Midnight`s Daughter Page 0,11

a partner I already know,” I said, trying to blunt the insult. “We won’t have time to learn each other’s styles. What’s Marlowe doing?”

Kit Marlowe, vamp, playwright and onetime Elizabethan bad boy, was head of intelligence for the Senate. He was one evil son of a bitch, as I could testify on a personal level, and we weren’t exactly buddies. But if I had to track the meanest vamp on the planet, I’d like to have one of the runners-up at my back. As long as he wasn’t gunning for me this time.

“We are on a wartime footing, Dorina. I can hardly pull the chief of security away for a personal errand at such a moment.”

“It’s not gonna stay personal for long,” I pointed out. “Our names may head Uncle’s list, but we’re hardly the only ones on it. The war may seem like a sideshow if he really gets going.”

“Nonetheless, the Consul would never permit it.” Even Mircea would think twice about bucking the Senate leader’s orders, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d met her only once, and that had been more than sufficient. My personal opinion was that she was crazier than Drac, but no one had asked me.

“So who is going with us, then?” I hoped he had some better backup in mind than the guys I normally used. One or two could handle themselves in some pretty tough situations, but nothing like this. The only connections I had who might have been useful were currently incommunicado—locked away for crimes the vamps or mages didn’t like, but hadn’t viewed as being serious enough to merit a cell six feet under. And since the war had intervened, their trials were on permanent hold—there’s no such thing as habeas corpus in the supernatural world.

“I would prefer to keep this in the family,” Mircea said.

I snorted. I didn’t doubt it. Anyone not under his direct command would have no compunction about staking good old Drac at the first opportunity. It was certainly my plan. Assuming he didn’t get me first.

Something occurred to me. “So what’s he doing here?” I jerked a thumb at the fashion plate. I wasn’t on great terms with the family, but at least I knew who was who. And Mr. Lack of Congeniality wasn’t on the list.

“I told you,” Mircea said in that überpatient voice he reserves for me and the mentally challenged. “This is Louis-Cesare.” I looked expectant. He sighed. “Radu’s get.”

I gave the pretty vamp another, more interested look. “I wasn’t aware my marginally sane uncle had any offspring.”

I was being kind. Radu—Mircea and Dracula’s younger brother—was a real weirdo. Not in the contender-for-homicidal-heavyweight-title kind of way like Drac, but almost as creepy. For one thing, he insisted on dressing like a reject from a Three Musketeers film, only reluctantly putting on up-to-date clothes when strong-armed into it. Some vamps liked to dress as they’d done in life when out of sight of humans, but Radu had been brought up in fifteenth-century Romania, not seventeenth-century France—hence, the weird. For another, he’d never, or so I’d thought, made another vamp in his life, although he had been a second-level master for centuries. Someone that powerful without a stable was unprecedented. Followers gave you income as well as protection, and who would voluntarily forgo both? He used Mircea’s stable almost like it was his own, but sponging off elder brother would have gotten tiresome to me. But then, nobody much cared what the skeleton in the closet thought.

“This is the only one.” I waited, but Mircea didn’t elaborate. Again, no real surprise. Why tell cannon fodder any more than she has to know?

“Okay, I understand you want him along, and that’s fine. I’m sure I can find something for him to do, but—”

“I think you are laboring under a misapprehension,” the Frenchman interrupted, his accent a bit more obvious than it had been before. “You speak as if you will be deciding strategy. You will be under my direction, not the reverse.”

I slowly turned to face him, and something in my expression caused him to lower a hand to the hilt of his rapier. He didn’t draw it, but he didn’t take his hand back, either.

“I don’t know who you think you are,” I informed him evenly, “and I don’t care. But I take direction from no one. Are we clear?”

“We most decidedly are not,” he responded, equally crisply. It would have been funny at another time, our trying to out-enunciate each other, but at the