“I’m guessing,” Pemberton added, “that you’ve decided to cooperate.”
* * * * *
“I suppose I should have figured it out before,” Pemberton said. He was sitting in the comfy chair—Charles’ chair—and Charles and Doreen sat on the couch together. The rest of the vampires were standing. Kent had arrived ten minutes later, and Charles hoped the presence of his friend was a good sign. Either that, or Pemberton wanted his executioner handy. If so, Charles was sure Pemberton had misread Kent, because no way would Kent cut down Doreen in cold blood at this point.
“Vampires are dominant by nature. We have a hierarchy, to be sure, but that merely means that each vampire who is not lord of a city bows to one man, and still feels he or she is lord of the rest of the world. It would be a nice fiction to say only the physical changes in the transformation, but it would be false. What is the saying? No man steps into the same river twice, because not only does the river change, but the man changes as well. The change in a vampire’s personality is even more drastic. Hunters,” he nodded to Kent, “have noted that change and have used it to justify indiscriminate killing of my kind, and I do not judge them. I can merely say I will fight them whenever and wherever I am able.”
He turned to Charles and Doreen. “But you two are something else entirely. No vampire I’ve ever met could submit to a human for even a single night, even in a purely sexual context. But Doreen has no trouble. In fact, I would even say I sense some inner peace in her. She’s not struggling against her nature. She’s at peace with it.”
“Are you trying to say she isn’t a vampire?”
“Now we get into words and their meanings. Patience, Mr. Keller. Perhaps it’s best to say she isn’t the same kind of vampire as I am, or as the others in this room. There are legends of a
la sang du verité,
the blood of truth, that flows from a very special kind of vampire. This blood can be used to compel obedience to an oath, even if the oath is obtained under duress.” He nodded at Charles. “You may have noticed that my invitation into your house, even though it was obtained under duress, was quite valid.”
“The blood of binding,” murmured Doreen.
“Hmm?”
“That’s what Mario called it. The blood of binding.”
“That’s another name. One thing about legends, they tend not to agree in exact detail. The truth behind them, well, that is another thing entirely. So, then. What did your sire have to say?”
“He forced me to drink something called the blood of binding to swear I would help him kill Kent.” She turned and looked towards Kent. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”
Kent shrugged. “Sorry would be for if you succeeded.”
She couldn’t even say sorry to you then.
But Charles didn’t say it aloud.
“And where did the blood come from?” asked Pemberton
Doreen frowned. “I don’t know, but…”
“But you have a pretty good idea. It came from you, Miss Hammaker. A submissive vampire, whose blood holds others to oaths of submission, too. A vampire attacked me tonight, sworn to such an oath, and under compulsion told me about drinking
la sang du verité.
You—and your blood—are a danger to my people. And to me, obviously, because someone with access to your blood wants me dead.”
Not good.
He squeezed Doreen’s shoulder. But Pemberton hadn’t killed her. He was talking, and there had to be a reason for it.
Kent. He brought Kent with him. Why?
He looked up at his friend, and Kent was smiling, trying not to show it, but Charles knew him too well to be fooled. The smile was probably at the danger Doreen represented to Pemberton. Charles wasn’t sure that was much better, but at least it was one vote for Doreen’s survival.
“So you sent Mickey to kill me,” Doreen blurted into the silence.
“Mickey,” Pemberton repeated.
“Yeah. And why haven’t you killed me already now? You’ve brought enough people for the job.”
“I explained to Mr. Carlisle and Mr. Keller already that
Mickey
, as you call him, was following you for the purpose of protecting you. And the reason I don’t kill you now is because, like it or not—and I don’t like it—you’re one of my people. I don’t suppose you have a yearning for the sun?”
“No.” Doreen squeezed Charles hand.
“A pity.”
Anger rose in Charles. A lot of people in the BDSM scene felt pretty bad about the way they were wired, and he’d lost a couple of friends to suicide. He always wondered if a word here or there would have saved them, or if a word someone had uttered, somewhere along the line, had pushed them over the edge. “Look, whether you care to admit or not, Mickey did try to kill her, less than an hour ago,” Charles told Pemberton, keeping the anger from his voice.
The suddenness with which Pemberton turned his gaze to him and rolled into his mind startled him.
Oh my god, I’m lost.
“Tell me all about it,” Pemberton said.
Charles knew it wasn’t a good idea to tell Pemberton that Doreen had killed Mickey. After all, killing another vampire could put her beyond the protection of the laws of the vampires. But it didn’t matter. He found himself talking, words tumbling after themselves in their eagerness to be said, describing every detail of the fight, from the length of Doreen’s heels to the faint scent of magic about Mickey.
The blood. Mickey was controlled by the magic surrounding the blood, transformed by the mage who had gotten away from them in the basement of the Georgetown house.
But Pemberton hadn’t asked for his opinion, just the facts.
“Let him go,” he heard Kent say.
“Don’t even think it, Mr. Carlisle. I’ve agreed to let you and yours alone, but I will protect my people, and you are not in charge here. I need to know, and I need to have confidence in my information. So Mr. Keller has some magical ability, hmm? Something gives me the feeling you knew and have been leaving it out of our conversations. Tell me, Mr. Keller, is anyone here under some magical influence?”
Charles looked around and gave the only answer he could give. He wouldn’t have thought about lying anyway, if it were not for the galling fact he couldn’t. “No.”
Two vampires had moved next to Kent, clearly ready to take him down if he moved. Another couple had moved near Doreen, whose lips had tightened in anger. He couldn’t do a thing. Pemberton had moved into his mind, and he was just a bystander. He tried to push him out, and failed. He caught a glimpse of something in the process, though, and he probed Pemberton’s presence more gently, trying to bring it to clarity.
Pemberton was telling the truth. He hadn’t sent Mickey for any reason other than to protect Doreen. Pemberton didn’t want to kill Doreen outright, but he was trying to see if he could goad her into attacking, because that would give him the right to if he had to. Pemberton was trying to decide if Charles was useful. And while he hid it from his fellow vampires, Pemberton would die rather than fail to protect his fellow vampires. And he had now noticed that Charles could read his mind across the connection as easily as Pemberton could read Charles’.
Suddenly Pemberton drew back, and Charles mind was clear. The vampire lord laughed. “So, you have claws after all, Mr. Keller. Very interesting. I won’t be doing
that
again.”
Charles wanted to ask him if he was sure and locked gazes with Pemberton again. But he’d become aware of something else; Pemberton’s position was not exactly secure. There were people in the room who would be happy to see him dead or deposed, and his rule depended to a small degree on the love of his subjects and, to a much larger degree, on their fear. He was pretty sure the vampires could have a worse leader, and challenging him in front of his people was not going to help matters. So he gave Doreen’s shoulder another squeeze.
“It’s all right,” he murmured. He kept his gaze averted from the vampire lord.
“So, Mr. Keller, is Miss Hammaker’s blood itself magical?”
“Not inside her body it’s not.”
Pemberton smiled. “Shall we take a little out and do another check?”
Charles didn’t like the vampire’s smile one bit. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“So, in your considered opinion, something has to be done to the blood to give it the power it possesses?”
My opinion. I find out a day ago I can do a little magic given the right props, and now I’m an expert?
But Mario had access to her blood over a long time, and he’d used it only once in Doreen’s memory. She couldn’t know about all the occasions he might have used his “blood of binding,” but Mario had gone to kill Kent with only three people. Couldn’t he have gotten an army? Two vampires had been turned to the other side in the last twenty-four hours. Mario would have gotten more force if he’d been able to. So Mario was probably dependent on someone else to change the blood for him. “Yes. Something magical.”
“And is it something you can do, Charles?”
All eyes were on him; he could feel the weight of the stares of a dozen vampires. His own gaze had risen naturally to Pemberton’s face again, and the lord of the vampires shook his head almost imperceptibly. He realized then if he said yes he was a dead man. Vampires wouldn’t want a mortal to have power over them.
“No. I don’t know how, nor am I close to knowing how.”
Pemberton smiled. “Well then, we can’t use that against them. But we do have something. From what my attacker told me once, he was subdued, and the blood they took isn’t going as far as they wanted it to. So they’ll want more.”
That didn’t sound like good news to Charles at all.
“This means we have one of the key elements to a good trap. We have bait.” Pemberton nodded at Doreen. “Lucky us.”
“Yeah. Lucky,” replied Doreen.
They spent the rest of the evening planning, and Charles wished they’d been able to come up with a better plan. They all agreed, that from what they knew about the original break-in to Doreen’s apartment, it was almost certainly the same mages who kidnapped her at Dark Xanadu. They hadn’t, as far as anyone knew, tracked her to Charles’ place, so if they were looking to pick up her trail, Dark Xanadu and Doreen’s apartment were the places to let them do it. By night, Pemberton could keep a slew of vampires nearby, but as it neared dawn, they all needed to go find shelter.
The problem was daytime. The mages themselves, especially if there was more than the one still alive, could do whatever they liked in the day. Carla had left Dark Xanadu after the raid on the house in Georgetown, so they had to assume they were dealing with Carla, if Carla was her real name, and “John”; whether Carla could do magic or was just a lackey, they didn’t know. Possibly they could get others. Did the blood of binding work on humans? Charles didn’t have any clue, and the vampire legends among them didn’t say. He supposed they had less exotic ways of making humans do their will.
But Pemberton had connections. In the end, they’d agreed to have Doreen stay the night and day at his place, so they could make sure everything was set. The rest of the week she’d spend at her apartment, and if that didn’t entice an attack, she’d go to Dark Xanadu with Charles on Friday evening. By night, she would be watched by the vampires; during the day, four discreetly well-armed ex-Navy SEALs would be guarding her apartment. Charles, Kent, and “the wolf” as Pemberton called Brennan, could come and go as they wished during the day.
“He doesn’t know who the wolf is,” Kent told him quietly at one point. “So don’t enlighten him.”
Pemberton glanced over their way. Charles was pretty sure he could hear even what Kent whispered. So he nodded silently and made a mental note not to whisper secrets around vampires.
“You okay, hon?” he asked Doreen once the vampires were safely away, watching the house from outside.
Doreen nodded. “Seems like a lot of fuss over me. But I guess what he really wants is to catch the mages.”
“Yep,” said Charles. “Gotta take out the bad guys before you can feel safe.”
“I’ll never feel really safe, Charles. Not for long. It’s not because I’m a vampire now. It’s because I realize how dangerous it really is out there. And who are the bad guys, really? The vampires or those who want to kill them?”
“Maybe a bit of both. But you’re worth saving, Doreen. And I don’t think the mage—John—wants to kill or control vampires out of the goodness of his heart. He’s after something bigger, and the vamps are in the way. Given the power in this city of the purely mortal variety, I don’t think we can let him get his way.”
“They both think I’d be better off dead. Mickey wasn’t looking to capture me. He was trying to kill me.”
Charles digested that. She hadn’t brought it up during the planning, and he could see why. If Pemberton thought the mages wanted to kill Doreen, rather than get more blood, he’d have been tempted to let them. But if the mages wanted her dead, then Doreen was some danger to them or their plans. The attack on Pemberton was sensible enough, as he was presumably the most powerful of the vampires, but Doreen, by rights, should have been one of the weakest. No, something special about Doreen made her a danger.
There was a lot special about Doreen, actually. He smiled at the thought. He loved her curves and her submissive heart, but there was more. Her strength was part of it, too. There was a fine line between BDSM and abuse, and it all depended on the informed and sane consent of the submissive. He’d never had much taste for games where the sub yelled “no”, and because she didn’t use her safe word, the Dom was supposed to continue anyway. He’d seen Doms treat a safe word as the refuge of the weak-willed and mock subs for using it, and he’d always been careful not to.