revenge from outside the organization. If I wanted Tony to suffer for what he'd done, I would have to return.
It easily ranked as the hardest thing I've ever done, not only because I hate Tony so much, but also because I didn't know whether his greed would override his anger. Yes, I made him a lot of money and was a useful weapon he could hold over the heads of his competitors. They never knew what I might tell him about them and, while it didn't keep them completely honest, it did cut down on the more blatant cheating. But that didn't reassure me much. Tony isn't always predictable: he's smart, and he usually makes decisions for financially sound reasons, but there are times when his temper gets away from him.
He once took on another master over a minor territorial dispute that could have been solved with negotiators from either side sitting down together for a few hours. Instead, we went to war, always a dangerous business (if the Senate finds out about it, you're dead whether you lose or not), and lost more than thirty vamps. Some of them were among the first Tony ever made. I saw him crying over the bodies after the cleanup crew brought them back to us, but knew it wouldn't make any difference the next time. Nothing ever did. So all things considered, I hadn't known whether to expect open arms or a session in the basement. It had been the former, but I'd always had the feeling that this was as much because I caught Tony on a good day as because I was useful to him.
It took three very long years to amass enough proof to destroy Tony's operation through the human justice system. I couldn't go to the Senate, since nothing Tony had done actually violated vamp laws. Killing my parents was perfectly okay, since neither had the support of another master, and the hit had been made to look like something human criminals had done. As for misuse of my powers, they'd probably have applauded his business acumen. Assuming I even got in to see them, they would have merely returned me to my master for appropriate punishment. But no human DA was going to listen to anything I had to say if I started talking about vampires, much less some of the stuff that went down at Tony's on a regular basis.
In the end, I'd had to set him up the same way the Feds got Capone. We nailed him on enough racketeering and tax-evasion charges to put him away for a hundred years. That isn't all that long to an immortal, but I was hoping the Senate would stake him for drawing too much attention to himself long before he had to worry about whether his cell had a window or not.
But when the sting went down, Tony was nowhere to be found. The Feds managed to round up and indict some of his human servants, but of the fat man himself there was no sign. Both his warehouses in Philly and his mansion in the country were empty, and my old nurse was dead in pieces in the basement. Tony had left me a letter explaining how his instincts had warned him that something was wrong, so he'd had Jimmy torture Eugenie to find out what I was doing. Vamps can take a lot of abuse, and Genie loved me; it took a long time to break her, but, as Tony said, he's the patient type. He wrote that he'd left me the body so I could dispose of it properly, since he knew how much she had meant to me. And so I'd know what I had to look forward to one of these days.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," I admitted to Billy. "But my parents weren't the only ones he killed who were important to me."
"I'm sorry." To his credit, Billy Joe knew when to stop pushing, and we sat in silence until the waiter returned with effusive apologies. The boss was unavailable for the evening. Apparently, Jimmy had gone home with a headache.
I flirted with the satyr for a few seconds before sending him off for another drink. As he left, Billy emerged from his head, looking surly. "And I thought I had a dirty mind! You don't even want to know what he was thinking about you."
"Got that right. So where's Jimmy?"
"In the basement, like I told you. They