and chat with one another. I kept two vamps from coming to blows over protocol, which I didn’t understand anyway, offering to knock heads together and stake them, in order of importance, and let them choose who died first. They behaved thereafter. I went back and forth to the security room, checking the monitors and getting firsthand views of anything untoward. All the while, I took security reports on the earpiece of the headset, which was making my job much easier.
I touched the mouthpiece and said, “The green security guy. Update.”“Still contained in his room,” Angel’s Tit said, satisfied.
I made another circuit of the ballroom. When Sabina stepped in front of me—make that, appeared like a magician’s trick and I nearly fell over her—I kept in the girlie scream but it was a near miss. We hadn’t spoken in weeks, and now I was the target of her attention, twice, which didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling at all. She reached up and cut off my mike with one hand, her other a band around my nape, pulling me down to her. Her flesh was cold and hard as marble, and as always she smelled of old blood, like an ancient crime scene.
Her mouth at my ear, she said, “I have smelled such creatures before. When the Eldest Son of Darkness visited, a century ago, he failed to rise one night. Leo sent for me, and together we entered his lair. The premises stank of blood and violence, of injury and pain; his holy lifeblood, and the blood of another was splattered against the walls. Though it was inconceivable for a single being to defeat a Son in battle, even by day, the lair scented of two combatants only. His attacker was an African cat, perhaps a lion. Or a leopard. Leo told no one. Now, you have allowed such a beast into this domain. If there is death, let it rest upon you.”