“You know, Leo, the last few minutes have really sucked. And if I have to fill you full of silver and then fight my way outta here, it’s only gonna suck more. So how about you pull up your big-boy panties and let’s see what’s happened in this FUBARed afternoon.”

Behind him, Leo’s second-in-command, Grégoire, unsheathed his weapon, which was way more threatening and way less sexy than one might imagine. With two fastfast steps, Grégoire positioned himself between Leo and me, his sword pointed at my throat. I didn’t take my eyes off the MOC.

Leo blinked. Blinked again. His fingers softened their positions, relaxing; his talons slid back into the sheaths across the tops of his fingers that hid them when he was faking human. His eyes bled slowly back to human, and something like humor entered his eyes. Leo opened his mouth, and the fangs snicked back on their hinges. “I assure you I do not wear big-boy panties, or panties at all, a fact I will gladly allow my Enforcer to investigate at some later time.” He stood straight, losing that hulking-monster-in-a-dark-alley posture he’d been holding. And I saw that his hands, mouth, and jaw weren’t bloody. He hadn’t killed anyone. Yet.

Grégoire resheathed his sword and stepped to the side, his eyes taking in everything and everyone in the room. Vamps are hard to read at the best of times, but right now, Grégoire looked like stone, a fierce, furious, and oddly worried statue, some golden warrior carved by Michelangelo. He was sniffing, taking in the scents, and his scowl deepened as he moved around the perimeter of the room.

“Yeah. No, thanks. I’ll take your word for it.” I pointed the barrel at the bodies. “Who?”

“The fools who transgressed and betrayed me,” Leo said.

Feeling a little safer, now that he sounded rational and Grégoire was otherwise engaged, I entered the room, leaving the door open. I had a flashlight, but no way was I putting the gun away just for some light. My eyes adjusted to the dark more slowly than usual, and I approached Leo with my body bladed, weapon down at my thigh, knowing that, injured and with Beast out of things for now, I was in no shape to fight my boss. If he went nutso, I’d have to shoot him. And run.

The two bodies I had seen from the doorway were lying on the clay flooring, positioned about ten feet out from the wall, one male, one female, both vamps, lying on their sides. The position was oddly familiar. Leo and Katie, his heir, had been positioned similarly last time I had been down there. This time, the female had curly red hair that fanned out on the clay floor, hair I remembered well. The vamps’ bodies looked totally human, relaxed in sleep, until I got close enough to make out the small pool of blood beneath each head and the gleam of silver at each temple. I moved closer to make sure, because they looked so peaceful.

So did the pile of humans lying on the clay farther out, appearing well and truly dead, all of them relaxed and calm looking, not in postures of fighting. Just . . . asleep. Which was something I had seen once before, in photos down at NOPD. A whole unit of city cops had been taken down in an alley, not a shot fired, all of them drained dry by a master vamp with a gift for mind control. The humans had died happy, probably dreaming of being on a beach, sipping piña coladas, while a vampire-skinwalker monster drank them down and then ate their livers. It was why I’d been hired to come to New Orleans in the first place, to track down the vampire who had killed them. A vamp who had been a lot more than just a vamp.

Unlike the cops, however, these humans hadn’t been eaten. “I have called for master Mithrans to turn them,” Leo said to me, gesturing with his chin at the humans. “There is life enough in them to bring over.” His voice sounded funny, not quite himself, as if he was holding something back, holding something in.

Before I could figure out what was going on with Leo, there were numerous pops as the air pressure changed, to reveal vamps bending over each human. Some were high-placed vamps, like Dominique, Grégoire’s blond, beautiful heir, and some were low-placed ones, like Edmund Hartley, who was the vamp version of Leo’s bond slave. There were humans to help, and a dizzying miasma of scents washed over me, bloody, peppery, papery, the herbal signatures of vamps under stress and the pheromones of humans holding down panic.

“They signed the papers?” I asked, meaning the contracts that humans signed when they became blood-servants, designating what was to happen if they were almost killed in service—whether they would be allowed to die or brought over.

“It is being dealt with,” Leo said. Which didn’t really answer my question, but whatever.

I toed a puddle of cooled metallic slag in the floor. It didn’t move. I looked up to the wall where Joses had hung. And back to the dead vamps, putting the scenario together. “The vampires came down here, pulled the silver stakes out of his wrists and feet, and let him off the wall. At some point, the pocket watches you were using to control Joses were activated and used in some spell. The working melted them down to puddles of bubbling goo.” I kicked another one of the disfigured, burned watches and chain with my boot, and it didn’t move. They were all stuck to the floor, melted into the clay, which had to take some kinda heat.

“With his mind he trapped the humans they had brought to feed him and drank them down. Then, a little healed, he held the vamps still and drank them down. And then he stabbed his rescuers through the brains with the silver spikes and took off.”

“Yesss.” Leo’s voice sounded ticked off again, that slithery dangerous tone vamps used when they wanted to remind you they were killers, at the top of the food chain. “You, my Enforcer, were supposed to keep my headquarters safe. You were supposed to keep my people safe. You were sup—”

“Stuff it, Leo. You were supposed to tell me when anything changed. Like Adrianna coming back. When did she show? Last night? Right. You didn’t call. So don’t blame me when you’re playing vampire games and it comes back and bites you in the butt.” I angled my body so he could see the gun, just in case my attitude was more than he wanted to put up with. Or maybe I should just throw up on him. That might keep him from attacking me. Toeing the female vamp, I said, “I’m taking her head this time. Gratis, since you already paid me. But you wanna tell me why she’s still alive? Or was? And why you let her back in here?”

Leo looked around the room slowly, and though his shoulders didn’t droop, it was obvious that he knew he’d screwed the pooch on this one. He frowned, a totally human frown, and said, “Rumors have persisted for many years that Adrianna had possession of objects of value to me—les objets de puissance, les objets de magie. I allowed her back, assured her of my good graces, and kept her under surveillance, with the intent to take les objets de magie from her.”