“You can’t just barge in here,” the nurse was spluttering. “I’m going to call for security—” She stopped and turned as the door opened again.
Mircea walked in.
He glanced around the room, one quick flick of the eyes that seemed to take in everything: the rows of cots, the rushing orderlies who were trying not to look like they were avidly watching, the bed with its ointment-stained sheets, and came to rest on Rafe.
Mircea studied him for a moment and then turned to the gaping nurse. “Thank you for providing such excellent care for my kinsman,” he told her. “Your actions will be remembered.”
Irony laced the words, but she didn’t hear. “I—I—it was nothing.
Really
. We were
thrilled
to be able to do what we could,” she said, still talking as Mircea walked behind the partition and calmly shut her out.
There was no more talk of throwing us out, and no interruptions. Not that I think Mircea would have noticed if there were. His attention was focused solely on Rafe, who appeared to have fallen into a light sleep.
“Raphael! Attend me!” His voice snapped like a whip, demanding obedience. And somewhere in the fog of pain that had fallen over him, Rafe heard. He opened his eyes a slit, a bare glittering against the raw flesh. “At this point, the process itself might kill you,” Mircea informed him. “What do you wish to do?”
I didn’t know what Mircea was talking about, but obviously Rafe did. He said something, but it was unintelligible. His voice was muffled, cracking, and I was suddenly grateful that I couldn’t understand. I didn’t want to know what went with the soft, broken sounds. One hand curled into a painful-looking fist and he pressed it down with terrible, leashed force against the soft surface of the bed.
“Then you must be willing to fight,” Mircea responded. “Life is not a gift, Raphael; it is a challenge. Rise to it!”
Mircea’s eyes had lightened, brightened, mahogany fired to gold-chased bronze.
Trust me
, they demanded, fierce and proud and infinitely compelling. It was the look that made me want to make really idiotic decisions that would only end in heartbreak. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Rafe nodded.
And Sal pulled me up and out of the curtained area. I looked around to find myself surrounded by the family. Sal and Alphonse were there, along with Marco, the two security men and Casanova, who was managing to look suave and frazzled at the same time.
“What are you doing?” I struggled as Sal pulled me toward the entrance. “Let me go! I want to stay with Rafe!” My voice had risen three octaves in that short sentence, which meant I was closer to losing it than I’d thought.
I tried to tear out of her grip, but of course that didn’t work, and her words caught me before I tried to shift. “It’s private,” she said sharply.
“
What
is private? What is going on?”
“Mircea is going to try to break Tony’s bond with Raphael,” Sal said, biting her lip. “Normally, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but as weak as Rafe is . . .”
“What are you talking about? What difference does it make who his master is if they can’t save him?”
“You heard what that orderly said. The damage is too great for them to do anything, not that I think they tried too hard until we got after their asses. They took one look at him and decided he was a goner.”
She plopped down onto one of the seats that Alphonse and Marco had dragged in through the main doors, and she pulled me down into another one. We were flanking the wall not far from the entrance in one of the few areas with no cots. Instead, a jumbled bunch of medical equipment—wheelchairs, gurneys, IV stands—had been pushed here out of the way. Unneeded for the moment. Like us.
“I still don’t see how changing masters is going to help!” I felt edgy and hot and weirdly tight in the chest, like I couldn’t breathe. Like I had to do something or I might explode.
“Mircea made Tony, but Tony made Rafe,” Sal said tersely. “And the blood is the life.”
I’d heard that phrase all my life; it was a mantra among vampires. But I didn’t see the relevance now. “But Rafe’s blood isn’t helping him!”
“Because it’s
Tony’s
,” Sal said as if I was being especially slow. “It isn’t powerful enough to let Rafe repair this kind of damage. But Mircea isn’t Tony.”
Alphonse snorted. “No shit.”
“We get our strength partly from our own abilities and partly from our master,” Sal explained, reaching for a cigarette. She noticed a couple of oxygen tanks nearby and stopped, looking frustrated. “The more powerful the master, the more powerful his servants. If Rafe has enough strength left to absorb Mircea’s blood, to let it become his new source of life, he should heal.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“What do you think?” she snapped, obviously tired of twenty questions. She glanced up at Alphonse. “I need a drink.”
“Send Marco,” he said, settling into a permanent-looking stance by the wall. “If the master pulls this off, he’s gonna be weak. And by now everybody knows he’s here. If someone was gonna hit him, this would be the time.”
“He brought guards,” Sal said.
“Two.” Alphonse sounded disapproving. “I got ten more boys on the way, and I ain’t budging till they get here.”
“I
have
guards,” Casanova said, looking insulted. “Not to mention those thugs the Senate imposed on me.”
For once, Alphonse refrained from a snide comment on the quality of Casanova’s stable. “And now you got more.”
Sal looked at me and I looked defiantly back. I wasn’t budging until I knew about Rafe. She sighed. “
I’ll
go. This place is fucking depressing. What does everyone want?”
As soon as she left, I rounded on Alphonse. “How could turning someone weaken a first-level master? They do it all the time!”
Alphonse tilted his head back against the wall. For a moment, I didn’t think he’d bother to answer. But then he cut his eyes my way and I must have looked pretty frantic, because he sighed. “For a master to turn a non-magical human, yeah—it’s no problem,” he told me. “Three bites from the same vampire in quick succession and that’s pretty much it. But Rafe was already turned.”
“So?”
“So to break the bond, Mircea has to drain Tony’s blood from Rafe and replace it with his own. Normally, it’s exhausting, but no big deal. A first-level master’s blood is pretty damn potent, so it doesn’t take a lot. But Rafe’s so far gone, Mircea’s gonna have to lend him extra power just so he can survive the Change.”
“And that means draining himself dangerously low,” I guessed, wishing I hadn’t asked.
Alphonse scowled at a couple of orderlies who had been loitering around like starstruck teenagers ever since Mircea showed up. They quickly found somewhere else to be. “The master’s gonna be hemorrhaging power whether this works or not,” he rumbled. “I’m here to see that he doesn’t pay for it.”
There didn’t seem to be much else to say, after that. The three of us sat there silent, unmoving and, in the case of the vampires, not even breathing. I couldn’t tell how Casanova and Alphonse were feeling, because they’d lapsed into the non-expression vamps use when there’s no reason to impress the humans. But I felt anxious, miserable and utterly useless.
For some reason, my brain kept going to the presents Rafe used to bring me whenever he went on a trip. They were always thoughtful, fitting whatever I needed at the time. As a rambunctious tomboy, I’d received a plastic gladiator helmet from Rome and a matching sword that I’d used to chase him through the halls of Tony’s farmhouse. As an adolescent girl who wanted to appear more grown-up than she was, I’d been given small bottles of perfume from Paris, perfectly child-sized but filled with adult fragrances. And right before my escape from Tony’s, Rafe had slipped me my very first fake ID.
He had never asked for anything in return, had never seemed to expect or want anything. He was probably the only person in my life I could say that about. And now he was dying.
I usually wasn’t a violent person. I’d seen so much of it growing up that it had lost its glamour for me, even before everybody and their dog started attacking me. So it took me a few minutes to put a name to the feeling flushing my cheeks and curdling my stomach. I didn’t know who was behind the attack today, or even for certain that anyone was. But I knew one thing.
If I ever found out, I’d kill them.
Chapter Thirteen
I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke up with my head against Marco’s shoulder, which somebody appeared to have drooled on. My eyes were gummy and I felt like I’d been hit by a large truck. My shoulders and back were in knots and my head was pounding. But Mircea was outside the screen, leaning heavily on Alphonse’s arm, and Rafe was—
“Rafe!” I bolted up the aisle, grabbed him and held on tight, whispering things that hurt against my throat. He still looked like death, but he was on his feet, and the skin that showed under the pale blue hospital gown he’d acquired was crisscrossed by scars but whole. The cracks were gone, the redness was gone, and he was standing. I was seeing it, and I could barely believe it.
“He broke your bond,” Sal said, and the look she sent Rafe was half relief, half jealousy. She’d been after Mircea to do the same for her and Alphonse ever since they came to Vegas, but so far, he hadn’t had the time or the energy to spare.
Rafe didn’t notice the undercurrent. He just nodded, looking dazed and amazed and utterly exhausted. He glanced at me, but I wasn’t sure he even knew who I was.
“My son requires a room,” Mircea told Casanova.
“I have something ready. Your rooms are waiting as well, of course. And the Consul requests an audience at your earliest convenience.”
“Tell her I will see her in an hour,” Mircea said. Casanova blinked and started to say something but swallowed the words. Instead, he mutely led the way out of the infirmary.
Dante’s had two penthouses, one in each of its twin towers, with the second reserved for the hotel’s owner. The best thing about them from my standpoint was their sheer inaccessibility. Each suite took up a whole floor and the only way in was through a private elevator with key-code access. And just in case Spidey scaled the building or a bunch of ninjas rappelled out of a helicopter, we were joined by a dozen guards as we crossed the lobby.
Six took the elevator up ahead of us, and the rest waited to follow. Marco, Mircea’s two guards, Casanova, Sal and Alphonse came up with us. And even in the plush elevator, which boasted its own padded bench seat and twinkly chandelier, that was a squeeze. I was all for security, but I didn’t see how anyone was supposed to draw a weapon if we couldn’t even move.
“Do we need a whole platoon?” I asked when we finally got the doors closed.
“The order went out after MAGIC fell: no one of senatorial rank is to go anywhere without an escort,” Mircea informed me.
“But you’re a master vampire.”
“And you are Pythia,” he said pointedly. “At the moment, our power merely makes us better targets.”
“Not for long,” Casanova said, his voice muffled because he’d ended up squashed behind two huge vampires. “The Senate has a staff working to strengthen the wards.”
“Wards don’t have eyes and ears,” Marco argued.“They’ll never replace a well-trained bodyguard.”
Maybe not, I thought, but they were a lot less creepy. I didn’t know the new guards, but I assumed they were part of Mircea’s personal stable. Because they gave off enough energy in the confined space to send a current prickling over my skin. And it wasn’t the usual light frisson, either. The energy in the air felt like an electrical storm, with power crawling over my arms, itching my scalp, making me want to scream.
Both masters, then.
I managed not to scrub at my arms, but when the nearest turned flat gold eyes on me, I forgot my training and shrank back slightly. He smiled, a slow baring of fangs, while the other looked at me like I was something funky he’d found growing at the back of the refrigerator. Then the doors opened and we spilled out into a private hallway.
It contained a potted palm, a small strip of carpet and the six guards who had preceded us framing the only door. One of them hurried to open it and we passed into a large foyer. For a moment, I just stared. Unlike my old quarters, which could have belonged in any hotel on the strip, this one was themed. The motif being flogged to death appeared to be the Old West, or some designer’s idea of it. The two-tiered chandelier was made of antlers, there were oil paintings of cowboys on the red flocked wallpaper, a cow skin rug made a black and white puddle on the floor, and a rough wood entry table supported a cowboy-and-rearing-horse sculpture in bronze.
Casanova noticed my expression. “The Consul preferred the blue suite,” he said stiffly.
“Imagine that.”
A wizened old vamp hobbled toward us, looking unhappy. “What’s all this?” he demanded in a quavery voice.
Most humans would have taken one look at the liver-spotted hands and wild clumps of white hair and guessed him to be about a hundred. And they’d have been off by four centuries. He wore pince-nez on his long nose, despite the fact that they didn’t help his blind-as-a-bat status, and he was almost deaf to boot. But Horatiu had been Mircea’s childhood tutor and was the only person I’d ever heard tell off the boss.
“The master needs to rest!” Horatiu said, surveying the army of guards attempting to crowd in through the door. “Out, all of you!”
When the guards uniformly ignored him, he shuffled over to one of the larger vamps and began attempting to push him out the door. That had about as much effect as a fly trying to move a boulder, but Horatiu didn’t appear to notice. The guard didn’t fight back, just stood there with a long-suffering look on his face and let himself be pummeled.
“I’m sorry,” Casanova told Mircea in a low tone. “I assigned a staff to these rooms, but Horatiu arrived with the refugees from MAGIC and—”