Midnight's Daughter (6 page)

“You’re telling me these crates contain booze?”

“Booze.” He rolled the word over his tongue as if he liked the sound. “Yes, I remember that one. And ‘giggle water,’ and ‘hair of the dog’ and, my personal favorite, ‘hooch.’ ” I stared, both at the oddity of hearing those words in his accent and for the realization that some of the slang wasn’t exactly current. I scowled. Thank you, Mircea. If Louis-Cesare’s knowledge of the rest of the country was as archaic, he was going to be just a huge help.

Before I could comment, there was an unearthly wail from upstairs. After a start, I identified it as both of Pip’s cats suddenly deciding to mew in unison. I told Louis-Cesare to help himself—Claire had crates of the stuff—and ran upstairs to find the two miscreants sitting in the bay window, screeching steadily.

“Cut it out!” They ignored me as usual. “No tuna for either of you for a week,” I warned. “You’ll eat dry food and like it.” The threat had no discernible effect, and I decided that a little rough love was in order.

I’d reached out to snatch Jackanapes by the scruff of the neck when a face suddenly appeared in the window. Ancient pewter eyes, clear and cold as spears of ice, met mine. I stared at the handsome face, but made no move to let my visitor in. Unlike the Dark, who tend to populate the same corners of the world where I frequently hang out, the Light Fey are rarely seen. And it usually isn’t a good thing when they do show up.

When another alabaster face joined the first, my unrest turned into something darker. I felt rather than heard Louis-Cesare come up behind me. “We have company,” I said unnecessarily.

A third Fey joined the others in my front yard. He caught the eye the way a newly drawn sword does—beautiful and deadly. His hair was the same cold, bright mantle as the others, and he was dressed similarly in nondescript gray. So how did I know he was the leader? It might have had something to do with the power that hit me, even through the wards, like a slap in the face.

“Send out the half-breed, vampire.” The leader’s voice was musical, with an odd lilting accent.

Louis-Cesare caught me by the wrist, keeping me from retrieving a little present for our guests from my pack. “What do you want with her?” he demanded. I struggled against his grip and found myself unable to break it. That was getting old, fast.

The Fey ignored the question. “We have no quarrel with you. Do not give us one. Send out the half-breed or we will come in and take her.”

“Let go of me,” I told Louis-Cesare quietly. I had no idea why the Fey were so interested in me, but if they wanted a fight, I’d be more than happy to give them one.

Instead of answering, Louis-Cesare increased the pressure on my wrist until I dropped the weapon. He bent his head until his lips found my ear, and even then, his words were so soft that I felt more than heard them. “The Fey are neutral in the war. I believe Lord Mircea would prefer to keep them so.”

“That’s his problem,” I said in a normal voice. I didn’t give a damn if the Fey heard me or not. I smiled at the leader. “I’ve always wondered what color you bleed. What say we find out?”

I didn’t get a verbal answer, but the fist he raised to smash my window was clear enough. So was the response to the assault by the house, which didn’t like trespassers any more than I did. The offending Fey ended up in the branches of a mulberry bush, halfway across the yard, an expression of slight surprise on his face. His companions did nothing, but their very stillness seemed a threat, especially when their eyes swiveled in unison back to us, silent and unreadable. The cats screeched on.

Louis-Cesare abruptly turned and headed for the hall, dragging me with him. I didn’t resist because I thought he was about to help me teach the Fey a lesson about name-calling. He stopped just inside the kitchen, and we both stared at the pale face that had appeared in the glass pane of the back door. “Is there another way out?”

“Let go of me and I’ll clear this one,” I told him irritably. I would complain—forcefully—at another time about being dragged about like a doll, but for the moment I preferred to save my strength for fighting Fey.

“Answer the question!”

“The front is impassable.” It had long been blocked by heaps of crumbling furniture that Claire wanted gone but that the house seemed to like exactly where it was. After a lengthy struggle, they had reached a compromise: the furniture stayed, and she kept the door to the entranceway closed so we didn’t have to look at it.

“There are no hidden ways?”

“No.” I managed to swing my pack around to where I could reach the contents with my left hand. The sound of shattering glass let me know that someone had figured out how to get past the ward on the living room window. “Except for the portals,” I added.

“Like the one at the foot of the stairs.”

“Yes. There’s another in the pantry. Claire and I use it to take out the trash the easy way. It lets out in back. And there’s one in the cellar.” I stuffed weapons into easily accessible inner pockets of my jacket, and grabbed a kitchen cleaver for good measure. “I’d take the one in the pantry if I were you.”

I started for the hall, but my collar suddenly bit into my throat and I was yanked back against an unyielding chest. “You are not going to attack the Fey,” Louis-Cesare informed me tersely.

I jerked away from him, glaring. We were going to have to talk about personal space. “That’s not your call.”

The sound of splintering wood whipped me around to see the Fey breaking through the ward on the kitchen door. He looked a little frazzled, with all that silver hair a crackling nimbus about his impassive face, but he was still standing. A second later a sword appeared in his hand as if by magic, which it probably was.

Louis-Cesare plucked the cleaver out of my hand and got a grip on the back of my jacket, pulling me off my feet like an unruly kitten. I dangled there, torn between outrage and discomfort, unable to do much about the interloper. Luckily, the house took care of the problem, deluging him with a hail of pots, pans and kitchen utensils. He staggered backward and fell into the demon hole, which contracted around one of his legs, trapping him. Another Fey, a newcomer with long black hair, appeared behind his shoulder and began trying to tug him out, while two more slipped past him. The last thing I saw before the door to the hall swung shut was the ancient iron stove advancing on them menacingly.

Louis-Cesare headed back toward the living room with me in tow. “I’m not a member of the goddamned Senate!” I said, tugging backward for all I was worth. “I’m not starting a war. “I’m defending private property!”

“You are a member of Lord Mircea’s household and your actions reflect on him.”

I grabbed the edge of the lintel over the living room door and held on for dear life. One of the silver-haired Fey was still at the bay window, muttering something under his breath. It might have been a spell, or a string of expletives. The window’s jagged glass shards had formed themselves into a mouth that appeared to be trying to eat the arm he’d thrust through it. I looked for the leader, but he was no longer sticking out of the bush.

“Dorina—,” Louis-Cesare began warningly.

“I am not letting them trash Claire’s house!” I told him furiously, kicking out with my feet.

He caught my legs and gave a yank. The lintel came off in my hands, along with a good chunk of plaster, and I hit the floor with a thud. He grabbed me before I could scramble away, and dragged me to within an inch of his face. “You will do as you are told. We will inform the Senate of this and demand an explanation from the Fey. But we will not start a war!” With that, he threw me unceremoniously over his shoulder.

I beat on his back, but it was like hitting concrete. He made it to the cellar stairs, but I braced my feet against the sides of the wall, blocking him from going down. “Listen, you crazy son of a bitch! Claire and I sent things through that portal, trying to figure out where it went, but we never found any of them again. What if her bootlegger uncle linked it to an incinerator somewhere? Or a deep pit in the sea? The cellar was his workshop—he might have needed a fast way to dispose of unstable mixes!”

“Why did you not mention this before?” Louis-Cesare demanded.

“I didn’t know you planned to run before!”

I’m not sure if it was my argument that halted the stubborn vamp or the deep growl, like that of an angry tiger, that suddenly replaced all the caterwauling. It echoed around the room loud enough to jar the china figurines on the mantel and to vibrate through the soles of my shoes. I jerked my head around to see an enormous white cat appear out of nowhere to swipe a paw the size of a sofa cushion at the Fey who was crawling through the window. I stared at the oddly fluffy creature as I was carried back toward the hallway again. It had a small blue ribbon dangling off one giant ear. Miss Priss had been wearing one just like it.

Another oversized feline, black with familiar green eyes, swished a massive tail and the hall door slammed shut behind us. The sounds of a giant cat fight joined the racket caused by screeching metal and loudly ricocheting kitchen implements. It sounded like a small war was taking place on either side of us, with much hissing and yowling and bumping of large objects.

“Where is the pantry?” Louis-Cesare’s voice was calm, but a muscle worked in his jaw.

“Put me down and I’ll show you.”

He ignored me. With both doors closed and a broken overhead light socket, the hall was almost as dark as the cellar, but he moved easily, managing to avoid the doily-covered tables and hard-edged chairs the house insisted on keeping in the narrow corridor. He found the pantry door on his own, probably by smell.

“Where is the portal?”

When I didn’t answer, the hand on my butt tightened painfully. “It’s camouflaged as the third set of shelves to the right,” I said resentfully. “You’ll feel a tingle as soon as you get close.”

Mages skim along the top of ley lines all the time, using them like their personal superhighway for fast, unobstructed travel. But portals are a little trickier. They actually permeate the ley line itself, forming an energy sink that propels the user into the no-man’s-land between realities before spitting them out the other side. Sometimes that’s a few yards away; sometimes it’s in another world. Because they take so much power, portals are pretty rare, and most people are a little nervous about entering one. Assuming he’d need to work up his courage, I’d planned to escape as soon as Louis-Cesare put me down. But the damned vamp dove in headfirst.

For a second, I was caught up in a maelstrom of activity—energy hummed inside my bones, sound roared in my ears and a swirl of colors flashed before my eyes too swiftly to sort out. Then I was bouncing on something soft and damp and odorous, bits of which clung wetly to my fingers. Once the world stopped spinning, I identified it as the sauerkraut I’d just cleaned out of the fridge. Damn—I’d forgotten that Claire had started a compost heap.

Before I’d even gotten my feet under me, a couple of Fey were rounding the house like silver blurs. My face was forced into the kraut by a strong hand, so I felt rather than saw the curse fly overhead. It burst against the trunk of an oak a yard behind us, causing it to catch fire and explode outward. One of the burning bits of bark set a tuft of compost in front of my nose alight.

Louis-Cesare released me, and I bounced up with a snarl. “OK. That’s it.” I grabbed a very illegal weapon from my jacket, but didn’t get a chance to use it. An arm circled my waist and suddenly we were airborne. It took a moment to realize that he had actually jumped the six-foot fence separating Claire’s house from the one next door. We landed in Mr. Basso’s flower bed, Louis-Cesare hitting the ground first and rolling to take the impact.

“You have my word that the Senate will reimburse your friend for any damage,” he hissed in my ear as I struggled to my feet. “Now, must I carry you from here?”

A Fey appeared on top of the fence, and another jumped over it with the easy grace of a leaping deer. Neither was the leader, and either they didn’t speak English or they weren’t feeling chatty. I silently opened a palm to show them the small black orb I carried.

Louis-Cesare had drawn his sword and begun backing toward the Senate’s car, a BMW four-door. The driver must have figured out that something was wrong, because I heard the engine crank to life behind us. The Fey didn’t so much as glance at Louis-Cesare’s nice, shiny rapier. Their eyes never left the dislocator in my hand.

We reached the car and Louis-Cesare stuffed me in ahead of him. He hadn’t even shut the door before the driver was tearing away from the curb, tires screaming. I twisted around in time to see the leader join the other two. Our eyes met, and his seemed to have darkened. They looked almost inky now, black as the deepest part of the sea, and as pitiless.

His power flowed after us, filling the air like a clammy fog. It took the form of a human hand, shimmering with the gases that formed it like a glittering shroud. I got the definite impression that it would be a very bad thing if it caught us. It wasn’t even at the car yet, but I could feel the coldness of it, a chill that reached all the way to my bones. I could sense its intent—to search, to find, to kill. It flowed over a flowering shrub, frost furling the leaves like autumn had come in a moment. And when it passed on, there was nothing left behind but dried sticks and fallen petals.

One insubstantial finger barely touched the bumper of the car, and I was suddenly engulfed by a chill so great I would have thrown myself into a fire had one been available. In a heartbeat, it made me certain that warmth would never come again, that I would never do anything but shiver and watch ice creep farther along my bones. So cold.

Strong hands seized me, jerking me across the seat, and lips pressed to mine. Warmth suffused my mouth and began to spread, pushing against the chill shuddering through my body. I came back to myself with a jolt, looking into Louis-Cesare’s worried face, as the driver floored the gas pedal. We rocketed through Claire’s normally quiet neighborhood like all the hounds of hell were after us, outracing ancient magic with a lot of modern German engineering. I clutched Louis-Cesare’s shoulders and shuddered with just the memory of that deadly touch. What had I gotten myself into now?