I watched and sniffed for the men I was hunting, but it was vamp I smelled first, up close. The tang was sharp and astringent as wormwood and dusty like dried sage, remembered from the first time I saw her in her office. I knew who she was even before I heard the silky laugh that her kind can give, low and erotic, like vocal sex. She was close, her vamp power cutting like razors against my skin.

I tensed and whirled, facing away from the stage, grabbing the ends of stakes in my hair, searching with eyes and nose and band-blasted ears. Katie of Katie’s Ladies was in the crowd behind me. Watching me. I stepped her way and stopped. Taking her in. Dropping my hands from the stakes. This was a totally different Katie from the mad, zombielike, flesh-eating monster.

Her fangs were snapped back into the roof of her mouth. Her blond hair was clean and brushed, falling like a thick, solid sheet of gold around her as she undulated to the beat. She was wearing a short, teal silk sheath, so tight there was no question that she was naked beneath it. And she was sane, not vamped out, not a nutso killing machine. Her eyes glittered, holding mine, her irises a grayish hazel as she swiveled up beside me, giving that caramel liqueur, sex-on-a-stick laugh. My Beast purred. She liked the sound, she always had, and she liked Katie, in a predator-fascination kinda way. The way a big-cat reacted to cobras, staring and entranced.

Katie’s skin was flawless, pale as alabaster, but with a faint blood blush on her cheeks, indicating that she had fed well and recently. She danced her way around the men from the bar, who had found me, whooped, whistling as she matched her moves to mine. I watched her, leery of this woman, this vamp-predator-woman, being here.

I caught a whiff of Gee. And I understood. Gee had, as he said, found and fed Katie, restoring her to sanity far faster than she would have without his blood. What the heck is that guy? I nodded to the bar and mouthed over the pulsing music, “Buy you a drink?”

She mouthed back, “I’d rather drink from you.” She did a full body slither, snakelike, ending up with her chest inches from me. Power sparkled off her, electric and cutting, scalding and icy. The three men hooted and hollered.

I had stopped dancing and I shook my head, no. “Bar.”

Katie pouted, her mouth making a little moue and, vamp-fast, moved off the dance floor. I followed Beast-fast, not caring that the men saw my speed.

At the bar, I took the stool Katie indicated, noticing the couple who stood and stepped away, looking confused, their drinks still in front of our confiscated seats. Stifling a sigh, I handed them their drinks and a ten for their trouble, said, “Thanks,” as if they had given up their seats voluntarily, and waved to Bascomb. The noise level was marginally lower here and when he came over I could hear his comment, “Missed you around here, Janie. Good to see you dancing. Miss Katie, a pleasure to see you here tonight. Your usual gin martini?”

The drink sounded perfectly hideous to Beast, but Katie cooed a yes. I asked for a Coke, something sugared and caffeinated. With a vamp—recently insane—near, I might need the kick.

We were silent until our drinks came, and Katie tasted hers, which was bluish green and smelled toxic, delivered in a stemmed glass with an onion on a toothpick in the liquid. She nodded to Bascomb, who moved away for another customer. I cut to the chase. “You drank from Gee DiMercy.”

“I did.” Katie looked at me from under her lashes, flirtatious. “You can smell him on me?” I nodded and she said, “With the taste of his blood on my tongue, I began to awaken, as if from a long sleep filled with dark dreams. And for a delicious, delirious moment I remembered.” She closed her eyes as an expression resembling ecstasy claimed her face. “I remembered the power. So very much power. Until Leo drank my power away, my magic was great enough that I might have taken the entire city, might have drunk from every throat I encountered.” She opened her eyes, and in them I could see her emotions as easily I might a human’s. She was grieving, in pain, and though she was sane, there was something frantic, something ecstatic and manic in her eyes that held me still and ready inside, prepared to ward off an attack.

Her fingers fluttered up her throat and down, across her chest and down to her décolletage, resting on the V of her low neckline. “I might have grown fat and content on the blood of this city, not starved as I am, as we always are.” I started to ask what she meant when her face hardened. “But Leo drank from me, drained me, and took it all away.”

I tried to understand what had happened, but my knowledge of vamp physiology and culture was based on killing the crazy ones, and my experience with the sane ones was still limited. Before I could put it into some kind of order, Katie said, “I wish to hire you to kill Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City. How much money will you require?”

I put my Coke on the counter, too surprised to hold the icy glass without spilling it. Cripes, she was serious. “Um, Katie, I work for the council, for Leo. He pays me.”

Katie said something in French and slammed her martini glass on the bar. The stem broke. Gin, bluish and harsh smelling, splashed over the counter. Her power spat over me like burning sleet, and out across the room. Even the humans flinched, as the air went suddenly arid and electric. The band stopped playing midsong and stood on the small stage, holding their instruments awkwardly. “I hired you. I!” she said in English, her words ringing into the silent room. “You belong to me.”

Belong to . . . My first instinct to quiet her vanished, and I spoke in a low rush of whispered words. “I don’t belong to anybody. You hired me to do a job, which I did. And then Leo extended my contract. I’m not a hired killer, Katie.”

“Of course you are. It is what you do, what you are. It is what all vampire hunters are, murderers of my kind.”

Deep inside, Beast growled, exposing killing teeth. She murmured, Jane is killer. Killer only. I ignored her. Beast and I’d had this conversation before. I disagreed with her opinion, but there are times for internal debates, and when faced with an unhappy vamp wasn’t one.

Katie glanced up the bar and called out into the odd silence, “Barkeep. Another drink!”

Her words broke a spell over the crowd; on the stage, the players seemed to shake themselves and put down their instruments, announcing a short break. Canned music came over the loudspeaker system, Aaron Neville singing “Jailhouse.” The humans in the place started to move again, recuperating from the blast of vampire energies, and I spotted the ones still unmoving in the crowd. Vamps, three of them. Each of them focused on Katie.

“Katie, why do you want Leo dead?” I asked, keeping an eye on the vamps.

“He buried me with the blood of all the clans,” she said, surprised. When I made a little, so what, gesture, she said, “He gave me the power of them all, and then he took it away. He drained me near unto true death. I would still be chained with the scions had not the Mercy Blade found me and set my mind free. It isn’t . . .” She struggled for the right word. “It isn’t fair.”

I grinned and picked up my Coke again, draining it to exchange the glass for the fresh one Bascomb brought. The concept of fairness from a vamp was amusing, but I had a feeling that laughing would win me nothing but a battle I wasn’t dressed for. And my momentary concern that Katie might be the vamp trying to get Leo and Bruiser arrested for murder eased. She was too nutso to have arranged the scenario. Bascomb wiped up the mess of Katie’s spilled drink.

When he left, I said, “So, challenge him to personal combat.”

“He has my blood, my power,” she spat. “I will not win.”

“He challenged you to personal combat when you were unable to fight back at full strength due to the dolore, which by vamp law isn’t an issue. But he won and didn’t kill you, which means he respects you and wants you alive.” Katie looked up at that, her drink poised halfway to her mouth, her exquisite eyes opened wide in surprise. “He drank from you against your will, right?” Katie nodded and sipped, her face puzzled. “I don’t know much about vamp law, but I think you’re number two in the city, now. Ask him to make you his heir.”

Katie pulled in a harsh breath and met my eyes again, hers going half vampy. “His heir,” she whispered. “Yes.” And suddenly, in a snap of imploding air, she was gone. Katie, pulling the vamp gift for speed that only the old, powerful ones have. And I got stiffed for her drink bill. Figures. Dang vampires.

CHAPTER 18

Woad

I danced another set, accepting a drink from Tex, the vamp who had been patrolling the compound with the huge dog, letting him lead me into a bump and grind dance to one of the band’s original country songs, the music too loud and the crowd too boisterous to converse. Beast watched him through my eyes with an intensity that was always surprising to me. She was too interested in vamps for her own good. I scent-searched while we danced, but never caught a whiff of Tyler, Rick, or anyone else I hoped I might find.

When the dance was over, I left the bar, walking through the night, the air like a sauna, my skin glistening with perspiration, my mind free and clear and open. Dancing did that to me—driving away the demons, letting me think. My dancing shoes made soft clips of sound. My dress moved with the barest caress across my heated flesh. My muscles felt relaxed and supple. And with the night breezes blowing a rainstorm in off the Gulf of Mexico, I let my mind float free.And narrowed the focus of the events of the last few days, starting with the Mercy Blade. He had spelled me the first time we met, with that weird bluish spell that crawled up my flesh. Beast had stopped his enchantment, but I hadn’t been thinking like myself since then; I hadn’t been thinking about Girrard DiMercy at all, and his scent had been on Safia’s body.

Kemnebi’s scent had been there too, and in a far more personal way, but he didn’t strike me as stupid. Not stupid enough to murder his girlfriend in the business office of the most powerful vamp in the Southern states. Strike Kem off my list.

But then there was Tyler Sullivan. The Mercy Blade and Tyler. The two men were the keys to everything. Whatever the heck it all was.