I walked to Adriana, who had been watching us avidly. “Give me blood,” she demanded.

“No,” I said. “I won’t. Edmund, will you liaise with Sabina and Bethany and get that bracelet off her?” My primo went still, that undead thing they do when they display all the life of a wax mannequin. I grinned at the wall, not looking at him directly, my Beast playing. “What? You thought being my primo was going to be all bloody fun and games? There’s politics too.”

Eli said to me, “He could bring in enough minor vamps to take it off her and deliver it to the house. Up to you.”

Regally, I nodded my head at Edmund. “I am not averse to either method. Make it so, Number One.”

Edmund went from still as wax to staring at me. “You are . . . teasing me?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “I still need that bracelet, but it’s up to you how I get it.” I stepped to Adrianna’s cage and rattled the gate. It was secure.

There was a faint pop of sound. Blood stench billowed into the room. I whirled to see a blood-splattered Leo in the open doorway. Blood ran in rivulets over his crimson clothing. Adrianna moaned.

“Leo?”

“Où étais-tu?” he whispered, the words strangled.

“What—”

“They have taken him!” he screamed. “They took my Grégoire. You were not here. You were supposed to be here.” Leo dropped to his knees. Tried to catch himself with a hand on the jamb but slipped in his blood. He had lost two fingers on his right hand. He face-planted and lay still. His shirt was cut to ribbons, as was the flesh beneath. There was a knife sticking from between his shoulder blades. Behind me, Adrianna laughed, the sound low and mocking.

• • •

Things moved fast. Katie, Leo’s heir, with the most powerful blood in the city, Dacy Mooney, the visiting heir of the Shaddock blood clan from Asheville, and others gathered to feed their master. Someone sent for Sabina to help feed him. Bethany, the other priestess, raced down the hallway to feed Leo, opening the flesh of her fingertips and smearing it over the MOC, sticking the same fingers into wounds I hadn’t noticed. When he was at least stable, the vamps carried the MOC to his rooms. I followed behind, useless, and I finally got to see where Leo spent his private time.

The room was unlike the one Grégoire slept in, with its tapestries and fancy antiques and carpets. Leo’s room had wooden floors, pale blue walls, and a four-poster bed with intricate carvings. There were three armoires, all closed; a single chair, a small table, and a bookshelf full of old books and scrolls and wax tablets, of the sort he had owned before his former home burned to the ground. Some things had been saved from the flames, perhaps these.

I pulled the chair into the corner and sat, silent, watching, a nine-mil in one hand. Just in case.

Katie entered after me, bringing Leo’s dismembered fingers for reattachment. A hand reached out and snatched away the dagger in Leo’s back. Edmund brought gray silk thread and a medical bag for sewing. Someone else took a liquor bottle off Leo’s shelf and cleaned the fingers, dousing them in copious amounts of ethanol. Edmund grabbed the bottle and shoved it away, saying, “One does not use a thirty-year-old Macallan for dismembered Mithran limbs. One uses vodka.”

I heard the words coming out of my mouth before I could help it. “Doesn’t that cause cell damage?”

On his bed, Leo laughed, as if at my naïveté, and clasped Edmund’s hand with his own. “I wish a taste of that elixir before you put it away. It’s obscene to open that bottle and not taste.” Someone found two cut crystal glasses and poured some of the Macallan in each, added a splash of water, and the two men clinked glasses. Sipped. Edmund sighed, the sound so longing that I had to figure he’d had nothing so nice since he lost his own clan. Lesser vamps probably didn’t get the good stuff.

“Sire,” Edmund said in thanks.

Around him other, even lesser vamps opened ancient surgery supplies from Edmund’s medical bag and doused them with vodka. There was nothing in sterile packets, and the part of me that remembered my emergency medical classes cringed. But then, vamp physiology was not human in any way. So what did I know?

“Do you remember the last time I replaced a body part?” Edmund went on. “You offered a much less fine drink.”

“We were on a battlefield,” Leo said, his voice regaining something akin to the mellifluous tones it usually carried. “Scotch doesn’t travel well, not in saddlebags in summer.”

“Rotgut,” Edmund said. “Swill.”

“’Twas all we had, mon amie,” Leo said, his laughter containing a faint wheeze of pain and grief over Grégoiré’s kidnapping. Leo looked at me. “Save him.” I nodded.

“Let’s flip you over, sire, so the priestesses can heal your back. Removing that blade was unwise, whoever did it. Blades should be removed from bodies—even Mithran bodies—in the presence of a skilled surgeon or a master with particularly potent blood. Even a master can bleed out if the placement was especially skilled.”

“What if the blade was silvered?” a voice asked from the corner of the room.

Edmund looked up at that. Sipped, while surveying the onlookers. Perhaps he was remembering his own brush with silvered death only a day or so past. “In that case, yank it out and bleed yourself inside the wound. Feed the Mithran. And pray.”

If anyone thought the order to pray was odd, no one said so. In fact, a tiny vamp at the edge of the bed dropped to her knees and started praying to a handful of beads. It wasn’t a prayer like I remembered from the Christian children’s home where I grew up, and it was full of stuff about Mary. I figured it was Catholic and I had been wrong about her praying to the beads themselves. Another person dropped and started praying too, also with beads, this one talking to Allah.

Vamps. Praying. This was crazy. Except that their sire and master was injured, and his death would set into motion perilous changes. If Leo fell, with his city in chaos, and the EVs arrived, all of Leo’s people were in danger of a second and true-death. I secured my weapon and escaped to the elevator and down, to find another madhouse where the NOPD bomb squad was defusing and removing bombs in the ballroom. The cops escorted me back into the elevator and instructed me to go up a level and out the front door.

Unfortunately, a crime scene investigation was taking place there. Two dead and drained gang members—kids—lay on the floor and the security system just happened to have gone out during this battle, so there was no internal surveillance of the fight or the deaths. The cops seemed to find that suspiciously convenient and wanted to talk to everyone present. Including me. And while Eli, who was sitting in a folding chair in the security room, had proof of our whereabouts on his thumb drive, taken from Adrianna’s prison, he didn’t volunteer that just yet. He wanted to upload the video first before turning over the drive to the cops, so we were stuck. Sitting. Waiting.

Alex, who had followed everything on video, called and talked to his brother about the fights he was reviewing on the security feed. Skinwalker hearing allowed me to hear it all. Alex had video of the ballroom brawl, or most of it, and he had the battle in Leo’s office. “Le Bâtard and four other vamps came in through the secret side-gate entrance,” he said.

Dread swarmed through me like hornets. I hadn’t secured the gate after I entered. Nor had Eli. We had been keeping our exit open, but in hindsight that had been stupid. Very stupid.

“Grégoire fought, but Le Bâtard threw some kind of spell at him and Grégoire fell. That was when the sword-fighting vamps rushed Leo, five to one, and cut him to pieces. When Leo fell, they took Grégoire and retreated.”

“Ask him if he can follow their vehicle,” I said.

“Working on it now, Jane,” Alex said.

“Have I told you recently that you do a great job?” I asked the Kid.

“Words are nice, but I’d rather have a car.”

Eli snorted and ended the call.

We sat in the security office near the front door, unmoving, silent. I was thinking through the last hours, tying the events from now into events from months and months past. Tried to make sense of it all. Le Bâtard wanted Grégoire. Everything else was a feint? No, that left out the revenants and the ship at the dock and the invisible ship in the lake and the attempt to free Adrianna, and the bombs in the ballroom. Vamps never had just one goal for anything they did, thinking far ahead on the chessboards of their games. They always had multiple goals. Le Bâtard would take what he could from each attack. Yeah. That.