“No, I’m just saying that it’d be good to know your cells will hold before the ‘prisoners’”—and I made little air quotes around the word—“wake up and start looking for food.”
Griffin and Donnie exchanged a look. Brennan scowled harder. Mort joined him in the scowling, though he wasn’t as good at it yet. I wasn’t sure if he was just more pleasant than he was pretending to be, or if he hadn’t been around Nolan as long. Flannery stepped up, smiling.
“I think it’s a good idea to test the cells before we lose the sun,” he said, still smiling.
“Great. Then let’s do it,” I said.
“Which of your people gets locked into the cell to try to break out?” Brennan asked; he’d taken the bag from Jake and hefted it over his shoulder.
“Let me do it,” Nicky said.
They all looked at him. “No,” said Brennan.
“We want a fair test for the vampires that will be in the cells tonight. I don’t think you, Mr. Murdock, are going to be an equivalent for a mother and two teenage girls,” Flannery said.
Nicky gave them a grin that was more a snarl. “You’re just afraid it won’t hold me.”
“I will do it,” Magda said, “if someone will watch over my master.”
“I will be honored to bear his burden, and treat him as if he were my own master,” Jake said. It sounded more formal than they usually talked to each other, and maybe it was a type of prepared speech, but regardless Magda lifted the duffel bag holding Giacomo and started to hand it to Jake.
“You really call the vampire in that bag master?” Donnie asked.
Magda looked at her. “Yes.”
“I don’t,” Nathaniel said.
“Is it like a bondage thing?” Mort asked.
“No,” Magda said.
“Why don’t you call yours master? Is it a guy-girl thing? Please tell me it’s not some kind of male-versus-female thing,” Donnie said.
Nathaniel smiled at her. “No, of course not. Damian just isn’t my master.”
“Then why are you carrying him?” she asked.
“Because I needed my hands free for weapons,” I said.
“Is he your master?”
“No.”
Griffin said, “What do Ms. Fortunada and Ms. Sanderson mean when they call their vampires master? If it’s not a bondage thing, is it like a real slave thing?”
“It’s more the old idea of fidelity to the Lord of the Manor,” I said.
“Some vampires demand to be called master by all of their underlings,” Fortune said.
“Do your masters demand that?” Donnie asked.
“No,” most of us said together. Then we all looked at one another, and Nolan’s people looked at us, too.
Donnie said, “That was a little disturbing that all of you said that.”
I shrugged. “You asked the question.”
“I didn’t think you had a master in that way, Marshal Blake,” Flannery said.
“Jean-Claude gets the title so the other vampires don’t get all weird about him marrying the Executioner.”
“But when you call him master, do you mean it?”
I looked into Flannery’s brown eyes and told the truth. “No.”
“Does that bother Jean-Claude?”
“Sometimes he says it does, but honestly, I think it’s one of the things he likes about me.”
“That you will never call him master and mean it?” Flannery asked.
I nodded.
“I think you’re right,” Fortune said. “He wants partners, not servants in his romantic life. I’ve never known a man centuries old who wanted to be in less control of women.”
“Jean-Claude is a modern kind of guy,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said, and there was something in her look that let me know had we been alone there would have been more to say. But it wasn’t the kind of information you shared in front of strangers. I didn’t poke at it, because Fortune was a good judge for what was public-speak and what wasn’t. I trusted her judgment and I let it go. I could be taught.
“Show us the cell you want Magda to try to smash her way out of,” I said.
Flannery and most of the others were watching the exchange between Fortune and me. He, Donnie, and Griffin all seemed to understand that the conversation had stopped for a reason, but they didn’t push at it. Apparently, they’d come knowing when to back off a topic. It had taken me years to learn that particular lesson.
Flannery led the way to a door in the far wall. It was a different door from the one that Nolan and Edward had vanished through. Wherever they had gone, it wasn’t to the cell block. I’d love to think that Edward would tell me later exactly where they had gone, but I knew better. No one alive kept a secret better than Edward.
43
WE DIVIDED UP into two groups. One went to the control room, where all their security cameras would be recording things and they could look into the cell as well as the hallway outside the cell. The second group went to the hallway with Magda. I sent Nathaniel with Damian up to the control room, because I was pretty sure that Magda was going to get out, and violence of some kind seemed likely. I wanted both of them safe and out of it. Since Jake was keeping Giacomo safe he stayed with them, and Fortune stayed there for the same reason. If we didn’t have to leave the vampires unguarded, then why do it? In fact, there was really not a good reason for most of us to go down to the cells, so in the end it was just Magda, me, Nicky, and Socrates. He wanted to see the state-of-the-art cells and he could talk police with Flannery, and Griffin, who had actually been in the Garda Emergency Response Unit, before Nolan recruited them. They were both former military, too, but their civilian jobs had been as cops. Donnie, Mort, and Brennan had always been military. One of them had even been military police, an MP, so they’d handled detainees before. Socrates got more information out of everyone in a shorter time than I ever could have. I had a badge and was technically a real cop, but because I’d never been military and I hadn’t come up through the ranks like a regular cop, I just didn’t know how to talk like all the other cops. Socrates was great at it. They liked that he’d been a detective in Los Angeles, a real cop, before his “accident.” They’d gotten to the point of finding out that he was in a traditional marriage with nothing that made them uncomfortable or forced them to think outside the box. It made it all so much easier for him to find out that Flannery was married, too, and everyone else was single; beyond that I don’t know because we got to the cell block.