I liked, and it was a fine old scotch that went down so smoothly that you barely noticed how much it burned.
“—that we all got something in common.”
“Such as?” I asked.
“Such as the fact that the consul doesn’t like any of us. You’re a dhampir, he screwed up, and I’m an outsider who she thinks may be a spy for the East Asian Court.”
“Are you?” Louis-Cesare asked.
It was a little too abrupt for somebody like Zheng, who came from a culture who valued dignity, aka “face”, above all. And who was also a master vamp, none of whom like being challenged, even indirectly. But he didn’t take offense.
A suspiciously good mood, I thought, and drank whiskey.
“I was approached,” he said. “Too bad our dear empress spent hundreds of years knocking me down to size and treating me like a pariah that wasn’t good enough to kiss her little feet—”
“Big feet, according to your old boss,” I put in. Lord Cheung was the other would-be member of the East Asian Court who had ended up on ours instead. He was Zheng-zi’s old master, although they were equals now, both being senators.
“He would know better than me,” Zheng agreed. “At least he got a few trips to court. I was never good enough. And now she’s not good enough for me—unless I need to start kissing up?”
“And why would you do that?” Louis-Cesare asked.
He shrugged. “What you think. We work our tails off, risk our necks, and after the war, when we’ve made plenty of enemies on our dear consul’s behalf . . .”
“She cuts us off,” I said. It was what I’d been assuming, too.
He nodded. “Possibly literally. Call me paranoid, but I’ve been feeling the need for some reassurance, lately.”
“What kind of reassurance?”
“An alliance with clan Basarab.” He shivered suddenly in apparent delight. “Ooh, just the thought makes me all tingly.”
“What kind of alliance—” Louis-Cesare began, before I set down my glass—hard.
“No.”
“No?” Zheng raised an eyebrow. “You don’t even want to hear my proposal?”
“No. Not now, not today. I get my sister back, I get Ray back, then maybe—”
Zheng tilted his head. “Where’d they go?”
I told him.
Chapter Thirty-One
Dory, Hong Kong
“That’s . . . a lot to take in,” Zheng said, and I’d given him the truncated version.
I nodded. “Then you see why we need help—”
“And I need an alliance. With your old man gone, you’re head of the clan, so you can make those kinds of—”
“Wait. What?” I looked from him to Louis-Cesare and back again. “What do you mean, gone?”
It was Zheng who answered. “As in away. As in, nobody knows where he is, or they aren’t saying. I’ve been trying to get hold of him for more than a week, but—”
“You’ve been trying to get in contact with Mircea for a week?” I asked, making sure I understood.
He nodded.
“And it hasn’t worked?”
He nodded again.
“Did you know about this?” I asked Louis-Cesare.
“No, but it does not surprise me. I tried to contact him mentally the night that . . . everything happened . . . but could not reach him. I was told that he was unavailable—”
“His daughter was just kidnapped, and he’s unavailable?” I stared at him.
“That is what I was told. I then tried his phone, but could reach only his batman,” he said, speaking of the military attaché Mircea had acquired after being promoted to general of the World Senate’s combined army.
The promotion had made him more difficult to contact lately, as he was constantly in a meeting or running around, putting out fires. Or actually fighting in Faerie, where the first battle of the conflict had been an overwhelming success, although with significant losses for our side. I hadn’t seen him since he’d healed my leg, having first been recovering and then, once I was back on two feet, off on the current, diplomatic whirlwind.
But still. Louis-Cesare was family, not to mention a senator who might have picked up important intel on his travels. Getting in touch shouldn’t be this hard!
“What did Gerald have to say?” I asked, referencing the pinched faced batman.
“That ‘General Basarab is currently unavailable’.”
I frowned. That bastard. He never told anybody anything.
Of course, that was true of somebody else around here.
“And you didn’t mention this?” I said. “Why?”
Louis-Cesare didn’t even have the grace to look uncomfortable. “I was going to, but you had enough on your plate.”
“Don’t you think I should have been the one to decide that?”
“Normally, yes—”
“Normally?”
There was some kind of commotion across the club, but I didn’t look