There probably were cameras in the condo, too.
“You don’t know—” Mari-Brigid started to say, but subsided at a minute gesture from The Driver.
“Alvarez is brokering several territorial boundary deals for Bonarata,” The Driver said, “among the fae and certain vampire seethes believed to be independent.”
“The ones Frost gathered,” Asil speculated to himself.
“You know Frost?” asked The Driver.
“I met him before he died at the hands of a werewolf.”
“You?” The Driver’s incredulity was faked.
Asil smiled. It was well-known who’d killed Frost. “No. But I was there to watch Adam Hauptman and his mate.”
Yes, he thought. A werewolf killed a powerful vampire not all that long ago.
The Driver looked at him intently. “You intend to kill Alvarez.”
“I do not make deals with people whose names I do not know,” Asil told him.
“Bobby,” The Driver said, holding out his hand. “Bobby Anderson.”
Asil exchanged a firm handshake.
“So,” he said. “Knowing that I am of the opinion that if all vampires ceased to exist at this moment, it would not be a bad thing, why do you think I should kill Alvarez?”
“Bonarata is planning on moving from Europe to the US.”
Not expanding his reach, not growing his empire—but moving.
“Do you know why?” Asil asked. Something was driving him. Was there another Power stirring in Europe? Or something he wanted here?
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “But Alvarez is a key component in Bonarata’s plans. Alvarez owns people carefully placed in the tech industry. And he has some kind of hold on several of the Gray Lords that might stop the fae from interfering.”
“Then by all means, Alvarez needs to die,” said Asil, pleased. He would have killed the vampire regardless—it was obviously the task that had been set before him tonight. But it was good that he would not have trouble defending his actions to the Marrok.
“We need to get going soon,” Bobby said. “If you are too late, Alvarez will know something’s up.”
Asil considered not going. He could use Mari-Brigid as a lure because the vampire who had bitten her could find her wherever she went. But Asil found himself reluctant to go on the attack without knowing more about his enemy.
If the vampire was as old and powerful as Bobby had indicated, then Asil should know him.
Like werewolves, vampires tended to come to an end well before their first century. He didn’t have any idea how many of them died in the process of their making, but once they were actual vampires, they tended to die in their first twenty or thirty years as a monster.
That meant the average vampire had been a vampire longer than the average werewolf, but not by a significant amount. A three-hundred-year-old werewolf was a wolf that Asil would know by reputation, if not on sight. He was nearly certain that he could say the same about a vampire. Alvarez was not a name he associated with any vampire.
“What does Alvarez look like?” Asil asked. “Do either of you have a photo?”
“I’ve never seen him,” Mari-Brigid said. “Neither of us has.”
Bobby nodded. “If he leaves home, he does it with his own people.”
“People?” Asil asked.
“Vampires,” Bobby said, and Mari-Brigid hugged herself.
And this was why jumping too fast was unwise.
