The extended waiting period was being filmed by Scooter in the rushes and sea oats of a sand dune. It was a terribly boring job. So far.
Titus was a small man by today’s standards, not quite five feet, seven inches tall in his dress shoes and black tux. He was clean shaven, his eyes a teddy-bear brown, deceptively nonthreatening, and his hair was worn in a modern style, not the old-fashioned one in the portraits I had seen.
His power swept before him. It hit me, a burst of icy intensity, shattering across my flesh in a shotgun blast of energy that charred and froze at the same time. It would have brought me to my knees had I not been expecting it. In Beast-sight, it flashed on the foundation of the hedge of thorns in the sand.
I was reminded of Leo’s power the one time I had been standing close to him when he was about to lose control or else he was funneling all the power of all the vamps in his vicinity. One or the other. Or both. It had been the opening moments of a feeding frenzy, something I had no desire to ever see.
Titus’s power was like that but more. An exhibition. A demonstration. A painful shower of smoldering barbs that iced where they touched. I took a slow breath. Eli’s eyes narrowed at his own discomfort.
Titus turned his head to scan the house. A gold chain glinted at his neck, dropping inside his collar. Gold on his fingers. At his wrists. A beach wind and the house lights caught his curls. I wanted to giggle but kept it in for fear it would sound like, well, like a titter of fear.
We stayed put as the group approached, blocking the bottom of the stairs. Staring them all down. Staring down Titus’s Enforcer, a hulking female Viking vampire named Glacie, though I suspected she had originally been a Gertruda or a Hilda. Staring down Titus’s primo, Taviano, one of the human warriors who had challenged me. Him I looked over and then ignored as they got close enough for them to see us clearly. Our blocking the way was a pointed insult. Taviano put both hands on his swords as if ready to cut his way through once they reached us. We still didn’t move.
The man who claimed to rule all the fangheads in the world was forced to come to a complete halt in front of us. Because this was Sangre Duello. Courtesy and vamp etiquette were distant rules that could be twisted and bent to intimidate or bewilder. Titus looked us over, giving the boob flesh a pointed and condemning glance. But his attitude declared that Eli and I were beneath his notice. We still didn’t move.
Just before Taviano and his boss could react to the insult that the blocked stairs represented, Eli and I swiveled on our heels and stepped to the sides. From above us, Leo boomed, “Titus! Come on up, dude. We have beer.” I slid my eyes to Leo. He was standing there in the same jeans he’d been wearing when he landed, a brown bottle in one hand. And he was barefoot. Just like the Fifties Americana I had suggested.
Katie was by his side, wearing a billowy dress and flops and an expression that tried hard to appear excited, despite her role as inelegant, unsophisticated, and vaguely vulgar. “We have an entire . . . keg . . . of beer.”
I was sure Katie hadn’t had a beer in centuries. The whole sentence sounded strange in her usually sophisticated mouth.
Titus’s face went paler than vamp-normal. His mouth opened. His eyes went human wide, not vamped-out wide. And his power stuttered and fell. “Beer?” Titus repeated. And then he barked a torrent of French and what might have been Italian to Taviano. Shock and anger in the tone. Insult. Confusion.
“Come on up!” Leo shouted again. And the MOC and his heir turned and walked away from Titus, Katie’s flops flapping against the wood porch. The three cameras caught every word and gesture. If I survived the night I’d have to watch this someday. The MOC and Katie had succeeded in gaining the initial emotional upper hand. Point one to Leo.
And then I caught a whiff of lemons and a glimpse of the woman closest to Titus. Julietta Tempeste, Blood Master of Clan Des Citrons. Behind her was Dominique.
Beast leaped to the front of my brain. Enemy, she thought at me.
Yeah. Enemies. All of them. I stared at Julietta and when she looked up, I grinned at her, showing too many teeth, my eyes glowing gold. She faltered. And I laughed, my voice a low growl.
At the sound, the Europeans tightened around Titus, a group of men close to him, and the semicircle of women behind. The emperor stepped through the residue of hedge of thorns 3.0, his individual power signature sparking in Beast’s vision as a dotted line of energies.
And then something happened. I wasn’t sure what. Just something different. Unexpected. Magic raked across me, familiar, gray and black with motes of red. The magics in my middle reacted, speeding up in the Vitruvian pattern of the star within me. And then it was gone and I wasn’t sure what had happened, except that Titus had done . . . something. And then . . . that thought slipped away.
* * *
• • •
The front room was full of casually dressed humans, reading, speaking into their cells, thumbs flying as they sent texts. Two guys were stretched out on the rug on their stomachs, a spirited game of checkers between them. Not the dignified game of chess enjoyed by most older vamps, but gauche American games. Beer bottles were everywhere. The first two rows of a pyramid of beer cans had been built at the base of a window.
Deon shouted from the kitchen, his island enunciation like honey and whiskey, “Titus, honey, come and get you’self a corn dog. We got us three kind of mustard to Dip. It. In!” Deon demonstrated dipping a corn dog into a small container of Grey Poupon and biting off the end. It was a decidedly sexual act, Deon at his most amazing, putting on a show, the kind he had performed at Katie’s Ladies when he chose to participate in the evening entertainment. Chewing, he pranced out from behind the Carrara marble–topped island while waving the emperor and his peeps over. The chef was dressed in feathers, spangles, and rhinestones from head to toe, an outfit that looked like the love child of Bollywood and Brazilian Rio Carnival.
I thought Titus—the homophobe that history had never gotten right—might stumble.
In Rome, sexuality and sexual expression had been far more open and varied than in modern times, but Titus had never participated, more pope than playboy. Judging from his expression, the emperor was still a straight, conservative man.
“Grab your corn dog and beer and come on up, hoss.” Tex stood at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, Brute beside him. The white werewolf was staring at Titus, panting, salivating, as if he might want a little taste. “We got us some fightin’ to do.”
Deon held out a carnival treat on a stick. Daring Titus.
Titus reached to accept the corn dog and Taviano stepped between them. Deon smacked the dog down onto a paper plate on the island and put both hands to his hips. “Sugar, if I wanted to poison the kink-ly sort, I’d do it in Earl Grey tea, not in a corn dog. That would be downright sacrilegious.” Deon picked up the paper plate and slapped it against Taviano’s chest. “Now you take that food and you eat it.” Ziggy slid a hand around the stunned primo to whack a bottle of beer into Titus’s hands.
Titus’s secundo leaned in and whispered something in that foreign, Italian, Frenchy talk to the king, then led him up the stairs. Deon grinned evilly. He’d been having fun. From behind me Ziggy said, “Honey, if I’d known you were going to play I’d have put on Queen Bitch and helped. That looked like fun.”
“It was,” Deon said, “what that old dude deserved.”
Titus’s shoulders went back and he stepped up the stairs, straight toward the lens of a camera and into the view of the world. Leo, with a faintly pleased smile on his face, followed. Katie winked at me as they passed. Winked. At me.
Point two to Leo. And to Shakespeare. Leo’s opening salvo had been stolen from Petruchio, his own Kate by his side. I grinned suddenly, showing a lot of teeth. I couldn’t have been prouder. This was the stolen theme from Taming of the Shrew. Ro and Brenda, wearing jeans and sweatshirts, followed Katie and Leo. And then the rest of the NOLA retinue.
This little show was surely my fault from way back when. Go, me.
CHAPTER 17
Stuck His Nose into My Crotch
We were standing on the third floor, the windows open to the cool night breeze, the corroded fans turning overhead. The air smelled of salt, smoke, and vamp, a weird mixture of herbs and blood and sex, poorly hidden beneath the wonderful aroma of food.