“I suppose you would.”
Well, now I was worried. Not that there was a lot I could do about it. If I found a dead body and told the cops a vampire drank them dry, I’d be laughed out of the station. Plus, there would be the problem of proof.
As in I had none.
Old Rossi kept some cutthroat lawyers on call for family members with legal problems. Lawyers who also happened to be vampires and would make sure I’d lose that sort of case.
Still, I’d do a quick check to make sure no one from Spokane had turned up dead after a wedding.
“I’m joking,” he said. “I drank alcohol, not blood.”
I tried not to let him see how glad I was to hear that. But he was a vampire. I’m sure he could tell my mood by my heart rate.
Voices grew louder as we neared a family room toward the back of the house that was the size of a hotel ballroom.
Leon wasn’t kidding all the Rossis were here. At last count, we had sixty-four vampires in town. Many of them were hermits on the outskirts of Ordinary whom I never saw. But I knew Rossi kept tabs on them, and their comings and goings. I scanned faces of the vamps I’d rarely seen, reacquainting myself with them. They, of course, hadn’t changed since I’d last seen them.
Long life had some advantages.
“He’s in his study.” Leon pointed to the door at my right.
“Who?”
“Old Rossi.”
“Did you tell him I was here?”
He smiled again. His eyes focused on my neck and did not budge. I knew he was messing with me. “He knows you are here. We all do.”
Right. If it wasn’t the scent of my blood that tipped them off, it was probably the whole vampire telepathy thing they all shared. I’m sure Leon had told Old Rossi I was at the door before I’d even rung the doorbell.
“Thanks.” Still, manners were manners. I knocked softly.
“Come in.”
I opened the dark wooden door and stepped into the room.
For a creature of the night, Old Rossi sure liked his pastels. The room was painted a soothing misty gray, the accents a soft white, the wood floor honey blond. Although this was his study, there were no books in this room and no desk. There was, instead, a curve of lush shell-blue couches, slender tables that seemed to have grown out of the honey flooring, and wall-to-wall white open-fronted cabinets with backlit glass shelves. All filled with carved eggshells.
Hundreds of eggshells, from huge ostrich eggs to tiny hummingbird eggs, all of them carved into impossible swirls, hollows and designs, perched on delicate glass pedestals that seemed too thin to for them to balance upon.
A few of the eggs were brushed with gilding or showed glints of diamonds and other precious gems and metals. A few were dyed so that the contrast in carved layers created landscapes and portraits. But most of them were simply soft shades of shell, carved into impossible twists and cages.
There was no carpeting on the floor. Every vibration of every movement in the house was telegraphed to the fragile sculptures. It said something about vampires that there could be dozens of them in this house and the shells weren’t even trembling.
I took in a breath and let it out slowly, hoping my heartbeat didn’t send anything tumbling.
Rossi sat on the couch, his back toward me so that I only saw his dark hair and wide shoulders.
“I need to speak with you,” I said.
“I know.”
I walked over to him, my feet falling as quietly as I could manage, the slightest rattle of glass and shell brushing the air with each step. When I rounded the couch, I could see what Rossi was looking at.
Sven Rossi lay upon a glass table in front of the couch. The glass table beneath him was low to the ground but both long and wide enough to hold him. It seemed to be the only sturdy thing in the room.
Sven was naked, a white satin sheet draped over his hips. The designs drawn in blood across his pale chest seemed too loud in the room, a gory shout against the silence of the artistic carved shells that surrounded us.
