Crimson Death (5 page)

“I always do.” He hung up. I hung up. We were done. We could go back to bed for a couple of hours.

I opened the door for Micah. He was one of the men in my life who
didn't argue over which of us got the door. I valued that, because sometimes you just want to open the damn door. We were in the corridor and it was just as empty as it had been an hour and a half ago. We all mostly worked nights here, so six or seven a.m. wasn't a time that any of us expected to be awake to enjoy.

“Do you think the smallest bite is a child vampire?”

“I really hope not.”

“Why?”

“I've told you this before. All the child vampires go crazy eventually. Jean-Claude says that some of them go nuts immediately after rising from the dead. They just never adjust to it.”

We had a couple of child vamps that we'd inherited from Europe. They were both constant reminders of why it was a bad idea.

“At least Bartolome is old enough for everything to function like a grown-up,” Micah said.

“Yeah, but he still looks eleven to twelve, a young twelve.”

“Valentina is worse,” he said.

I nodded. “Five to seven years old forever.”

“Her mind isn't the mind of a child,” he said.

“Just her body. I know.”

“I know the other vampires killed the one who made Valentina, but it didn't really save her,” he said.

I took his hand in mine and said, “I really hope that she's the youngest vamp I ever meet.”

“She's older than Jean-Claude.”

“Her body isn't,” I said.

I prayed that the vampires in Ireland were just female with small bite radiuses. I prayed that no one was creating more child vampires, because if any vampires were damned, it was them. Please, God, no more.

W
HEN WE WOKE
for the night, Jean-Claude informed me that there had always been vampires in Ireland, and in fact we had a vampire from there in town. Which was why I was sitting in a very model of a modern business office waiting to talk to our Irish vampire, who wasn't actually Irish at all. He'd just died there. The office at Danse Macabre had once been Jean-Claude's; it had been black and white with an Oriental rug and a framed antique Japanese kimono on the wall. Jean-Claude's things left when he started to be too busy to manage all of his businesses. Damian became manager; he was good at it, but the office was so bland that I'd have never believed the person who decorated this room would be theatrical enough to run Danse Macabre, which showed what I understood about such things, or maybe Jean-Claude had spoiled me. He was theatrical about most things.

The office chairs matched the desk, all pale wood and neutral, as if they'd all been bought at the same time and were a matched set, which they had been and were, but somehow the red-haired, green-eyed vampire with his milk pale skin and six feet of ex–Viking warrior looked too exotic to be in this Office Depot–designed room. He needed Victorian furniture, antiques, rich dark colors to complement him, but instead the entire room was so normal it could have been any manager's office in almost any business across America, except for the vampire in the room and me. We were both too colorful for the beige walls and pale wood. Him in his green frock coat, skintight pants, and knee-high boots. Me in my royal-blue business skirt-suit, the skirt a little too short for a lot of businesses, but at five-three a longer skirt made me look even shorter. Besides, I had a date later with Jean-Claude and I might not have time to change before I had to meet everyone for the talky bit beforehand.

Damian had actually requested a meeting so we could talk about something that was bothering him before I knew he might have insight into the case Edward was working on in Ireland. I'd come prepared to hear his problem first, but he seemed reluctant to talk about whatever was bothering him. Fine, we'd talk about crime and vampires first, personal issues second.

“There have always been vampires in Ireland, Anita, or at least for the last thousand years, because that's when She-Who-Made-Me turned me into one, and she'd been there in her castle on the cliffs long before I tried to steal her gold and jewels.”

“Then how come the humans didn't know about her?”

“You know as well as I do that if a vampire is careful, he can take a little blood from one person, and a little from another the next night. Our stomachs can't even hold the quantity of blood in an adult human being's body, so there's absolutely no reason to kill your blood donors.”

“Unless you want to make them into vampires,” I said.

“Or you're a sadistic serial killer who just happens to be a vampire,” he said.

“You've told me that She-Who-Made-You is exactly that.”

He nodded, staring at his hands where he'd spread them on the pale wood of his desk. “Yes.”

“Then how did the human authorities miss a serial killer all that time?”

“You have to remember the times she began her . . . career in, Anita. People vanished all the time. They died young and tragically. Life expectancy was less than forty years and most died much younger than that. By forty, people were usually grandparents, or even great-grandparents.”

“At forty?” I said.

He smiled. “The look on your face is priceless, and yes, at forty. Ireland has had a bloody history and a lot of battles fought especially since 1170 when the Normans invaded and stayed. It's so easy to disappear someone when there's a battle close at hand. Then there're displaced people trying to escape from the fighting. No one questions if they don't turn up at the next town, or a relative's house, or rather they
assume that the enemy killed them or took them prisoner. It can be months or years before they finally learn that no one knows what happened to them, and by that time it's too late. The jail in the town was a place where people died of disease and starvation. No one ever questioned if they died a little quicker, and the jailer didn't give a damn as long as the dead prisoner was one of the ones who hadn't been able to pay him for better care.”

“So you're saying I just don't understand how easy it was to kill people back in the day.”

“Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying.”

“But it's not the olden days now, Damian. How have she and her kiss of vampires gotten away with it in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries? People freak out if someone is late sending them a text. It's not so easy to disappear a person now.”

“It's harder now, much harder, but not impossible, Anita. You're a U.S. Marshal. You know better than I do how modern killers work. You've worked enough serial killer cases here in the United States to know just how good people can be at getting victims and hiding the bodies. And that's human serial killers. Think how much better they would get if they'd had centuries to perfect their techniques.”

“I've worked cases where the perp wasn't human.”

“I know that, but my point is still valid.”

“How many vampires were there in your group?”

“It was small, but then we were hiding. The more vampires you have, the harder it is to feed and stay undetected.”

“I get that, but how small is small?”

“Never more than a dozen vampires, and usually less. We were harder to hide than the humans and shapeshifters that were part of her retinue.”

“One of the reasons that vampires have human servants and
moitié bêtes,
beast halves, is that they can both move around better in daylight than their vampire master,” I said.

“She-Who-Made-Me could walk in daylight.”

“That's right. I'm sorry. It's such a rare ability that I forgot.”

“Perrin and I were the only two of her vampires that were able to live in the light, even holding her hand. All the others that she'd tried
to take for a walk in the sunlight had burst into flames and died, while she laughed at them. It was an envoy from the vampire council that suggested the evil thought that made her risk burning both of us alive.”

I'd literally shared the memory with Damian once, and I didn't want to do it again, so I said the words. “He said, ‘Perhaps the reason they can walk out with you in the sun is not you sharing power with them'”—and Damian joined his voice to mine, so we finished the speech together—“‘but that they have gained power of their own, to sun-walk.'”

We looked at each other. “I really wish we didn't keep sharing the worst of each other's memories, Anita.”

“Yeah, why can't either of us remember puppies and rainbows when we go all vampire and master?”

“I never owned a puppy,” he said.

“I did.”

“Oh right, the dog died when you were thirteen or fourteen, and then the dog rose from the dead and came home to crawl into bed with you.”

“Okay, maybe not puppies, maybe just rainbows,” I said.

“Sharing good memories would be better, but you're the master here, not me, so your wishes dictate the nature of our relationship.”

“Are you saying if I can't find my happy thoughts, then none of us can?”

“When we share memories, apparently so.”

“I'll talk to my therapist about trying for more cheerful memories.”

“Is it helping? The therapist, I mean.”

I thought about it, then nodded. “I think it is.”

“What made you decide to finally see a full-fledged therapist? I know you were getting some informal counseling from the witch that works with the werewolf pack in Tennessee.”

He was right. I'd been doing a little therapy while I was learning to control my metaphysical abilities with my magical mentor, Marianne. I was still seeing her from time to time. Nathaniel and Micah had both gone with me, because I wasn't the only one who needed to ask someone more knowledgeable about “magic,” but real hard-core therapy wasn't Marianne's job.

“Oh, I don't know: my mother's death when I was eight; my father's remarriage to a woman who had problems with me being half Mexican and ruining her blond, blue-eyed family picture.”

“Which means you don't want to tell me, because you give almost no emotion to any of that,” he said, looking at me very directly out of those greenest of green eyes. They really were the purest green eyes I'd ever seen in a human face. Hell, I'd only seen a few domestic cats with eyes that green. He swore they'd been the same color when he'd been alive.

“When I go too long without talking directly to you, I forget how impossibly green your eyes are.”

“Which means you really don't want to tell me why you started therapy.”

“What, I can't compliment you?”

“First, I'm not sure that was a compliment. Second, you almost never compliment me, so yes, it's a distraction technique for you, though your best distraction is what you started with: trot out your tragic family history and most people would leave you alone about it.”

I gave him an unfriendly look. “If you know I don't want to tell you, then why are you still pushing on it?”

“Maybe I'm thinking that if I understood why you went, I might go, too.”

“Is that why you wanted to meet? To talk about going to therapy?” I didn't try to keep the surprise off my face.

“No, but it's not a bad idea.”

“No, it's not. I think most people could use a little good therapy.”

He nodded, but more because he thought he should than because he meant it, as if he was already thinking about something else.

“What's wrong, Damian? You asked for this meeting days before I knew I needed to ask you about Ireland.”

“I'm having nightmares.”

“Vampires don't have nightmares,” I said.

“I know.”

He blinked those impossibly green eyes at me, then tucked a strand of that equally impossibly red hair behind one ear. He was so nervous that it showed in the tightness of his muscles as he moved, or tried not
to move and betray just how nervous he was. For once, I didn't need to sense anything from him to know exactly how he felt.

“How bad are the nightmares?” I asked.

“Bad enough.”

“Are they memories?”

“Some, but most of them are modern-day, and I don't recognize most of the people in them.”

“I've had dreams like that, where it's like you're guest-starring in someone else's dreams,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes, but they are violent, awful dreams.” He stared at his hands, shoulders slumping this time, as if he was beginning to hunch in upon himself. “I wake up and Cardinale is still dead, cool to the touch, and I'm burning up like a fever.”

“Vampires are hard when you have daymares,” I said.

He nodded. “I guess it is a daymare, not a nightmare.”

“Either way, when your lover is cold to the touch, they can't hold you while you scream.”

“No, she can't. She keeps saying,
Why aren't I enough for you?
But she doesn't understand.”

“You need someone there who can wake you up, hold you, be warm for you,” I said.

“Yes, I do, damn it. I do.”

“What did Jean-Claude say when you told him?”

“He doesn't know.”

“You're telling me first, before your king?”

“You're my master, Anita, not him. I'm supposed to tell you first.”

“We'll debate that later. Are you dying at dawn?”

“Sometimes, but most of the time I curl up beside Cardinale and I sleep until the nightmares wake me.”

“You should be dying at dawn, Damian.”

“Don't you think I know that? When I woke this morning I had sweat blood, Anita. It's like I have a fever, a human fever, but I sweat blood. It's like I'm sick.”

“Vampires don't get sick,” I said.

“If I'm not ill, then what is it?”

“I don't know, but first we have to tell Jean-Claude,” I said.

“And then?” He gave me a very direct look.

I met the look with one of my own. “What do you want me to say, Damian? We'll talk to Jean-Claude. Maybe I'll talk to my friend Marianne; she's a witch—maybe she'd have an idea about where to start.”

“I think this is happening because you, Nathaniel, and I almost never see each other. You're a necromancer, I'm your vampire servant, and Nathaniel is your leopard to call, but the three of us have almost no relationship.”

“You say that like it's normal for a necromancer to have a vampire servant the way a master vampire has a human servant, but it's a first in all of vampire history. The fact that I can make
moitié bêtes
like a master vampire is even weirder, because that has nothing to do with my necromancy.”

“You gain power through Jean-Claude's vampire marks, through being his human servant.”

“Yeah, but that doesn't explain everything I can do.”

“You came with your own power, Anita.”

“I'm sorry I accidentally bound you and Nathaniel into a triumvirate of power.”

“You saved my life more than once with your power, Anita; I don't regret being bound to you. The only thing I regret is that you grew closer to Nathaniel than to me.”

“You and your lady love, Cardinale, asked me to back off and let the two of you be monogamous together. I respected the request.”

“You had already fallen in love with Nathaniel, and were so not in love with me. Don't blame that on Cardinale's relationship with me.”

“I'm not, but we were lovers before you and she went monogamous.”

“You slept with me less than you sleep with Richard now.”

“Look, I'm sorry you're hurting, or scared, or sick, or whatever, but it wasn't just me that contributed to whatever is happening, or not happening, between us.”