This had happened in the hours since the attack on the null prison house. If Mainet had been behind that attack, and he had gained some magical energies after theattack, had his claim on Leo already deepened? Could it work so fast?
“What if we stuck you in a null room? Could you talk then?”
Leo’s eyes went wild with an expression I had never seen on his face. Fear. Terror.
“I retract my questions and request,” I said.
Leo blew out the breath he had taken, and his shoulders slumped. His hands relaxed to stillness.
“Go on, Alex,” I said.
“Over the next few decades, Amaury Pellissier turned his sons-of-the-body and his nephews, including Leonard Eugène Zacharie Pellissier and his brother, known as El Mago, in 1525.”
Leo’s eyes bled back to human and his fangs retracted, but only for a moment before they clicked back out, and back in, back and forth, as if he fought a compulsion. Something or someone wanted him to be vamped-out. He was fighting it.
Alex said, “Amaury Pellissier and his scions came to the Americas and started the colonial branch of the Pellissier blood family, under the proprietorship of Clan Pellissier and the French Blood Master, Mainet Pellissier, in the French countryside. Then there was a break between Amaury and Mainet.”
That made sense. Amaury had already been a powerful vamp when he came to the Americas. Once here, he found freedom enticing. He had an opportunity to take control of his own fortunes and so he did. “He dumped his maker?” I asked.
Leo’s eyes widened.
“The records of the cause of that break in the power of the clan are missing,” Alex said.
“But somehow he broke the link between master and scion.” I thought about the angel. About all the magical amulets in the city. About all the vamps who had come here, to a small, tired city on the Gulf of Mexico. Why here? Why not New York?
Leo tightened his lips and didn’t meet my eyes, the frown again pulling down his face.
Yeah. Leo knew why Mainet and Amaury parted waysbut couldn’t say. Couldn’t say anything about Mainet, or the angel, leading me to conclude that the two, and Mainet’s break with Amaury, were related.
If Leo was bound and under a vamp blood compulsion, that binding had to have deepened between the time he appeared to me at the null prison and now. Maybe Mainet hadn’t just gotten stronger. Maybe he had caught Leo.
I took Leo’s icy-cold undead hands and pushed up the sleeves of his black suit coat. There were bloodred abrasions circling both wrists, five inches wide. Fingerprints were deeper. Fingernails had broken his skin. He had been held down and... and he hadn’t healed. I looked at his neck. There was nothing there, no bite marks. But there were other places a vamp could be drunk from.
“He caught you. You got away,” I whispered, “even after he had you.”
Leo’s shoulders slumped. He took a breath he didn’t need and blew it out. His eyes met mine and his were damp with tears. This close, I saw a white hair on his suit coat and I plucked it free, twirled it. I had a pretty good idea what had happened. “Brute appeared, didn’t he? And he got you free.”
Leo blinked away tears and I understood.
“But not quite in time. You’ve been rebound, or your binding has been partially strengthened by your old master.” And yet, Leo was here, clearly in defiance of this new compulsion. I wanted to hug him. But I knew better than to get my skin anywhere near his fangs.
Alex cleared his throat to warn us he was still on the comms and continued his info. “Mainet lived in seclusion in France on the Pellissier winery until Grégoire started challenging and killing vamps who refused to participate in the change of leadership,” Alex said. “The reasons why the Heir came here are obvious: to run away from Edmund and Grégoire and a conflict he didn’t want to engage in, to get the box everyone wants”—meaning the heart of the SOD—“to take power over the U.S. vamps, to take over as the new SOD, and to take over the Dark Queen.”
Leo met my eyes. In them I saw agreement to thewords Alex had just stated. Yeah. Power. That was what all the old vamps wanted. They had lived so long that they had inevitably buried their loved ones, their unchanged human children, their scions stuck in devoveo, all their blood-servants, all who perished, the years passing too quickly. They had loved and always lost. Broken and lonely, they had drunk and sexed their way through all the other humans, and burned through all the passions that a young vamp was prey to. All that was left was power, control, remaking the world in their own image.
And there was still the blasted heart.
I didn’t say it, but it seemed obvious that the heart belonging to one of the creators of the vamps could possibly be used in any ceremony to finish binding the angel and maybe bind a demon. And with those two bound, use their power to affect changes not only on Earth, but maybe in heaven and hell as well.
That made sense, as Earth was the place where heaven and hell met.
Leo stood, shoving back his chair. It wasn’t the smooth graceful motion of the Leo I knew, but rough, clumsy, and inelegant. Oh yeah. Bound. Fighting it.
Stiffly, Leo gestured. It was a little like the sort of hand gesture one would give a dog, and I grinned. It was the kind of thing the Leo of old would have done and it sent an unexpected sense of release through me. He walked to the door, into the hallway, leaving the door open. He didn’t look back. The former MOC appeared to be heading to the elevator. I looked around the room for Eli.Right. In surgery. “Any news?” I asked Alex, one eye on Leo.
Alex, the mind reader, said, “Eli: awake. Drinking from a lower-level vamp and acting all stoic and ranger-y. Bruiser: in video conference with the governor but will join you at any moment should you need him. Koun: His bones were set by one of the Roberes, and he’s healing. Alex: My drones sent back good vid and info, are all back safe, and I’m going through to cut out the unusable and enhance the necessary useful stuff. Nothing else happening.”
I stood from my chair and followed Leo through theopen door. Two of the security team fell into place just behind me, though not the same two I had coldcocked. One of these was a vamp I had seen around, an older, more experienced one, if his smooth gait was an indication. His name was Jermaine. With him was a human, Blue Voodoo, one of the security guys hired when Derek was still with us.
