Ravenous

Chapter 15

"Damn you, Pierce, you killed it!" Alessandro folded his arms and looked down at the changeling, disgust welling. Disgust at Pierce's clumsy job of questioning. Disgust at the sight of the grease spot where the creature's body had melted into the carpet.

"It was an accident," Pierce protested.

Omara stood a few feet away, her expression that of an irritated schoolteacher. She was still dressed in the pantsuit she had worn earlier, reminding Alessandro of a carnivorous Emma Peel. They were in one of the hotel's plush conference rooms, the mahogany furniture pushed against the wall. Two of Omara's security vamps stood either side of the double doors, arms folded.

"You could have waited for me," Alessandro growled at Pierce. "Interrogation is my job. I know how to do it properly."

"You always get to question the prisoners."

"Apparently I'm better at it."

Omara cut in. "Boys, I'm glad you're both in touch with your respective inner children, but skip the tantrums."

Her jibe did nothing to improve the atmosphere. Why did she let Pierce screw this up? When I left, she was angry with

him for feeding from the human woman in public. Now she is letting him serve her? Letting him do my job?

Alessandro rounded on Pierce. "The changeling was the best lead we had, and now it's gone. Did you kill it to cover your tracks?"

"What?" Pierce gave him a what-the-hell look. "You think I'm in league with changelings? Why?"

Omara inspected her rings, tilting her hand so the gems glittered in the light from the overhead chandeliers. Their divisive squabble seemed to please her. It certainly gave her the position of power. "Alessandro is determined to think the worst of you. It's the sad effect of centuries of bad behavior, darling. People start to judge." Omara snapped her fingers, bringing the security vamps to attention. "We're done here. Tell the concierge to clean up."

Alessandro swore in lusty, antique Italian. He had left Holly for nothing. Right now she was enjoying a meal with Macmillan, having a pleasurable bonding experience he could never offer her. In so many ways the detective outmatched him.

He wrenched his thoughts back to the mess in front of him.

"Where did you find the changeling?" he asked.

Pierce replied. "University Laundromat. One of the local werewolves phoned in the sighting as a courtesy."

Alessandro furrowed his brow. "The changeling was doing laundry?"

"No, but it was eating someone who was. The werewolves pulled it off the student and held it until we got there. The changeling was pretty, um, subdued by then. I think the wolves were enjoying themselves a bit too much."

Lovely. "Did you manage to get any good information before you turned him to sludge?"

Pierce shrugged. "He was too afraid to talk."

It was all Alessandro could do not to bang his head—or Pierce's—on the wall. "We. Are. Vampires. We make the prisoners afraid. Us."

Pierce's eyes narrowed. "Whatever master it served was worse."

The demon. Demons were the only creatures more feared than vampires. Despite losing a suspect, Alessandro felt a flutter of satisfaction. His emerging theories were holding up.

Omara cut in. "The changeling's name was Arnault, and there are others of his kind in Fairview. That was all we learned."

Alessandro frowned. "What about these others? The police looked for more changelings. We looked as well. None were found."

The queen shrugged. "Obviously there are hiding places we missed."

I should have gone with them on the search, Alessandro thought, but he had been watching over Holly. There had been the demon mouse. He couldn't be everywhere at once.

Then he looked at the splotch on the floor where the changeling had melted. I should have done the questioning.

Frustration chewed at his gut. He had to work harder. Faster.

Just then the double doors to the conference room opened, and the janitor with his cleaning cart entered, followed by Omara's security men. One vampire carried a Shop-Vac.

"I'm done for the evening, gentlemen," Omara said to her security. "Finish up here, and then you're free for the night." She turned to Pierce. "You can go, too. I think you've done enough damage for one evening."

The last remark was icy cold. Pierce's eyes flared, anger and shame in competition.

Omara touched Alessandro's sleeve. "Let's go upstairs."

She led the way out of the room, crossing the lobby to the elevators. Pierce was left standing alone next to the stain on the carpet.

"Did the changeling say how many others there are?" Alessandro asked. Surely they got something useful out of the discussion? Omara did not get to be queen without knowledge of how these interviews are done.

"No, though it sounded like quite a few." The elevator doors opened and they got in. Omara pushed the button for the top floor, where she was staying. The doors slid closed.

"So what now?" asked Alessandro. "Another search? Find another changeling to question?"

"What's the point?" asked Omara softly. "The wolves captured the changeling, and so it made sense to see what we could learn. But to chase down another? They are barely articulate. Their tolerance for pain is legendary. A waste of time. We need to find their master."

The elevator doors slid open and they got out. Omara started down the hall to her room, Alessandro at her side.

"I don't understand what happened tonight," he said. "When I left you earlier, you were going to question Pierce."

Omara waved a dismissive hand. "The affair with the changeling was more urgent."

"You let Pierce interrogate the changeling."

"Pierce was here and you were not."

"So, just like that, you let him deal with the prisoner?"

"I wasn't about to touch the changeling myself. Besides, I knew I could count on John's cruelty. He needed a chance to redeem himself after tonight's little performance with the human."

She sounded almost—he searched for the right word—indulgent. Not like Omara at all.

Alessandro tried again, frustration making him push. "But what if he is in league with them? Wasn't that what we were wondering? The tokens, the bleeding ring? Murders?"

Without answering, Omara stopped in front of her door and handed Alessandro the passkey. He swiped it and pushed open the heavy door, holding it for his queen. The balcony doors were open, and the sitting room was cold but fresh. Omara switched on a table lamp, showing expensive, spacious, and utterly anonymous decor. Alessandro entered after her, locking the door.

"Consider this," he said. "Pierce's clan is well versed in magic. Someone has been casting summoning spells. If Clan Albion wanted to stage a coup, what better way than to raise an army of changelings and summon a demon to perform their bidding?"

Omara turned, throwing her arms in the air. "But why? Why would there be an alliance between Albion and a race of hideous mutants?"

Thrown on the defensive, Alessandro raised his voice. "I can remember when they were your rivals. Albion was bitterly ambitious. Only your superior sorcery stood between them and the crown, and they would have taken your place as ruler had you had faltered for one instant. Do you think they have changed so much since those days? Besides, changelings would never challenge you on their own. They are too few. They have to be working with somebody else."

"But John Pierce is not capable of any of this. He is pretty, vain, and foolish. A man with a child's need for reassurance. He behaves badly because he wants my love."

"Earlier tonight you thought he might be the murderer."

"Earlier tonight I was angry with him."

"But the Albion clan has always been a problem. I beheaded Pierce's brother for breaking your laws."

"John would never hurt me. Nor my throne. He adores me."

There was real anger in her voice. Alessandro stopped, not sure he believed what he had heard. Possessiveness. Protectiveness. She is defending Pierce against me!

A thrum of alarm traveled through him. Pierce was a wastrel, his family a pack of villains. Omara knew that. What is going on here? "Does he know about the portals?"

"I have not discussed the subject with him. Just the murders." Omara fell into one of the beige tub chairs that faced the balcony. The position turned her face from Alessandro. "I do not know how many ways I can say this. John is selfish. He is not, however, a mastermind of evil."

The vulnerability in her voice shocked him. He stared at her profile, and she stared out at the dark, sparkling night. She loves him, but treats him like a dog. He abases himself in order to wound her, but still seeks her favor. They are engaged in some bizarre, destructive affair. A queen cannot behave this way. Not with the throne in the balance.

His voice grew soft, but cutting. "Is it possible that one who has walked the gardens of ancient Babylon and has seen the sun rise and set on the pharaohs could stoop so low as John Pierce? The notion is breathtaking, and not in a good way."

Her tone was glacial. "Don't criticize me, Caravelli. I've slept with you, after all."

"But you would still tear my eyeballs out in a human heartbeat if you thought I'd crossed you. You forgive Pierce everything."

Omara gave him a scathing glare.

After all that the queen had put him through, Alessandro felt a petty thrill of satisfaction. He had found her out. "You like him. You love him. He challenges you."

Omara looked away.

Alessandro went on. "Ancient evil though you may be, you still fell for the bad boy. Perhaps that is why you've promised to share Desire the last times we've met, but never kept that pledge. I am not Pierce. I no longer please you."

Her profile was marble, yielding nothing. His triumph melted to pity. For all her power and ferocity, Omara had surrendered to a charming smile. That wouldn't be so bad, but Pierce was Pierce. "You can't afford to lose your judgment. Not now, with your throne under attack. You know it."

"I know it." Her voice was small. "In all these centuries I've made only this one blunder of the heart. I know I am in the wrong. A queen's mistakes are the errors of a whole people."

Alessandro sat in the tub chair next to hers, stretching out his long legs. They sat, sharing the view of the skyline. The moment was oddly companionable. The power balance between them had shifted, if only for that tiny slice of time.

"Is he involved?"

She sounded weary. "He showed no mercy to the changeling, as you saw."

Alessandro pondered that. "Where do you think the changelings are coming from?"

"Maybe the portals," Omara answered. "The changelings disappeared from the earth, and then here they are again. It is one possible answer."

He sat up straight. "I thought only demons dwelled on the other side. Demons and the damned souls sent to keep them prisoner in their hell. In the Castle."

"There is more to the Castle than that. It is a danger to all the supernatural species."

Alessandro's shoulders tightened. "How so?"

"It was meant as a prison for us all."

"What?" Alessandro held his breath, shocked.

She sank further into the chair. "The only nightmares I ever have are about getting trapped there."

She stopped talking. A TV went on in the room next door, loud at first; then someone turned it down. After a minute or so Omara went on.

"When I was young, magic was commonplace. Demons and dragons prowled freely in the dark places. Humans were not the all-powerful species they are now."

She stopped again and toed off her shoes.

"And?" prompted Alessandro.

"The human sorcerers banded together." She sounded far away, her voice rising and falling in the rhythm of the old storytellers. "They believed, in the beginning, that they would weave a great spell to help protect their people. In the end they built a monument to their own absolute power."

"A prison for nonhumans?" He had never known where the Castle came from.

"Yes. They gathered together and raised a powerful force, the most fearsome since the birthing of the sky and the seas. They created their prison for the demons and the dragons, the hellhounds and the werebeasts, the vampires and the fey. They gave it existence outside the laws of time and place, and there they locked away any creature that possessed the merest whiff of magic."

Alessandro saw the irony at once. "Any creature excepting themselves, of course."

"Indeed."

"But they failed," he put in. He didn't want to believe what she was telling him. "The supernatural never left this world."

"Not entirely, but it was close. What followed was genocide. A few, like me, managed to escape their armies. It took centuries before our numbers came back to even a fraction of what they once were. And only in these last few years have the supernatural races walked as we once walked, openly and in freedom."

"So is that why you spearheaded the move to let the humans know we were here?"

She gave a small smile. "That was part of it. I remembered what it was like not to hide. Some called me a visionary. Really, I was just bringing back a way of being that I had once taken for granted."

A beat passed in silence. "But if so many members of the supernatural races were hunted down and taken prisoner," he said slowly, "what happened to them all?"

Omara went very still. "Those that were taken never returned. The sorcerers stole human men from their families, gave them unnatural powers, and forced them to guard the Castle for all eternity."

"But… no one summons a vampire or a werewolf. Only demons. If those original prisoners survived, they're still trapped."

Omara watched his face, her own carefully blank. "No one who goes into the Castle ever comes out. Ever. And if the guardsmen come to our world to hunt, they capture any supernatural creature they find and drag it back to their hell."

Alessandro felt a cold nausea. All those unfortunates are still trapped there, forgotten. In the next room the television murmured on.

She continued as if she had never paused. "There are tales in the wind that the Castle is crumbling and disorder rules its halls. They say the guardsmen are dwindling and those who remain have gone mad with despair. They say the inmates have run amok. Perhaps, after all this time, the Castle's magic is fading. Even I don't remember the names of the self-proclaimed sorcerer kings who built it."

Alessandro stared out the window, nursing a slow, welling anger. He remembered the portal behind Sinsation and the hellhounds that had scrambled through. What he had seen was a prison break.

"Why has there never been a rescue mission?" he asked.

"Why have I never heard that there were more than demons being held?"

Omara brushed the air, flicking away his outrage. "It is kept a secret because there can be no rescue attempts. All the nonhuman leaders agree."

"Why not?"

"Would you really want to share our world with powerful beings who have been locked up in the silent dark for thousands of years? They would be mad, warped things by now. Once you opened the floodgates, there would be no telling what horrors would come vomiting out of the breach."

"So you let them all rot." His voice was a razor.

Omara raised her hands in surrender. "Tell me who has the resources to provide social services to an entire hell dimension! For centuries, those of us who had escaped capture had all we could do to survive."

"But now?"

"Trust me when I say the rest of the vampire council is even less sympathetic than I am. No one wants a refugee problem. Not when we're still trying to earn rights for our own people."

"How enormously practical."

"What would the humans think if they found out? What if they learned there was a prison full of demons and deadly lunatics just beyond their back door? It would be disastrous." She paused, breathing hard. "And don't forget the guardsmen. They follow where portals have opened and look for escapees. That is one more reason we must return the demon to the hell it came from. They may not notice that a pack of hellhounds got loose, but they certainly won't let a master demon roam free. If they find our community in Fairview, we'll have to battle them, too. Some of us might be dragged into that hell."

Alessandro clenched his teeth, sitting hard on his instinct to fight Omara's pragmatism, to ride to the rescue. As little as he liked it, she had valid points. Still, he wasn't letting this go.

"Is that how the changelings became imprisoned in the Castle?" he asked. "They were captured by the guardsmen?"

"That's not the only possibility. A few modern sorcerers know how use the place as a cosmic garbage can for their troublesome enemies. Your witch's ancestor, Elaine Carver, used a portal to rid Fairview of a demon over a hundred years ago."

A puzzle piece fell into place with a cynical snap. He finally saw Omara's plan. The bitch.

Alessandro turned in his chair. "Of course. Witches do their magic by manipulating energy. You need Holly for more than necromancy. You need her help to control the portals!"

Omara smiled.

He felt his heart give a single, desperate thud. "That portal killed Elaine Carver."

All the vulnerability in Omara's expression was gone. Her eyes mocked him, because she knew she had struck his tender place. Dread—or perhaps it was a premonition—rolled over Alessandro. Hot fury rushed in behind it. He was starting to understand a great deal, or at least to make some good, ugly guesses.

"So you remember your history," Omara said quietly.

No! There was no way he was going to let Holly start down a fatal path. His thoughts scrambled, seizing on one horrible realization, then another. He made one last leap of logic.

"You've had me watching Fairview for over a hundred years, monitoring what you said was strong, unstable coastal magic. Was that the whole reason you wanted me here, rather than at your side, where a champion ought to be?"

She looked amused, as if waiting to see what trick he might perform. "Whatever do you mean?"

He felt his lip curling back, revealing fang. The old loyalty that bound him to his queen was hanging by an unraveling thread. "A mere surveillance job could be handled by any reliable hireling. You didn't need a warrior here, unless there was something big that might need fighting."

Omara's chin jerked just a fraction. He'd hit the target. "Do you have a point?"

Alessandro hesitated, but ultimately let the words go.

"You worked with Elaine Carver when she banished the demon before. You expected that demon to find its way back out of the portal. You just didn't know when, or how it would manage it, but you knew it was coming. You've had me watching for it."

"And if I did?" Her eyes were bright and hard. "What does that matter now?"

"Why the secrecy? Why pretend you have no idea what is going on?"

"Up till now, I did not want to admit that, despite my magic and the Carver witch's sacrifice, the portal might reopen. To say such a thing would be to invite accusations of weakness."

"But now the demon is here, and yet still you say nothing. Why not?"

A long beat passed, and Omara's expression crumpled into a rictus of agony. She buried her face in her hands, her body collapsing into itself.

What now? What more could she possibly be hiding? Alessandro scrambled to his feet, automatically offering comfort, but she waved him away, hugging herself.

She lifted her face. Her eyes were dry, but her expression was raw. "I pretend ignorance for a good reason. I cannot say I know about the demon and then do nothing to stop it. I've been waiting to see what your witch can do. I must be sure of my resources."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't have the power to stop the demon anymore." She stood up, her arms folded across her body. "When my Seattle apartment was ransacked, the thief took my grimoires, all my magical tools."

"What?" Omara had lied to him in Sinsation. An utter lie. His stomach was a lump of granite. "You said none of those things had been taken!"

"They were all taken. Every tool I need to perform the smallest shred of sorcery. Every magical instrument that I took decades to attune to my power. It will take me a century to replace a tenth part of it all."

The queen angled her back to him, staring out the window at the nightscape. She dropped her arms to her sides, her breathing heavy and slow. He could see she was deliberately, brutally forcing her emotions under control. "No one knows I am powerless. I've been pretending for weeks. Stalling. Bluffing."

Alessandro's mouth went dry with shock. "The Book of Lies?" He named the tome of demon magic that had won Omara her throne.

"Gone." The word came out like a curse.

It was Omara's best weapon. Indescribably deadly. Full of violent secrets. And it wasn't as though she could order another from Evil4U.com. She had stolen it from a demon herself, a bold stroke that had nearly cost her everything.

Omara looked nowhere near so victorious now. Her fires banked, she seemed small and frail. "I have enemies that would tear me to pieces if they knew I've lost the book. You're right about Clan Albion's ambitions, and they are just one name on a long list. I cannot be exposed. That's why I need your witch's help so badly. She must work the magic that I cannot."

He touched her shoulder with his fingertips. She flinched as if they were red-hot, but did not shake him off.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked, fear for her pushing aside his earlier anger. "You took me in when I had no clan. You are my queen. You know I will always protect you."

"Because I can't even defend my throne from other vampires, to say nothing of demons. Your loyalty, brilliant flame though it is, cannot protect me from everything. It was information I could not afford to share. Not with all the work I have done. I've made too many gains with the human lawmakers to lose my seat halfway through the game."

She spread her hands in a gesture of despair. "I've been trying to hold on, to find a solution before my weakness is made public. There is no one with my skill and patience willing to negotiate with the humans."

"I know. We have everything to lose. Who took the book?"

"More important is where it is now, and how I can get it back." Omara lifted her head, pride warring with a look of numb misery. "I'm afraid."

Alessandro felt his body go cold and still. There was something else, something neither of them wanted to say. There were no ex-monarchs among the vampire clans. Crowns were always taken by a combat to the death. It was the one fight where champions weren't allowed.

Without her power, Omara was as good as dead.