“We never told you,” Alex said. “But we have to keep you alive.”
“Huh?” I asked, dragging my thoughts back to this conversation.
“But we can’t do that if you don’t trust us,” Eli said.
“We need to be able to talk to you. Tell you what we’re thinking and discuss the potential problems, refine plans like you and Leo used to do,” Alex said.
“And then you stay out of the way and let us do our jobs,” Eli said.
“Keeping you alive,” Alex finished.
I nodded and tucked my mug between my thighs. “Fine. You want me to stay out of the way, right? You want to tell me what you know and let me help with the planning. Then my stupid crown and I will stay safe and sound in my little queenly castle and let my friends and brothers and family go out and die in my place. Right? Like last night? That about it?” I smacked the back of Eli’s skull. Then Alex’s skull. Both men looked at me with astonishment and some bewilderment. “How ’bout I knock some sense into your heads? I suck at twiddling my thumbs. We do this all together, or we don’t do it at all.”
Getting up, I clinked my mug into the kitchen sink hard enough to crack it, stuffed my bare feet into my mudders, and yanked on a thin green slicker. I walked toward the door and yelled, “I’m hungry, and the quiches smell like heaven. So not fair!”
I may have stomped, and stomped some more as I headed into the rain. It was possible. I’d miss that mug.
I strode away from the house, letting the cold rain patter onto me, trickle down my collar, letting the slow fall of water cool me off. “Idiots,” I said.
I heard a doggy chuff and spotted Brute watching me from the overhang of one of the cottages, still and silent. “Men are stupid,” I said.
Brute sat up tall and raised his eyebrows as if considering my statement. He lifted a paw, touching his head. Then he looked at the cottage near him. There were footprints in the soft, rain-wet ground leading to it. They had been there long enough to be full of water. They didn’t belong to Eli or Alex. Worry whispered through me.
Bruiser?
Stepping slowly, as silently as I could in the mucky grass, I approached the cottage window. I heard his voice and a woman’s voice. I didn’t like her cajoling, suggestive tones.
I backed away, raced back inside, toed off the mudders, and sprinted up the stairs to the closet where I kept my own toys. I slid out a plastic container and rummaged around for the Glob, but it wasn’t there. I found it in the pocket of the armor I had worn to the vamp battle and raced back down. Downstairs, I slapped my crown on, felt it adhere to my head, too tight, as always, and patted my pocket where the Glob rested.
Eli was standing at the back door, a nine-mil in one hand, a machete-looking blade in his other, a water resistant pouch cinched at his waist. “What?” he said.
“Don’t know. Brute’s out in the rain, staring at the second cottage.” I pulled on the mudders.
“That’s where we put Monique Giovanni after Shaddock finished healing her gunshot wounds and relieved her pain from the broken wrist,” Eli said.
From the office, Alex called out, “I have footage of Bruiser entering the cottage. Forty-two minutes ago.”
“Too long,” I muttered. “Looks like I may have to slap the back of my Consort’s head too. I’m surrounded by idiot men.”
“This idiot man has your back.”
I looked at Eli, his dark eyes calm and steady. “We okay?” I asked.
“Babe . . .” His tone called me stupid. And loved. And family.
I laughed once, but it was a sad tone, not real laughter. “I shot Monique. And broke her wrist. She heals up nicely with vamp blood, but if she’s messing with his brain, I’ll end her.”
“Roger that.”
Together we stepped from the back door. I spotted Brute, who was standing, four-pawed, beneath the window of the cottage. I bent slightly forward and crab-raced to the cottage, Eli behind. He sped to my left and disappeared around the cottage, making sure this wasn’t an ambush.
I leaned close to the building but couldn’t hear a thing. Eli joined me from the right and mouthed, Clear.
“Wish I had cat ears,” I whispered. I glanced at him and grinned. “Never thought I’d say that.”
From his dry bag, Eli pulled out a tiny black rubber suction cup and pressed it to the lower corner of the window. We waited a moment to make sure no one inside had seen the tiny cup appear, but there was no reaction from within, the voices talking on without change. Eli snapped in a small plug and unwound three black wires, two earpieces, and one micro video port, which he plugged into his cell. He handed me an earpiece and took one for himself.
Just that fast, we had ears and eyes inside. I loved tech. “Mr. Prepared.”
“Always.”
I worked the earbud in and could hear just fine, Bruiser’s voice and Giovanni’s, hers all seductive. I wasn’t jealous of her tone, so like a vamp in mesmerism. She had no idea what Leo had put my sweet-cheeks through. No way she could roll the former primo, especially not with the silver cuffs on her wrists and head. I took in what I could see of the room. It was the back bedroom of a two-bedroom cottage, decorated in leaf green with charcoal gray walls and white trim. Giovanni, wearing dark purple pants and a sweater, was sitting in a captain’s chair in front of a gas fireplace, which was not lit.
“I am not the Firestarter who attacked the Winter Court of the Dark Queen,” she said. “Look at my hands. At my face. You saw that one. The Firestarter . . .” Her voice trailed off and she bowed her head. The woman was facing away from the window; Bruiser was sitting in a second chair, facing slightly away from her, at an angle from me.
I had to wonder why they were talking about Aurelia Flamma Scintilla, the Firestarter sorta-Onorio who started out a witch-in-the-closet nun and made burning vamps to death her reason to live. Who picked her as a topic? And why? Aurelia was dark haired, dark eyed, and was neither vampire nor blood-servant, but a rarer creature, similar to Bruiser and the B-twins, but a dark type of Onorio called a senza onore. We saw an illusion of the former nun last March as we fought a losing battle.
“I am not Aurelia,” Monique whispered, so softly I nearly missed it. “I did not burn the mausoleum in New Orleans.”
And then I understood. They were talking about Leo’s death. It all came back to Leo. To his death. His burial. The burning of his mausoleum. I had assumed that all those blasted layered political threads he had woven together over the years had come apart when he died. But clearly there were threads I didn’t know about. It seemed Leo had woven me and my entire family into his final tapestry.
“The Firestarter,” she said, “is in New Orleans once again. It is said that Aurelia burned the outclan priestess to a crisp, that the priestess was true dead. But the Firestarter doesn’t believe this. She is hunting for Sabina.”