know what to tell you,” I said. “I wish I did. All I can say for sure is this. If some genie had come to me and offered me a trade: a few years of being with someone I truly care about in exchange for all the centuries that I had left like that? Yeah. I’d have made the trade.
“And I still would.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Dory, Hong Kong
We reentered Zheng’s office sometime later, without encountering Hassani’s vamps. I didn’t know where they were, but was grateful that they were gone. I wasn’t even sure what the hell they were doing here in the first place. Did Hassani think I wasn’t going to track down my sister’s kidnappers? Or that I was going to let them off with a slap on the wrist? And if he did think that, what exactly were two guys going to do about it?
I mean, yeah, they were pretty good in a fight, but still. Two guys. I couldn’t really see them taking on a whole contingent of fey on their own.
But damn, if they weren’t sticking like glue.
“Tossed your buddies out,” Zheng said, answering my unasked question while cradling a phone under his chin. “Lily was getting pissed. They’re waiting outside.”
“Did anybody find Bertha?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Whoever did probably went screaming down the road. Can you give me a minute?”
We nodded and sat back down.
“Yeah,” he told the phone. “All of them, even the creepy mage. Yeah, I know, but he’s sneaky. He might have something up his sleeve . . . No, gimme an hour.” He eyed us. “I think I’m about to make a deal.”
He tossed the phone in a drawer and looked at us.
“What Louis-Cesare said before,” I told him, because I hadn’t objected to the terms, merely to being excluded from having a say in them. “The alliance is contingent on getting Dorina back, and is defensive only until we see how things go. But that does not mean defending you because you attacked someone and they attacked you back. It means unprovoked.”
“I know what defensive means.” Zheng took out another cigarette and lit up. “And I got fire power. I don’t need more boots on the ground.”
“Then what do you need?”
“Information and contacts. I don’t know your territory any more than you do mine. You needed help in Hong Kong, and you came to me, which was the smart move. Well, I need help in North America. I got some contacts there, sure, but not at the higher levels. I saw a senate seat go up for grabs, and I grabbed it. It was only afterward that I realized—shit. I might have just put my head in a noose.”
“So, we’re supposed to keep your head out of the noose,” I clarified.
“That would be nice,” Zheng said sardonically. “And I’ll do the same for you, if I can. But I’d settle for knowing that it’s being prepared.”
“And you think you wouldn’t?”
He shrugged and sat back with his cigarette. “I keep my eyes open, but they’re messing with us newbies at court. Rumors, rumors everywhere, but who knows what to believe? I’ve been walking around with goose flesh up my back for months now, right over the spot where somebody’s probably planning to plant a stake in it. I need information I can believe.”
“And Cheung?” Louis-Cesare asked abruptly.
“What about him?”
“Does this deal include him, or are you simply going to inform him of everything we tell you?”
Zheng’s eyes flashed dangerously through the smoke. “You got a mouth on you.”
“It’s a fair question—”
“It’s not the question,” Zheng said, sitting up. “It’s how it’s asked!”
Louis-Cesare started to get up, but I put a hand on his arm. “How would you like us to ask it?” I said.
“With some respect!”
“I have respect for you,” I told him truthfully.
“Yeah, but does he?” Zheng stabbed his cigarette at Louis-Cesare, who was still bristling. Master vamps did not take a challenge well, even an indirect one. But I didn’t think that was what this was.
Zheng hadn’t even noticed my hubby’s hand going to his shiny new rapier; he was too busy going off.
“Mr. Aristocrat, looking like he smells something bad, just like everyone else at that damned court! I thought it would be different from Ming-de’s,” he said, talking about the East Asian Consul, who headed up the Chinese version of a senate. “But some things never change. Be part of the wrong family, and no matter hard you work, you’re never—”