Home > True Dead (Jane Yellowrock #14)(3)

True Dead (Jane Yellowrock #14)(3)
Author: Faith Hunter

   My warlord, Grégoire, aka Blondie, and my primo, Edmund, who I had started calling Eddie the Great on cell calls just to needle him, were taking over the European world in my name. They were pals of mine, as much as fangheads can be pals. Eddie was also the emperor of Europe, the Blood Master of all the European territory, and my vamp primo. It was complicated.

   In my name, Grégoire, Edmund, and my warriors had defeated the last powerful vampires who were still active in Europe. Not that I had planned all the vamp bloodshed, but to keep European humans and witches safe from marauding bloodsuckers, and to reassert peace, I had let it happen. Yeah. In my name. I hated vamp politics.

   Unfortunately, the dregs—and some of the remaining most powerful vamps—of Europe had escaped to all points of the globe, the strongest heading here to take my position. Leo had been fighting European vamps for centuries, and things had only gotten worse when I arrived on the scene.

   I loped downstairs into the kitchen to find three vamps and a human, Koun, Tex, Thema, and Alex. And that was an amazing sight—a blue-and-black-tattooed Celtic warrior in modern night camo armor, a gunfighter from the Old West wearing six-shooters on each hip and an ARGO Benelli shotgun like mine strapped to his back on top of buckskin-toned armor, a black warrior in matte black armor, a woman so powerful she sometimes wore silver in her ears as a warning to others—silver being a dangerous, burning, sometimes even an incapacitating allergen to vamps—and Alex, a mixed-race human . . . not teenager. He was an adult now. A very pretty adult with curly ringlets, slightly greenish brown eyes, muscles, and a sense of self-confidence that oozed from his pores along with the garlic stink. The four of them were standing around the bar, checking comms and weapons. Lots and lots of weapons.

   I walked around them and stopped, seeing the mess on the floor. “Dang cat!” I found the Clorox cleanser and sprayed the dried blood. The vamps watched, still as statues, until I grabbed the paper towels and started to clean the floor.

   Tex grabbed my arm. “No, Janie—My Queen,” he amended.

   “Why not? My cat did this.”

   “We weren’t sure if you wanted the floor left this way. But you ain’t cleaning the mess. It’s not, uh, seemly. For a queen.”

   I wanted to argue. I wanted to stamp my feet. My clan were working hard to make me act like a queen, like the Dark Queen of the Mithrans, which I was but which I hated. So far, I pretty much sucked at it.

   I blew out a frustrated breath, placed the roll of paper towels in his hand, and walked between the vamps, muttering about dang cats. Opening the fridge, I took out a stack of well-marbled steaks, turned on the stove grill, and switched on the fan above it. I tossed a steak onto the grill and waited. Behind me, Tex and Koun cleaned up my mess. Thema was above cleaning up after a cat. She lounged against the wall, polishing a blade, her black eyes on the glinting steel. Not that she missed anything happening around her.

   The steak began to sizzle. When it was slightly brown on one side, I salted it and flipped it and salted that side too. When it was mostly no longer raw, I turned off the burner, opened a package of oversized naan, which was the best bread ever made on the face of the earth, and tossed the steak into the middle. I bit into the steak sandwich. Nothing in this world was as good as ultrarare beef. Except maybe oatmeal, and there wasn’t time for that too. I needed the calories that I had used up shifting. My skinwalker magic helped power my shifts, but there wasn’t enough magic inside me to do it all, and I was once again skinny as a rail, so I had to eat, a lot, to make it through a shift. And when shifting multiple times, like in the middle of the night, I needed to eat a huge amount of food. “Let’s go, then,” I said, chewing. “We got enemy vamps to behead.”

   “For this alone, I would call you queen,” Thema murmured happily, her accent rich with her African heritage.

   “Hey, Alex,” I said, grinning around the macerated steak. “Put away the queen’s raw steaks and clean up the grill, wouldja?”

   He narrowed his eyes at me, so much like his brother that I burst out laughing—which sounded like a cat growling. I was still laugh-growling around the steak and bread as Koun pulled the SUV along the winding drive. Behind us, four more SUVs followed. Koun was deeply focused on the task of negotiating mountain turns, but I realized that he was smiling. A harsh, stoic man, a warrior to a Celtic queen, a Roman slave, soldier, fanghead for nearly two thousand years, he smiled too seldom.

   Watching him from the corner of an eye, I leaned the seat back, propped my funky-looking boots on the dash, and licked the steak grease from the fingers of one hand. I ripped more meat and bread off and chewed noisily. Licked some more. My tongue was part cat, and its rough surface cleaned things up nicely.

   Koun’s smile spread slightly. “My Queen should perhaps know that modern manners are relatively new in the world, that her lack thereof is not shocking to me, as it was to Leo Pellissier and his ilk. In my day, we ate with our fingers and licked them clean. It is an efficient method of eating, allowing a hungry person to get all the fat and nutrients from their skin.”

   Ilk? I grunted, wondering if I could make him laugh. “Squatting over an open fire, meat on a spit, and then you rubbed bear grease and ashes into your skin as grooming?”

   Calmly, a strange light in his eyes, Koun said, “Ashes are efficient topical antibiotics, as is rendered animal fat. My Queen is deliberately attempting to insult me?”

   “I’m tribal. My ancestors probably did the same at one point. But yeah. Goading you. Being difficult. Seeing where the chinks in your armor are.”

   Eyes on the road, Koun lifted his eyebrows, his pale eyes twinkling. “I have no chinks. I am perfect.”

   I snickered. “Yeah. Okay. Glad you told me. I musta missed the announcement.”

   He laughed, and his shoulders relaxed beneath the armor. Bingo. Mission accomplished.

   I knew a lonely redheaded witch-vamp who might like Koun if he was happy more. Not that I was going to matchmake. Nope. No way. Especially not from within my clan, where my interest could be considered by some to be an order. Ick. However, I could do things to make Koun feel like smiling more often, though so far, the only things that seemed to get a rise out of him were battle, me goading him, and me being crude—the Leo comment to the contrary.

   I finished my sandwich, used premoistened handwipes kept in the glove compartment to clean up, and pulled up the address on my tablet so I could study the area where we were headed. Time passed.

   “How many people are we bringing to this fight?” I asked.

   “Us, three other Mithrans, and six humans,” Koun said. “And, as you might say, a buttload of weapons.”

   “The humans are not to engage the enemy,” I said.

   “My Queen will leave all such decisions to the chief strategist of Clan Yellowrock and the Dark Queen’s Executioner,” he said mildly, giving me his official title.

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