“Copy,” Eli said.
It was still predawn as we pulled in behind Derek and his top men. Some were team Tequila, from the first time I met him, and some were team Vodka. There was not enough left of either team to make one single full unit. There had been battles. Too many battles. Too many injuries and deaths.
We deserted the limo under the porte cochere, Bruiser and Edmund parting and moving in different directions. Eli hung with me and gave Derek one of those manly nods that accepted the other’s presence without being too happy about it. Everybody around here had a history. “Any luck?” I asked Derek as we went inside out of the wet and cold.
“Le Bâtard and Louis—the Deadly Duo—haven’t been to the Roosevelt, or the Hotel Monteleone, or Dauphine Orleans, or the Omni.”
Deadly Duo. I liked that. I liked even better that Derek had started assigning nicknames the way I did. Not that I’d ever say so. Instead, I said, “You covered a lot of territory.”
“We broke up into small groups. Less conspicuous. Each group took a vamp to let us get where we needed.” He grimaced, his full lips scowling, as he said the last part. Derek hated working with vamps. Hated that they could roll most humans so easily. But he used the tools at his disposal, always had.
He continued, “One team did get a tip where an unknown vamp might be. It seems there’s a five-star vamp inn we didn’t know about.”
“Not the Acton House?” The Acton House was where famous vamp visitors of the twentieth century had stayed, including the Son of Darkness, one of the most powerful vamps in the world, on the good part of his visit. Since then, the SOD had been hanging on the wall of Leo’s basement. Worst vacation spot ever.
“The St. Emilion House,” Derek said, leading the way into the lower, back entrance and up in the elevator. “According to our source, it’s discreet, gated, and has ten staff per bloodsucker. We did a drive-by. Place also has more cameras than Fort Knox. I doubt that it has anyone staying there right now because it’s for sale. I called Scrappy on the way back and she asked Leo about it. It’s one of the properties that went on the market after the last vamp mini-war.”
The elevator doors opened and Eli placed the blood bottle in my hands. As the doors closed on us, he drew his weapons. Derek and I both raised our brows at him. “Edmund was a little aggrieved when he smelled the contents.” Eli nodded at the bottle. “If Leo loses it, I can shoot him, standard ammo. It’ll at least slow him down and let us get a door between us.”
Derek let a grin pull at his mouth. Like Eli, he was former military and if he showed amusement it was for a reason. “Legs, I think I’ll tag along to see how this goes down.” He led the way from the elevator to Leo’s office and knocked on the door. When Scrappy answered it, Derek said, his face emotionless, “The Enforcers and Yellowrock’s second.”
Scrappy was looking relaxed and more rested than the last few times I had seen her. She stood aside and left as we entered, the smell of pepper and papyrus and the fainter scent of ink on the air. And blood. Scrappy looked mighty happy as she left. I wondered if Leo’s redheaded assistant had been lunch.
We moved silently across the piled carpets in the hallway, and the perfume of other vamps infused the air. The faint trace of tea in Katie’s scent and Grégoire’s pale green odor of freshwater streams and summer gardens, this time overlaid with a dissipating reek of fear. And then blanketed with the scent of recent and sweaty sex. Lots of sex.
The furniture had been moved out, a few essential pieces shoved back, to line the walls: the desk, its chair, the armoire, which had been pushed to the side, and a smaller-than-normal tea tray were still present. A second built-in fireplace had been exposed on the wall where the armoire had been and it was burning merrily. A round, king-sized bed had been placed in the center of Leo’s office, a silk fitted sheet hiding the mattress itself. It was covered with velvet throws; chenille throws; a puffy, fluffy, silky comforter; a dozen or so pillows; and three vamps in various stages of undress. I stopped hard at the end of the hallway. There were things I so did not want or need to see. I already wanted to stab out my eyeballs.
Leo (pretty sure he was buck naked) lay closest to us, on his side, his bare feet dangling over the edge of the mattress, a thin, shiny sheet tossed over his hips, his head on his arm. Long black hair dangled over the side, curling on the ends. Katie was in the middle and definitely naked, the small fleur-de-lis brand on her upper arm darker than I remembered, the scar brown and uniform. She had been branded before she was turned, possibly as a crime of the French state of the time. Delicate and erotic, she was posed languidly on the mattress, facing Leo, the covers underneath her. Grégoire, farthest from the doorway, was at her back, one arm holding her close to him, spooning, his face buried in her nape, her ash-blond hair tangled in his lighter locks. At least he was under the covers. Mostly. The important bits.
“Boss,” I said calmly.
“Do you know why the revenants are rising?” he asked, opening his eyes, cutting to the chase.
“Yup.”
Leo brushed the hair out of this eyes and sat up. His hair was longer than I remembered, a good six inches longer. It lay on his shoulders and across his chest in a tousled disarray. Sex on a stick. “Proceed,” he said.
I filled him in on the discoveries of the day, including the pink silk line we found at the funeral parlor. “We also found a bottle of something that made Edmund freak out. It’s possible that it’s used in the embalming process. Maybe it—”
Leo thrust out his hand in a give it to me gesture, imperative.
I looked at Eli, who moved into the room where he could cover all the vamps. He centered one weapon on Leo, the other on Grégoire. “You get Katie,” he instructed Derek. Leo vamped out. So did Katie. Grégoire didn’t move except to twitch the arm that hung off the edge of the mattress.
“Blade,” I said to Eli, assuming that the boy wonder already had one in hand.
“Got it.”
“Explain yourselves,” Leo said around his fangs, in the soft velvety tones of the mesmerizing fanghead.
Derek sighed and drew a weapon. “Standard ammo, boss. You try to kill us, go into a feeding frenzy, we’ll shoot you, let you heal. Come back at a better time.”
“It’s what a good Enforcer does,” I said. Leo scowled at me, but I stepped close and extended the bottle to him. The Master of the City of New Orleans, way underdressed for a business meeting, wrapped his pale fingers around the neck of the bottle and pulled it from me. Without removing it, he sniffed the cork. Stopped, his eyes narrowing, his head tilting to the side as if to access an old memory. But he didn’t go nutso or try to eat me. Instead, his fangs retracted, his eyes bleeding back to human. He was beautiful and, for a moment, uncertain, perhaps even terrified, though he hid it instantly. He extended the bottle to me. I took it and stepped back.
Leo took a breath deeper than he needed for speaking, as if to settle himself, and said, “This contains the blood of Louis the Seventh. And Le Bâtard. And a dozen others I recall from long ago.” He lifted his brows. “And the blood of Titus Flavius Vespasianus.”
As Leo spoke, Grégoire peered out with one beautiful blue eye. The scent of fear pulsed into the room. “I told you that Le Bâtard is here.”
Leo said, “We have no eyewitness proof of his presence in the city. Be still, my love.” But things were moving in the back of Leo’s eyes, like pieces on a chessboard, rearranged and reorganized and reconsidered. Leo was still in the game. Musingly, he said, “If the age of the rising revenants and the scent of this blood are indicators, some plan of our enemies has seemingly been in place for two hundred years. The Caruso Family were originally Clan Bouvier, but if they have been the willing spies of the Europeans, they may have set a strategy in motion that we only see with the rising of the revenants.”
Grégoire’s face slowly eased away from Katie’s shoulder, his eyes bright with tears. “I told you. I am doomed.”
Leo leaned back, exposing waaaay too much of himself, and stroked Grégoire’s pale white shoulder. Katie pulled a golden comforter over Blondie. “You are safe, my darling,” she said. “Remember that you are safe here. We three are enough to defeat them all.”