He was also the kind of guy who walked out alive from a gun fight.
The next couple of faces weren’t so nice, not that the crowd seemed to mind. A tall, gaunt man with deep set eyes and a sallow complexion was next, with greasy black hair that matched the color of his worn and potion-stained robes. If he’d had “dark mage” tattooed on his forehead, it couldn’t have been any more obvious. I was surprised that he hadn’t been rounded up with the others, but maybe he’d been smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing and join the right side.
Didn’t make him any less creepy, though.
His buddy was a bit more of a mystery, reading as magical human to me, but as something else, too, something other. If I’d encountered him in a fight, I’d have kept my eyes on him above any of the others, although it wouldn’t have been a fun experience. He had the face of a pugilist who’d been hit one too many times, knocking things out of whack to the point that they couldn’t be set right anymore. There wasn’t a feature on his face that wasn’t skewed, and he also had some pretty impressive scars, as if something had gotten claws into him at some point.
Interestedly, he hadn’t bothered to cover anything up with a glamourie. Maybe he liked looking like a tough guy. The crowd certainly seemed to approve, roaring in support when his face was shown.
But their biggest roar of all, the one that had us rocking again and Zheng cursing, was for the fifth member of the group, who had just emerged from under the walkway. Only, in his case, I wasn’t sure whether the cheering was for his fighting prowess or his good looks. He could have been the lead on a telenovela: cheekbones high and sharp enough to cut you with, only you’d take it smiling because they were paired with golden skin, short, well-styled, dark hair, and movie star good looks. Not to mention a lithe, muscular body that filled out the jeans and casual black button up he was wearing to perfection.
He was the kind of guy who turned heads. He turned mine, but not for the usual reasons. I tensed up, with every dhampir sense I had suddenly blaring away.
In contrast to the other guy, he didn’t have a weapon on him, but that didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that a first-level master vampire was hanging out with a bunch of pit fighters, because that was undoubtedly what he was. The flood of his power was unmistakable even this far away, making my skin crawl with the energy he was sending off.
And I wasn’t the only one to notice. Louis-Cesare had been watching casually from beside me, drinking his whisky and chatting with Zheng. But he was suddenly sitting up, was staring out the window, was opening the car door—
“What are you doing?” Zheng and I asked, simultaneously.
I doubted that Louis-Cesare heard the question, even with vampire hearing. Because cracking the door did what the window going down had not, and cancelled the silence spell. A wash of pure sound blasted over us, so loud that it was like being struck by a fist. I actually felt my head go back for a second, which is how I saw Zheng echoing my own question. And then I grabbed hold of the back of Louis-Cesare’s trousers, because a fall from that height could kill even a master.
He turned around, detaching my hand. “I have to go down there.”
I saw the words, rather than heard them, but either way, they made no sense. “What are you talking about?
He said something, but I still didn’t hear, and my lip-reading capability is limited.
“What?”
“I said, I have to go down there!”
“I got that much! What I didn’t get was why!”
He said something else, but I didn’t catch it. But I decided that that was beside the point at the moment. “Do you remember what happened the last time you went running off?” I demanded.
“You don’t understand! It’s—”
The crowd roared, drowning him out.
“What?”
Louis-Cesare repeated himself once more, but the crowd was still going crazy, and I didn’t hear.
“Did you say Jonathan?” I asked, and grabbed my purse.
He shook his head. “No! I said—”
Another roar, goddamnit!
“He said Tomas,” the attractive pit fighter said, appearing out of nowhere, and clinging to the side of the car like Spider Man.