Reading Online Novel

Cassandra Palmer 1(34)



She'd made that clear the day she'd visited Tony's audience hall to drag off one of his vamps for questioning. Whatever the guy had done, he definitely didn't want to talk to the Senate about it. In fact, he was so opposed to the idea that he issued a challenge. Mei Ling was new to the position and didn't have much of a reputation; she was also only about 120 years old and looked like a China doll, so I guess he thought he could take her.




It amazes me how even old vamps sometimes forget that it isn't size but power that matters, and while that often correlates to age, it doesn't always. Some vamps many centuries older than Mei Ling will never have her strength, and I've seen hulking bruisers forced to their knees by the glance of a child. The transition to vampire doesn't make you gorgeous if you were plain, intelligent if you were stupid or powerful if you were weak: a loser in life is a loser vamp, spending his or her immortality serving someone else. It's one of the major drawbacks to the condition, something the movies never seem to highlight. But occasionally it does give someone who was overlooked as a mortal a chance to shine. That day I saw a tiny, fragile-looking flower literally rip a vamp into bloody shreds. I also saw how much pleasure she took in it, how her dark eyes glowed with a fierce joy at the fact that she could do this, that once again a man had underestimated her, and this time he would pay for it.



She never did kill him that I saw. His head was intact and screaming when she ordered the pieces packed into baskets to be carted off to the Senate. I never saw him afterwards, and nobody present that day, to my knowledge, ever again challenged Mei Ling.

«Why did the Consul bring in a ringer? I'd think she or Mei Ling could deal with a simple challenge.»

«The Consul's powerful, but she ain't a duelist. And Mei Ling don't have Rasputin's experience. He was already old when he tried to take over in Russia; rumor is that he's never been defeated in a fight, and that he don't much care how he wins. No one saw the fights with the dead senators, but the first two to be attacked are still alive—so to speak. And Marlowe stayed conscious long enough after they found him to say that Rasputin somehow turned three of his own vamps against him, and one of them had been with him over two hundred years.»

A few scattered puzzle pieces started to come together. I filled Billy Joe in on my most recent escape, and he looked thoughtful. «Yeah, that would make sense. I don't know how the Senate guards are chosen, but it's almost sure to be from the stable of one of the members, since who'd ever think any of them would turn?»

«But why would Rasputin want me dead?» I shivered, and it wasn't from cold. I was used to the idea that Tony wanted to kill me, but there were suddenly a whole bunch of newcomers trying to jump on the bandwagon. And any one of them would be enough to give a sane person a serious case of paranoia.

«Beats me.» Billy Joe looked way too cheerful and I glared at him. He enjoys recounting a good fight almost as much as being in one, but I wasn't his entertainment. He hurried on. «But you haven't heard the best yet. Marlowe took out a couple of his attackers before passing out, and the bodies were left behind when his reserves showed up. But nobody can ID the dead vamps. It's like they came outta nowhere.»

«That's impossible.»




I didn't doubt the part about Chris Marlowe being tough to kill. Before he crossed over, he'd been the bad boy of Elizabethan England and had been in a few hundred bar fights in between writing some of the best plays of the era. The only ones anybody thought rivaled them were by a guy named Shakespeare, who conveniently showed up a few years after Marlowe transitioned and had a real similar writing style. Eventually, when the two-bit actor he'd set up as a front died, Marlowe turned to his other hobby for kicks. He'd done some spying for the queen's government in life, and he added to his bag of tricks afterwards. He was now the Senate's chief of intelligence, using his family of vamps as spies on the supernatural community in general and the other senates in particular. He helped ensure the peace by taking out anybody likely to disturb it, which might explain why Tony had been more worried about Marlowe than about Mei Ling. The only time I'd ever seen him, when he dropped in to talk to Mircea one night during his visit, I'd thought he looked rather nice with his laughing dark eyes, messy curls and a goatee he kept getting in the wine. But, of course, I hadn't been planning to take out the Consul. If I had, I might have hit him first, too.



The part of Billy Joe's story I found hard to credit was the two unidentified vamps. That was literally impossible. All vampires are under the control of a master, either the one who made them or the one who bought them from their maker or won them in a duel. The only way not to have a master is to reach first-level master power yourself. Anything else, including killing off your own master, won't do any good; someone else will simply bind you to them. Since there are fewer than one hundred first-degree masters in the world, and they mostly hold seats on one of the six vamp senates, this makes for a nice hierarchal structure and keeps everyone organized. Most masters give their more powerful followers some freedom, although a certain amount of their revenues are sent as yearly «presents,» and any servants they make are subject to their masters' whims. The masters also check on them from time to time, like Mircea with Tony, because they are always responsible for them. If Tony had ordered an attack on me after he knew I was under Senate protection, it would be Mircea who would be expected to deal with him.