I automatically shook my head. “I can’t. I have Shadow.” The bargest was not allowed to leave LA County, a deal we’d made with the people who’d created her.
“Corry’s spring break begins this weekend,” Dashiell reminded me. “She can take care of the bargest. I’ll pay her for her time. And you, too, of course.” He named a figure, and I couldn’t help but widen my eyes. That would take a chunk out of Logan’s hospital debt. And all I had to do was spend a couple of days on what amounted to a vacation.
But something about the situation felt wrong. For one thing, diving into an enormous, completely unknown vampire population all by myself was more reckless than I was willing to be. I was a little bored, sure, but I wasn’t looking for actual physical danger. I’d found plenty of that right here in LA, and I was in no hurry to repeat the experience.
Besides, I hated Las Vegas. You know that expression “You couldn’t pay me to go there”? Yeah.
Happily, Dashiell couldn’t make me go. I didn’t work for him individually; I worked with him, Kirsten, and Will as a team. So I shook my head.
“I’m sorry, Dashiell, but no. If I randomly show up at one of their performances, those two are going to know exactly what you’re doing, and they’ll see it as a declaration of war, or—at the very least—a challenge. If they are doing something sinister, they’ll come after me. And you can’t send people to protect me without making it look like even more of a threat.” I stood up. “This is above my pay grade, and risky as hell. Send one of your vampires.”
He tilted his head, considering this for a long, silent moment, while I tried not to fidget. “You may have a point,” he allowed at last.
It took an effort, but I managed to keep my mouth from dropping open. Dashiell agreed with my assessment of danger? That was a first.
“I will give the matter more consideration,” he added. To my further surprise, Dashiell rose from behind the desk. “Let me walk you out.”
“Um, okay.” Did he think I’d forgotten the way?
But his motive became clear almost immediately. “So, how is Jack adjusting to married life?” he asked, in a perfectly civil, conversational tone.
My fists clenched. My brother Jack was human, which meant he didn’t know anything about the Old World or what I could do. As a way of keeping leverage on me, Dashiell had given him a job at one of his business endeavors, a company that made medical equipment. He’d even paid most of Jack’s way through med school. I’d hoped Jack would finally be out from under Dashiell’s thumb after he finished his residency, but that had been naive: Dashiell had offered him a part-time job, and now my brother worked thirty-five hours a week at the ER and twenty hours at Dashiell’s company, testing the equipment in his lab.
I knew Jack was probably a great employee—Dashiell didn’t suffer fools—but I was always aware that he was being used as leverage against me. Whenever Dashiell brought him up, I got half a panic attack—something the cardinal vampire had undoubtedly realized.
“He’s fine,” I said stiffly. “Juliet and the kids, too.”
“Good, good.”
I expected Dashiell to push his request again, now that he’d shown me the stick. At the very least, I figured he’d tell me we were going to revisit the topic soon. But the cardinal vampire of the city just bade me good night at the door, watching as Shadow rejoined me, her eyes bright and happy from chasing squirrels. There was probably a pile of them somewhere, a grisly present for Dashiell’s groundskeeper. Together we walked down the front steps and around the path to the van.
It was, of course, impossible, but I could swear I felt his eyes on me all the way home.
Chapter 3
“OMG, the Lucy and Arthur?” Molly squealed, a half hour later.
My vampire roommate was lounging on the couch in our little Marina Del Rey cottage, trying to pull open a bag of tortilla chips. Vampires can’t eat people food, so she’d been saving them until I arrived to turn her human again. Molly was used to vampire strength, and not at all used to the storage of modern food, so her attempts to open the bag were actually pretty funny. I could have helped her, but I hated to give up the comedy value.
“What do you mean, the Lucy and Arthur?” I asked, watching her try to pull at the top of the bag with her dull human teeth. “They’re really that famous?”
“Hell yeah, they are. They’re, like, vampire royalty.”
I finally took pity on her, grabbing the bag from her hands and pulling the top open. “Yessss,” Molly said greedily, practically snatching the bag back. Around a mouthful of chips, she added, “Do we have any of that green dippy stuff?”
I rolled my eyes. “Guacamole.” Expanding my radius so she would stay within it, I went into the little kitchen and retrieved the container from the fridge for her. After scooping some onto her chip, Molly continued, “You gotta understand, other than the cardinal vampires who run big cities, we don’t really have celebrities in the vampire community. Hell, we don’t really have a community, just a power hierarchy.” She popped the chip in her mouth, chewed appreciatively, and added, “Lucy and Arthur are the big anomaly. They’re like the JFK and Jackie of the undead.” She paused, considering that for a moment. “Or maybe the Obamas? Pre-divorce Brad and Angelina?”
“I get it. So why am I just hearing about them now?”
“Because they’ve always been in Europe and Asia,” Molly replied. “Look, you know we don’t travel around, not the way humans do—every ten or twenty years we just move to a new town, and when that happens there’s all this negotiating between cardinal vampires, and it’s a whole big thing. Lucy and Arthur are different. They’ve got, like, a free pass to wander around Europe meeting with cardinal vampires, telling stories, passing news. I heard they’ve got a tricked-out tour bus and a bunch of human roadies, whatever that means.” She shook her head. “But I don’t think they’ve ever toured the US.”
“Have you met them?”
“Not me, no. But I’ve met vampires who have, and they say Lucy and Arthur are charming as hell. They’re not like most of us. They socialize.”
“Huh.” I watched her eat another chip, thinking that Molly socialized too, but then, she was also kind of an anomaly. Decades ago, Molly had been an unwilling sex worker at a vampire brothel. All these years later, she still seemed most comfortable with other women around her. A few months ago, some human friends of Molly’s had been forced to become vampires, and she now visited them regularly.
“This Vegas thing, though . . . that is pretty weird,” Molly went on. “I’ve never heard of vampires putting on a show. I get why Dashiell’s freaked out.”
I scoffed at her word choice. “Dashiell doesn’t get freaked out.”
She raised an eyebrow. “He waited an hour for you, and he said please several times?”
“Well, yeah.”
I thought about that for all of two seconds. “He’s freaked out,” we said at the same time.
Molly laughed, and a chunk of avocado slipped off the precarious pile on her chip and dripped onto her pricey black sweater, which made her curse cheerfully. Expensive things meant nothing to Molly, or most of the vampires I’d met. If you could walk up to any rich guy leaving a bank and press him to give you a wad of cash whenever you wanted, what did money matter?
“What do you think he’ll do now that you said no?” she asked me. There was no judgment in her voice, but I still squirmed a little. Not my circus, not my monkeys, I reminded myself. For once, I really didn’t have to get sucked into Dashiell’s current supernatural crisis.
“I think he might send one of his vampire toadies,” I replied. “They can scope it out from the cheap seats and report back. Then Dashiell will decide if he needs to take action.”
She grunted, still inhaling chips. When she finished the bite, she added, “You know, if the show does get the okay from Dashiell, I’d really like to go, maybe in a few weeks or something. I’ve always wanted to see Lucy and Arthur.” She gave me a speculative look.