The inside of Christie's room was decorated like a gym, but without the charm. Bare mattress on a plain, steel bed, the four corners and headboard adorned with flex-straps and chains and cuffs. Bare white walls, bare wood floor, plastic rolled up in the corners. I didn't want to know what that was used for. Steel shutters and padded blinds were over the windows, blocking out the coming dawn, the latest vamp fad.
Christie was lying on the mattress with a dark blond vamp curled around her. Both were dressed, but only barely, Christie in a sheer top that exposed steel chains through her nipple rings - ouch - and the vamp in black silk pajama shorts. Seemed that Corpse had a name after all. The vamp looked vastly different from the way he had looked the last time I saw him, covered in blood and burns. Now he was clean, his hair combed, and his face stretched in a contented, well-fed smile as I looked him over. His silver cross burns were healed, and that kind of burn usually took a long time to heal. I'd burned Leo with one once and really ticked him off.
"Christie. Callan," I said.
Callan roused enough to lift his head from Christie's shoulder and I could see the tiny pinpricks on her throat that marked the constricted vamp bite marks. "You're my new master's Enforcer," he stated, his accent Southern, maybe a mill-town accent from the piedmont of South Carolina. He climbed slowly from the bed, moving like a feral animal, all smooth muscle and grace. Callan stood in front of me and slung the hair back from his face, holding my gaze, letting me look my fill. He was pretty. Dang pretty. And he knew it. Like a lot of vamps, he'd been turned for his looks, no doubt about that. He had a boxer's shoulders, a cyclist's thighs, and a painter's long, slender fingers, with an angel's face on top. But something about him made me think he wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier - maybe the fact that he was posing. He held the pose a moment longer and then dropped slowly to one knee, like an old-fashioned bow, but with a dancer's sense of balance. He bent forward, curling his spine so his hands and his hair fell forward to the floor, exposing his back, which was a swimmer's back, tapering to a tiny waist.
"Get up," I said. Before he could rise, I asked, "How did your former master infect you with the disease?" I expected him to say that he had dated a sick human at Blood-Call.
Callan stood, his shoulders back, a sculptor's model on display. I held in an exasperated sigh. "My former master fed me a woman. He feeds her to lots of us."
"One woman?" I said, not sure I heard correctly.
"Yes, ma'am."
My amusement vanished. A Typhoid Mary? A human with a disease that infects vamps? A prisoner, kept to be fed upon? Like a slave? I thought I had it all figured out, that sick humans were being passed around. I wasn't sure how a single sick human connected. Not sure at all.
"Against her will?"
"She's his prisoner. We all were."
"Crap." So what now? I'd have to kill de Allyon and rescue all the vamps and the blood-servants? I didn't say it, but I could feel the need burrowing under my skin. Saving people, fighting for people, is what skinwalkers do, when we aren't torturing them. "Is she here in Louisiana?"
"No. She is in Atlanta, in my mas - my former master's lair."
"So how did de Allyon infect all the vamps in Sedona, Seattle, and other places? Does he fly her around?"
"Lady, I got no idea how he did his thing. It ain't like I was up high in the pecking order or nothing. But I will say that he never let that woman out of his compound. Like not never."
I felt my hope deflate. "Is de Allyon in Louisiana?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where?"
"No. Somewhere north, and maybe west. In a little town on a river. I'm not good with directions."
The comment was so unexpected I almost laughed. Was the guy really dumber than a box of rocks, or was he dissembling, somehow hiding his true mind even from whichever old master vamp had fed him to heal him? That would have made Callan the best spy in history. Nope. He was no spy; Callan smelled of truth. And Callan was intellectually challenged - pretty, but dumb. Nearly