Companions (16 page)

"He has the best witch in the Midwest looking after him," Aunt Catie said, reading Selena's concern.

"Which is much the same as being in the ICU unit of the University of Chicago Hospital, only with magic."

They were seated in Catie's reading room on the shop's second floor, Lawrence propped up on the couch, with Aunt Catie seated on the other end. There were cards set out in a circular pattern on the table before her. "You told Steve about the family history," she said after a moment's study. She tapped a major arcana card with a frosted pink polished fingernail. "Didn't like it one bit, did he?"

"Who's Steve?" Larry asked.

"He's not important right now," Selena said, desperate to keep personal relationships out of this, hers at any rate. Istvan the Enforcer was what she had to worry about, not her… boyfriend, for want of a better ter —

"Husband," Aunt Catie interjected.

"Hardly."

"Who's Steve?" Larry repeated.

Aunt Catie patted him on the knee. "You know him by another name."

Larry considered for a moment, then blanched even paler than blood loss and vampire night dwelling warranted, and said, "I definitely don't want to know about
his
private life. And may he stay out of mine."

"He is family, Lawrence."

Selena ignored one implication but said, "Steve is not family."

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"You two would make quite the power couple if you'd accept the inevitable," Catie went on, her gaze on the cards again.

Larry chuckled weakly, his gaze on Selena. "Terminator and Terminator Two, you mean."

Selena tried not to be either amused or flattered by this description, but she was a bit of both. She bent forward in her chair and poured a cup of tea from the rose floral pot next to her aunt's tarot spread. The tea was some pale green herb stuff, probably medicinal rather than caffeinated, but Selena was thirsty and took a quick gulp before she continued talking. "This is good." Her aunt smirked at her surprise.

Selena drained the cup, hoped she hadn't ingested some sort of love spell or something, and concentrated on Larry. "Who is Pyotr? Why did someone want him dead?" She knew who, which she was not going to tell Larry. She wanted to know why. All her senses, cop and psychic, told her it was important to know why. She didn't think she was going to find out from deeply disturbed Sandy Schwimmer.

Larry's dark, arched eyebrows lifted. "Pyotr. I haven't heard him called that for a long time. How did you know — "

"It's a gift."

"It's a terminator thing," Aunt Catie added. "Or should I say Enfor — "

"No, you don't want to say that." She cast a quick glare at her witchy aunt. "And just how much do you know about Roma and strigoi relations?" Selena waved her own question away. "Never mind. That's another discussion. Pyotr, Lawrence. Tell me everything you know about him."

"I didn't like him," Lawrence said and looked surprised at his words. He gave a silent, mirthless laugh. "I admired him, the way I once admired Maria: age, wisdom, ruthlessness, beauty, traditional values… all that crap you suck in with your first blood in the nest."

"He was one of the old dudes?" Selena asked. "Thousands of years old?"

"Nobody's that old. At least nobody I ever met. Hundreds, though. Five, six hundred years old to hear him and some of his friends talk about the old days." He gave another mirthless laugh. "I used to love hearing about the old days. I majored in history in college, you know? That's how I got involved with a vampire." He gave an almost furtive look toward Catie, who was frowning, ostensibly at the tarot cards.

"But you don't want to hear about my old girlfriends."

"No, Selena doesn't," Catie answered.

"Peter," Larry went on. "When he was on his own, he went by Peter."

"On his own. You mean he was a strig?"

Larry shrugged and looked like he was going to faint for a moment afterward. He took in a long, whistling breath and said, "I shouldn't have done that. Kind of a strig, part of the time, I guess, but not really." He went on, "There's an old custom…." He shook his head. "It's hard to explain."

"Try."

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"A long, long time ago, Peter was part of a nest back in Central Europe someplace. He beat the shit out of me when I was a nestling for joking about his coming from Dracula country. He didn't like Dracula very much, said the bastard was a menace to vampires and would have been dead a lot sooner than he was if his nest leader back in the old country had his way. This is where you make some comment, like,

'Dracula's real?'''

"I've had that conversation already."

Larry looked curious but didn't inquire further. "We got to be friends, of sorts, when Peter discovered I was genuinely interested in history."

"You didn't resent him beating you up?"

"Of course I resented it, but that's how it is between older ones and younger ones. He got to show he was faster and stronger, I acknowledged his dominance. We got on fine after that."

"You didn't nurse any resentment and want to kill him?"

"Vampires can't kill each other."

"I've heard that."

"I nursed plenty of resentment when I was part of strigoi society. That's one of the reasons I got out." He gave her a hard look. "I don't play by the rules anymore, but I don't kill my own kind."

Selena gave the slightest of shrugs. "I have his tendency to treat everyone like a suspect, even when I know they're not."

"You should have heard her questioning her cousin about the honeymoon plans at her shower," Aunt Catie cut in.

"I was making polite conversation."

"You made it sound like they were heading for Ireland to avoid prosecution. Go, on, Lawrence. You can talk while she bristles with indignation."

"Sometimes I hate you, Aunt Catie. Tell me more about Pyotr, Larry."

"He liked power. Gravitated toward it, I mean. Liked to lord it over younger ones, but sucked up…" He gave a wince of irony, then went on. "… to older strigoi."

"Older than him?"

"Older and more conservative. Looked up to the ones he thought of as the elite and old school. Most of the old ones haven't immigrated, you know. Personally, I think the old school ones are the real troublemakers. No respect for mortals… or their own kind, for that matter. Power and dominance games are what matter to that bunch. They can make living in a nest pure hell."

"Peter made life hell for other vampires? Peter and this friend he sucked up to?"

Larry nodded. "Especially his friend. When Peter wasn't around Rosho, he was okay. Just barely.

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Sometimes he made the effort to relax a little, to hang with the homies. Then Rosho'd show up again and talk Peter into helping him take over another nest."

Selena sat up straight, warning bells going off in her head. "To do what? How?"
And why and where?

she thought, remembering Sandy's ravings.
Denver, maybe?
She didn't ask the leading questions that came to mind and carefully hid her thoughts and feelings behind her formidable mental shields. Best to objectively as possible let Lawrence tell her what he knew.

He leaned forward a little, obviously uncomfortable with the movement, but seeming to need to draw confidingly closer. "I hate this game. I've never been in a nest where it happened, but I know plenty of people who have. What happens usually is that some old vampire blows into town, looks around, and decides a local nest leader is vulnerable. They'll come up with some excuse for a challenge — lots of excuses built into the Laws — that way, the local enforcer can stand back and let it happen. Usually, the challenger will pick some nest leader the Enforcer of the City already has a grudge against or has had complaints against."

"Somebody the Hunter doesn't want dead but would like out of power?"

Larry nodded. "Like that. The outsider wins a fight with the nest leader, and that gives the outsider control of the nest leader and the nest. It can be rough for a while after that. Eventually, the strigoi members of the nest find excuses to drift away if things stay bad, but the mortals are stuck, and the old ones take a literal definition of the term
slave."

Selena's stomach churned at the images Larry conjured for her, but she didn't let any revulsion show.

"What about the companions?"

"They go with their vampires."

"What about companions that belonged to the defeated nest leader?"

He looked blank but not too successfully. "I don't know."

"Could this new nest leader take the property of the one who was beaten? Nestlings, slaves, and companions?"

He nodded slowly, reluctantly. "Winner's entitled. Most strigoi won't touch anyone else's companion, but

— "

"But your friend Pyotr mentioned something about this happening, didn't he?"

Larry looked disgusted. He looked away. It took him quite a while before he said, "Yeah. Peter's buddy, Rosho the old-line asshole, he's got a thing about sharing companion blood. Peter says he treated that kind of perversion like it was no more than passing around a bottle of somebody else's wine."

Gang banging, Selena thought. Psychic gang banging. Sandy had been raped, mind, body, and soul, by who knew how many vampires who'd waltzed into a nice man's nest in Denver and — lawfully — taken over. She wanted to throw up. She said calmly, "Please tell me they don't make the companion they rape take their blood as well."

Larry looked about as sickened as she felt. It saved her from ripping his vampire heart out. "Peter never admitted to that."

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No one mentioned the shattered wreck of china and spilled tea from Selena's having furiously swept everything off the low table between her and the couch. Aunt Catie kept quiet, expressionless, emotions surpressed, her neutral gaze fixed on Selena.

If Sandy Schwimmer had been forced to drink the blood of a vampire that wasn't her companion —?

Selena couldn't imagine what that could do to a person. Except that she'd seen firsthand what it had done to Sandy Schwimmer. "They drove her mad." She stood up. "No wonder she's killing them. The bastards drove her insane."

Hell, who could blame her? The question for Selena now wasn't how to stop Sandy's vampire killing crusade, but how to save her. To save her, Selena had to find the poor madwoman first. She didn't think that was going to be hard, at least she had one place to look.

"Larry," she said softly to the wounded vampire she was very close to killing simply because he was a vampire and not because she didn't like him. "Larry, I want you to tell me the address of your safe house.

You have one second, and no longer." She was fairly certain she could rip his heart out with her bare hands if he didn't comply in the given amount of time.

"In most cases," Selena recited quietly to herself as she approached the front of the dark building set squarely in the center of the block of brick row houses, "the cliche about killers returning to the scene of the crime is a crock of shit. But in the case of serial killers, returning to the scene to relive the thrill of the experience is frequently part of the killer's behavior." She was quoting from a seminar on criminal profiling she'd attended at the FBI training center in Quantico, Virginia, a few months before. She'd been thinking of Sandy as a serial killer until she learned the truth.
Maybe this time,
she thought,
the killer simply
doesn't have anywhere else to go —

There was a chance that Sandy had left town, but Selena didn't think so. Sandy had come to her, looking for help. Selena didn't think Sandy, disoriented as she was, would leave before making another stab at getting Selena to lead the revolution.

"Stab." She snorted. The shadowy image of some unknown, evil
he
bending over a victim flashed across her mind. "Yeah, I could see myself stabbing that."

The neighborhood was a low-crime, white-collar sort, and the hour was late. There was more than one building on the block where the lights were out and no signs of life stirred. Streetlights showed an empty sidewalk, cars were parked in a solid line on the curbs, and street traffic was at a minimum. The street was in the very heart of the busy city, but this section of town had settled down for the night. The building in the middle of the block exuded a different sort of quiet, one even hard for her to detect, and she was looking for it. Plus, she had the address. In all the other buildings, people were sleeping. In this one, someone very psychic was hiding, hoping those who lived by night and fed off mental energy would pass her by.

Selena shook her head sadly and took one more look up and down the street, all her senses searching the area. She wasn't a vampire — a dozen of them could have been lurking in the shadows and she
might
not have detected them — but she liked to think she had certain skills. Maybe it was a Roma thing, though mention of vampires had never come up in any family discussions she'd ever heard nor in any of Aunt Catie's training. Maybe it was the reluctant bond she shared with the badest ass of all badass Nighthawk Hunter Enforcer dudes. Maybe it was trust in her own abilities and a capacity to transfer law
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enforcement training, experience, and street smarts up to another level once she'd admitted that she could indeed function on a supernatural plane. It was probably all of the above, and there was no one in the street, she decided, and went up to the door.

Larry had given her not only the address but also the key.

For the most part, vampires didn't hang out in dark, musty basements during the daylight, and those who did were considered weird and socially unacceptable. Sunlight didn't turn them into overdone barbecue.