“Yeah. Whatever. I just like ticking off his Most High Toothy-ness.”

I thought I might have heard Edmund choking with laughter as I ended the call.

CHAPTER 21

You Are Going to Prick My Temper

It was well after dawn when I left my room and swung out the front door, hoping to leave Eli to get a nap. No such luck. He tapped on the SUV window as I inserted the key. I set a finger to the window button and it rolled silently down. “Busted,” I said.

“So busted. You can barely keep your eyes open. Move over. I’m driving.”

“You’ve had less sleep than I have.”

“Yeah. I know. Uncle Sam trains his Rangers to not need sleep like normal humans.”

I levered myself over the console into the passenger seat as Eli took my place and belted in. “I’m not a normal human.”

“I know that too,” he said, the engine turning over. “You’re part cat. Mountain lions sleep something like twenty hours a day, which means you’re overdue for a long nap.” Eli didn’t look my way, but his mouth took on that almost-smile thing he does. “Big-cats spend the other four hours hunting, eating, and mating. And you haven’t been with Bruiser much lately, except the short time . . . was it yesterday? When Alex and I went for groceries?”

That shut me up. I was pretty sure I blushed. “Drive.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And when we get there, be advised that I intend to bait Leo. A lot.”

“Because we’re pissed off with the MOC. I got that.”

I smiled. Yeah. My partner got that. And . . . we’re pissed off. Not you’re pissed off. But we’re . . . A feeling I had never experienced before rose from the deeps of me and began to spread out. It was a weird feeling—light and airy, and it made my eyes water. It was kinda . . . I didn’t know how to describe it. Maybe fluffy. Which I’d never say to Eli. Not. Ever. I looked out the window to hide the tears gathered in my eyes and I was glad he couldn’t smell my reaction. I stared out into the bright dawn so he couldn’t see my face. “Ticked off,” I said automatically. “You know I love you, right?”

“Yeah. I know. Ditto, babe.”

I blinked my eyes hard to dispel the tears as we rolled through the Quarter, silent now, getting ready to bait a master vampire in his lair. Go, us.

* * *

Eli and I made it onto HQ grounds from the side street without incident. The picketing citizens were fewer there and resorted to shouting at us as we turned inside. He parked under the porte cochere and we entered through the back. The repairs were coming along nicely, the store of building supplies that we kept on hand in the garden shed out back making a big difference in the speed of repairs. The back entry was repainted, the blood cleaned away, the walls looking brand-new. The elevator doors were perfect except for a couple of bullet holes in the metal. And what’re a few bullet holes between friends?

The sun was rising as we entered Leo’s office. He wasn’t alone, but his dinner was sleeping, possibly naked, on the chaise longue beneath a velvet throw. It wasn’t the first time I’d been there when a human was asleep after servicing his or her master. But it was the first time the sleeping human had looked all of fifteen. I threw Leo a murderous glance, and he lifted a single eyebrow in reply, amused.

I bent over the human and shook him awake. He was beautiful, with black hair worn long, blue eyes, and that perfect pale skin of the Black Irish. “Evening, ma’am.” Something in those two words drew rein on my budding anger. He sounded Irish too, and more composed than any fifteen-year-old blood-meal had any right to.

I stepped back and studied him more closely. Slender, with graceful bone structure, the shoulders of a dancer and the face of an angel. Michelangelo would have fallen in love with him and tossed the model for the statue of the young David out the window in favor of this guy. “How old are you?”

“’Tis closing in on forty, I am.”

My anger drained away like water down a drain. “Okay. Why have I never seen you before?”

He gathered the throw around him and swung his feet to the Turkish rug, sitting up. “I was rescued by Grégoire”—his voice didn’t get harsh, but it did go toneless—“from a breeding pen outside of Atlanta, it was.”

“Oh.” I took another step back, my thoughts skittering around in my brain like rats in a cage. I put two and two together and came up with the child-man having been raised on one of the slave farms run by the former MOC of Atlanta and Greater Georgia, Lucas Vazquez de Allyon. I had killed the MOC. It was a death I didn’t regret. Not one bit. I’d never get used to the way most vamps think that they own humans. The EuroVamps would only be worse. Probably much worse. If they came to America and won a war, we’d have a lot more people like this, but they’d be a lot less happy.

Running on instinct, I put the blood-meal on Leo’s couch together with the human’s old master, the former Master of the City of Atlanta, de Allyon, and tried to fit the puzzle pieces of the European vamps and the Son of Darkness into the picture. And the Damours. They didn’t fit; none of the pieces connected. Until I added in Adrianna. She was there, on the outside of everything, her fingers in all the pies. But I could have sworn that Adrianna wasn’t smart enough or powerful enough to accomplish long-running treachery, one that would have spanned decades. It didn’t add up to a massive conspiracy, a long-term strategy to take over the Americas, but with vamps there were always more layers to the puzzles. And I was absolutely certain that I didn’t have all the pieces. And if I was wrong, then the mystery was a huge, overwhelming plot with more angles than I’d ever be able to figure out. There was no way I’d ever learn enough history to name all the pieces on the chessboard of vamp politics.

The pretty child-man offered me a smile that was wholesome and cheerful. “My new master, Grégoire, thought I might gain some much-needed education ’n’ training here at Mithran headquarters. My opportunity to acquire such knowledge was sorely lacking under my previous master.”

I moved out of the way, nodding to the door, letting my body language tell him he could go. When the door shut behind him, I looked at Leo. He was doing that block-of-gravestone-marble expression vamps did. No breathing, no tightness around the eyes, no tells at all. He could smell my exhaustion and irritation, but he had few clues why I was upset. Eli moved into the room, crossing to my left for a better shooting position, an action that was second nature to my partner. Though Leo didn’t turn his head, his eyes marked the movement and returned to me. Keeping my voice neutral, I said, “Education and training for Grégoire’s new servants is to include . . .”