“Yes.”
“Into the dark.”
“Looks like it,” I said, maybe a bit too nonchalantly.
A blade appeared in Mario’s hands, one in each. Fast. Almost as fast as he vamped out into fighting mode. I was impressed. I pulled my nine-millimeter semiautomatic, checked the silver-round load, injected a round into the chamber, and off-safetied. With my left hand, I pulled a small LED flashlight and flipped it to turbo mode. I stuck it into the little strap on my left wrist and shook my arm, satisfied it was secure. I pulled the fourteen-inch vamp-killer and set my feet, carefully balancing my weight.
Around his fangs, Mario asked, “Why do I feel that you were, perhaps, expecting this descent into hell?”
“Because you’re almost as pretty as you are smart?”
“Jesu Christo,” he swore, the word choice odd for a vamp. “I am trapped with a madwoman.”
The doors opened onto a lighted room, the storeroom with the paper records and the paintings. I concentrated on the painting of the four vamps, taking it in fast, Grégoire and his sick little family, memorizing the faces of his sire, his brother and sister, their clothes, and the bird jewelry. The older male was olive skinned and dark haired, with a patrician nose and a dissolute, supercilious sneer that would do Caligula proud. This would be François Le Bâtard, an illegitimate son of French royalty, pederast, abuser of children. Someone of power among the EuroVamps. The younger male, Peregrinus, looked Grégoire’s age, black haired, black eyed, a beautiful fallen angel, his eyes and expression empty. The girl looked even younger, maybe twelve, dressed in a low-cut gown that revealed far too much of a body halted before puberty. Unlike Peregrinus, her face wasn’t blank. She wore a look of terror that seemed to have a scent even after all these years. Grégoire stood to her side, a hand on her shoulder as if to hold her down or give her reassurance, his golden hair pulled back into a braid, his blue eyes staring right at the painter. He was wearing a tight blue outfit with a white shirt and tall boots. And he looked angry. Beyond angry. He wore a fury that appeared unfettered, uncontrolled, as wild as a mustang cornered by a cowboy with intents to capture, tame, and ride him. But the painter who had captured them all. They looked real, as if they could step off the canvas.
Beside the painting was a safe, an old black one with a big handle and a dial. Another painting stood beside it, of two females, both vamps, according to the paleness of their perfect skin. One was Adrianna, a vamp I knew and had killed, twice now. For reasons never clear to me, Leo had brought her back. Other paintings were stacked nearby, including a painting partially hidden behind a trunk. It depicted Grégoire, his siblings, and a small girl child with golden skin and black hair. I had to wonder whether the thing or things that Satan’s Three were searching for might be here, in this huge room. Sadly, nothing jumped up and down waving its arms shouting, Me, me, me! and all I got from the experience was a chance to memorize the faces of my enemies. I needed to have the contents cataloged and photographed. Soon. When I had a free day. I laughed at the thought, feeling Mario jerk in shock at the sound.
Beside me, the terrified vamp cursed in a breath that stank of fear pheromones. He swiped his hand and pressed the main floor button. “A madwoman,” he repeated. The door whooshed closed on the paintings, and Mario started to put away his weapons when he noted I was balanced and ready for . . . attack? Combat? “What have you done?” he hissed.
The elevator dropped again, this time with a little jerk, as if it didn’t really want to go down. “Just checking to see if Peregrinus might be looking for something hidden down here.” Mario started swearing under his breath, the words in Italian and full of religious references.
On second thought, he might have been praying.
CHAPTER 15
If Vamps Could Wet Their Pants
I grunted once just as the doors opened into utter blackness. The stench of death and rotten things whooshed into the elevator. I breathed in through my mouth. The back of my tongue was instantly coated with the reek of the grave, the stench of unwashed bodies, long-dead herbs. Cloying and vile. I steadied myself.
In turbo mode, the flash provided two hundred fifteen lumens and threw a narrow, concentrated beam three hundred seventy-one feet into the darkness. It wasn’t enough. The darkness swallowed the beam of light like outer space. The silence was so profound that it filled the elevator, a hollow, echoing absence of light and sound and life, a long moment of nothingness as I swept the flash from side to side and up and down.
All I saw beyond the elevator lights was darkness with unfinished ceilings and rough-hewn beams far overhead, clay floor just beyond the elevator doors, damp and slick-looking. Old bricks appeared out of the gloom to one side, barely visible, wet and oozing and smelling of magic that held back the ground water. But there was no sound. Only an emptiness so acute it might have echoed into the next universe. I took a breath and it reverberated like a hissing, asthmatic snake. I pulled on Beast’s hearing and vision. And still heard nothing.
Then there it was. A single, soft drip, bright and clear, the resonance sibilant, as the sound ricocheted around the room. I tried to determine where it originated, but chasing the bouncing sound was like chasing a bunch of rabbits—everywhere at once. The drip sounded again and I followed Mario’s eyes to the left and ahead. I lifted the light there, moving it slowly left to right.
From the dark, a glimmer of something red, flashing to silver. Again. And a breath, like a winter breeze. Beside me, Mario repeatedly pressed his palm on the scanner until the doors whooshed closed. The vamp was swearing like a sailor as his hand jammed onto buttons. The elevator rose. He swallowed, his vamp tissues dry as bike tires, and he started cursing in English to make sure I knew what he was saying. Finally he wound down as the elevator opened to light and the smell of vamps and blood and humans and sex. Normal vamp smells. “You are psicotico,” he spat. “Insane.”
I grabbed his arm before he could disappear. “It was a vamp, wasn’t it? Down there?”
“It might have been Lucifer himself,” he said, jerking free as he strode from the elevator. “Stay away from me.” Mario’s clothes were dark, so I wasn’t sure, but if vamps could wet their pants, he just had. And I wasn’t sure why he was so negatively affected. Vamps always kept their scions chained to walls when in the devoveo, the ten years or more of madness after a human was turned. The sub-five basement had a vamp prisoner. Only one, by the smell. But I could drop that from my inquiries. A scion, no matter how important he or she might have been when human—even a king or queen—wasn’t anything that Satan’s Three would want. If the three were coming after something here at HQ, then it was likely that they were interested in something stored on sub-four. Could Leo have put magical items and artifacts in storage? In the safe hidden in the piles of stuff?