Even Vampires Get the Blues (7 page)

“In your dreams,” I muttered to myself, half annoyed with his arrogant attitude, half aroused just by the thought of sleeping with him.

“We'll explore fantasy role-playing later,” he said, and I spent a long time after that wondering just what his grin meant.

The remainder of the drive to Paen's home was anticlimactic (literally, but we won't go there). I was momentarily surprised to see that the castle I had astrally visited was his.

“It's just like I saw when I was floating around,” I said as he drove across a long causeway that connected a tiny little island with land. “I had no idea you lived in a castle. Wow. It's really impressive. It's . . . er . . . not haunted or anything, is it?”

“Haunted?” Paen frowned. “Why do you think it would be haunted?”

“Aren't most castles?”

“Mine isn't.”

“Oh. How old is it?”

He spent the time it took us to circle around the castle to a parking area at the back to give me a quick history of the place. By the time he escorted me into the main building, I knew it was approximately six hundred years old, had been inherited by his father via his grandmother's mortal family, and although it was beset with a dampness issue that no amount of
modern technology could seem to fix, it housed nothing more extraordinary than a family of vampires.

Which, I suppose, was pretty extraordinary when you considered it.

“How many people does it take to keep up a castle?” I asked as he walked me through a huge hall.

“We have a day staff of four—two inside, and two outdoors.”

“Ah. And nighttime?”

“None of the staff remains after dark,” he answered, shooting me an unreadable look.

“Oh, right. That's when you guys do your thing.” I stopped for a moment and looked at Paen. He turned back to see what was keeping me. “Do you miss the daylight?”

A tiny little frown wrinkled his brow. “Miss it? What do you mean?”

“Well, you're up at night rather than day. I wondered if you missed it.”

“I am up no later than noon each day,” he answered, looking oddly hurt. “I keep late hours, yes, but I assure you that I don't spend my life in darkness.”

“Oh. I thought all vamps were nighttime only. So you don't miss being able to go outside in the sun? You don't . . . you know, brood about being a Dark One, not being able to do things other people can do?”

“Good lord, no. I don't brood about anything. I am perfectly happy being what and who I am,” he said, giving me a mildly annoyed look. “To do otherwise would be a waste of time.”

“But . . . you have no soul,” I said, following him through a door. “I may not have been around any
Dark Ones before, but even I can tell there's something missing in you. It's like your insides are made of ice. Doesn't that bother you?”

“Not at all. I may lack a soul, but I have not allowed that to hinder me in any way,” he said, turning to wave a hand around the room. “You said you wanted to see the house. This is the library. My father is seldom home to use it, so it's really my room.”

“It's lovely. Very comfortable,” I said, looking around. It was a typical room of its sort—floor-to-ceiling bookcases lining two walls, dark leather furniture gathered around a fireplace, long, heavy (assumedly light-inhibiting) curtains framing huge windows and a pair of French doors, and a familiar desk lurking at the opposite end of the room—familiar because this was the room my brain had zipped off to while Paen was snacking on me.

It was interesting that I had been sent to this place earlier. “Can you guys disappear?”

Paen just stared at me.

“Is that a no?” I asked.

“Yes, it's a no. Dark Ones are more or less human, Samantha. We have some integral differences, but despite popular lore, we don't shape-shift, we can't fly, and we are not able to disappear into nothing.”

“Hmm. Then who was that man at your desk? The bad one, the one who creeped me out so much?”

He looked startled for a moment. “What man?”

“The one I saw while you were sucking down Vintage Sam. There was a man at your desk, poking around in things. I assumed it was his own. He seemed to hear me, though, and then I could have sworn he saw me, which is impossible. He seemed
threatening somehow. I'm so glad you pulled me back before he had time to . . .”

“To what?” Paen asked, quickly examining his desk.

“I don't know. Something bad.” I moved closer to the desk, looking hard at it like it would spill whatever secrets it kept.

“Why would someone want to harm you?”

“No idea. I haven't been in the business long enough to have jealous rivals, and we just got our first and second cases today, so it's not a pissy client or something. What are you doing?”

“Looking to see if anything has been disturbed,” Paen said, checking the computer. “I don't see anything missing.”

“Maybe he didn't find what he came for,” I suggested.

“That, or he was looking for information rather than an object,” Paen answered, tidying up some papers. “We won't know that unless you see the man again. Unless you can . . .” He waved a hand over the table, one eyebrow cocked in question.

I held out my hands over the table, but didn't get the slightest inkling of anything untoward. “Sorry. That's not really my forte.”

He grunted a noncommittal response as he shoved some papers into a leather attaché. I used the moment to get a better look around the room. I wandered down a line of bookcases, noting a few empty shelves. “Is this the room where the statue had been kept?”

“No.”

I waited a moment for Paen to elucidate, but he just shucked his coat, held out a hand for my jacket,
then went back to the desk to check the answering machine for messages.

“All righty,” I said, looking around the room again, trying to orient myself. “Where was it kept? If you take me there, maybe I can pick up some information about it.”

He stopped frowning at the answering machine and frowned at me instead. “That's what
you're
here to do—find it. I have no idea where it was kept.”

“Why do I think there's more to this statue thing than you're telling me?” I asked, taking a seat on a chair next to his desk. “You don't know what it looks like, don't know when it was stolen from your family's castle, don't even know where it was kept . . . Nope. Not adding up. Why don't you tell me the whole story?”

He stood silent for a moment.
I don't know if I can trust you.

Of course you can. I'm eminently trustworthy, just ask anyone. Besides, we're going to sleep together. Even you, Mr. No Emotional Commitment, must have some level of trust you are willing to grant to a sexual partner.

Paen's jaw slackened for a moment as a look of absolute surprise filled his lovely silver eyes. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”
Talk to you without actually speaking aloud?

He stared at me as if I was an escapee from a freak show. “Yes.”

“I'm not quite sure,” I said, shrugging. “I could hear you, so I figured the reverse might be possible if I thought at you. Evidently it is. Are Dark Ones usually telepathic like that?”

His eyes widened for a moment before narrowing. “No, they are not. Not without some connection, usually a close blood relationship.”

“Oh, so you can talk to Finn that way?”

“My brothers, yes. But not others,” he answered, moving behind the desk. I got the distinct feeling he was uneasy, as if he was avoiding something. “About the statue—it has been demanded as payment to the demon lord Oriens. I have five days to find it, or a horrible penalty will be placed upon my family.”

“What penalty?” I asked, feeling nosy, but needing to know everything there was to know about the statue and its history.

He toyed with a pen for a moment. “My mother's soul will be forfeited.”

“Ouch. OK, so we need to find this statue in five days. That's an impossibly short amount of time to find anything, but I'll give it my utmost attention.” I rubbed my chin as I thought. “Does anyone in your family know anything about it?”

“Assumedly my parents do, but they are on a research trip in an uninhabited forest in Bolivia, and thus are out of communication for the next month or so.”

“Can't you do the brain thing with them?”

“No.” His lips got a wry twist to them for a few seconds. “When I was a child I could, but now I can only do the
brain thing
, as you call it, with my brothers.”

“Hmm.” I rubbed my chin some more. “Can they do it with your parents?”

“Not anymore. Like me, they lost the ability when they reached adulthood.”

“Huh. Weird. I'd have thought once you had it, you had it forever.”

Paen made an exasperated tsking noise. “I appreciate you wishing to know all that there is to know about my family and our relationship to the statue, but shouldn't you get on with finding it? That is your job.”

“Yes, but as I told you before, I'm not a Diviner. It's not just a matter of me consulting the higher spirits and asking where the statue is now.”

“You may not be a Diviner, but you have elf blood, and you are talented in finding objects—or so you said.”

“Hey now, no slurs,” I said, getting up to pace the length of the room. “I
am
good at finding things. Better even than my mother, and she's nothing to sneeze at in the locating department. But every little bit of information I can get helps narrow down the search. Since you don't know anything else . . . well, we'll just do this logically.”

“What are you doing?” Paen asked, coming over to where I was stretching out on the carpet.

“I'm going to open myself up to the castle, and let my consciousness roam the hallways, looking for signs of the statue.”

“You intend to search for the statue while lying on the floor?”

“Sure. My mother does it artistically arranged on a fainting couch, but whenever I try that I get a case of the giggles, so I just use the plain old floor.”

He stood over me, his hands on his hips, glowering. I smiled up at him.
You really are handsome, you know? If you weren't so messed up about relationships, I might go for you.

“Stop that.”

Stop what, this?

“Yes. I don't like it.”

I could feel how uncomfortable it was making him, so I didn't continue, although I couldn't help but ask why. “All right. But why does me doing that bother you so much?”

He glowered some more at me, and ignored my question. “Why are you trying to find the statue here? I told you it was stolen. Why aren't you using your powers to locate it?”

“I'm looking here first because you don't know for a fact that it was stolen.”

“It has to have been stolen. I know every inch of this castle, and there are no monkey statues anywhere.”

“It could be hidden,” I pointed out, admiring for a moment the gloss on his shoes. “Until we rule out absolutely that it's not here somewhere, it doesn't make sense to search elsewhere.”

“Doubtful.”

I sighed, closed my eyes, and crossed my arms over my chest. “Shoo.”

“What?” Disbelief was rife in his voice.

“Shoo. Go away. Leave me alone so I can work.”

“You're shooing me from my own library?”

“Yes.” I uncrossed my arms to make shooing motions, peeking at him through barely opened eyes. He looked outraged at the thought of me telling him what to do. “If you're not going to be quiet and let me concentrate, you have to leave.”

He drew himself up, not that he wasn't impressive enough before. Now he positively loomed over me. “I will not be shooed from my own room.”

“Fine, then. Just give me a little quiet so I can focus and do the mental thing.”

The leather couch sighed softly as he sat a few feet away from me. “I thought you said you could only do the astral projection when you were aroused?”

“I can. But this isn't astral projection—I'm just opening myself up to the castle and touching its awareness. My mind will send out little tendrils to wander around, but my consciousness will remain here.”

“Mind tendrils? That sounds stranger than anything I've ever heard of, even sexually driven astral projection.”

I laughed and opened my eyes long enough to grin at him. “Yes, it is a bit weird, huh? But it works.”

The only sound in the room for the next few minutes was of the central heating kicking in and blowing warm air through a grate on the floor near me. I let myself relax, pushed down my brain's desire to think about Paen, and slowly allowed the essentia of the castle to sink into my body.

Every building has an essentia. It's the essence of existence, similar to the souls of living beings, a collection of emotions and thoughts that have been imbued upon its structure and pulled from the surrounding environment. Most dwellings' essentias consist of a mixture of happiness, contentment, and sorrow, as collected over the years from the people who've lived in them. I've only once encountered a place that had a bad essentia, but most places, like this castle, were an assortment of emotions, most good, a few bad, but nothing unexpected.