Whether she meant those words as a threat against my family or not, I took it that way. Instantly my ownhungerrose. I wanted to feed my land with her. To drain the undead life out of her. Far off, my land woke from its winter slumber, alerted by my fear-defense-attack mode. The power of my land stretched toward me, searching. I reached toward it, and the tendril of power wrapped into me. Calm flooded through me from that single coil.
Within my land, the Green Knight of the vampire tree cameto attention, but I had left its rooted sapling in the car. The tree would have a difficult time reaching me. Reaching Ming.
“You left a message for me at PsyLED Unit Eighteen,” I said, “that there is a dead body here. You asked for me specifically to pick it up. Tell me about the body.”
Her eyes narrowed as she stared at her finger.
“Please,” I added. “Is it a human or an undead?”
“Undead?” Ming asked. “What is undead? How can the undead have a soul? What can the undeaddoooowith a soul?” She held her hand up in the air, studying her fingers with the colorful, childlike nail polish on them. “How did my soul return to me? Where was it kept for so many centuries? There are those who say otherwise, but I know it was you.” She dropped her hand and scratched a single long cut across her chest between the robe’s lapels. A line of blood appeared in the trail of the fingernail. She had ripped her own skin.
There was something seriously wrong with Ming of Glass.
I fought to keep my breathing slow and deep, my heart rate steady and calm. I was in the presence of a predator, one not herself. Like a rabid dog. Or a bull with mad cow disease.
I clenched my fists and pulled on Soulwood, preparing my earth magic, keeping that slow trickle of blood in my line of sight. I might have to fight her and I had left my best weapon in the passenger seat of the car. But if I needed to kill her, to drain her to death, all I had to do was touch that trickle of blood. Thehungerof the land grew inside me.
“Did you force my soul into me?” Her eyes moved to my face. “Your life force is not human. Areyouthe danger to me? Should I drink you down?”
Thatwas a threat. Even though she was nuttier than a candy bar, Ming could rip me apart with her bare hands.
That thought triggered my brain out of paralysis, into action.
“You owe me two boons,” I said, clutching at that memory, not knowing what it really meant in terms of a balance of power against her threat, but willing to use what I had. “You will not violate your own blood word.”
She shrugged slightly, her robe slipping to reveal one pale shoulder. “Yes.” Before I could respond, she continued, “There are strange trees growing on your land.” She touched her chestand scratched at the drying blood, freshening her wound in a line of bright scarlet. She licked her fingertip again. “They bleed. Charlainn tasted the tree and she…she felt joy. And now she is dead by the dawn.”
I had no idea who Charlainn was or when or why the vampire woman had tasted the vampire tree. The tree was a poorly kept secret that grew on church land and my land and had a mind of its own, sentient and self-aware, and had taken to calling itself the Green Knight. I hoped to control the tree enough to keep it from killing people for its dinner. I even had a dream of monetizing it for lumber. Maybe. Someday. “Go on,” I said.
“You are a people eater. I have heard you are purple, but I see you are not.”
There was nothing amusing about this bizarre conversation, but laughter welled up in me, nervous, half-panicked. Soulwood filled me. Steadying me. I felt the Green Knight in the distance, alert.
“What happened to you?” I asked her softly.
“I found my soul. We all found our souls.” Bitterly she said, “Every Mithran everywhere has our souls and we cannot…” Ming turned her head halfway around to see Rick’s gun aimed at her. It was one of those not-human movements they can make, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. As if the weapon didn’t matter, she swiveled her head back to me. “We cannot make them go away. Souls are destroying us. When your sister’s babies were born, did they bring back our souls? Did your tree bring back our souls?”
Vampires didn’t have souls. Everyone knew that. Ming thought vampires now had souls? She had always been unstable, but this was a new take on vampire psychological instability.
“No baby did anything. Have you called J—” I stopped just in time. “Have you called the Dark Queen? She might know something. Have you contacted her?”
“Cai called. It went to voice mail. So he called again. And her lady-in-waiting took amessage.”
Jane Yellowrock had a lady-in-waiting? She was more likely to need an armorer than someone to paint her nails.
“When her secundo, the one called Eli Younger, called me back, he wove a tale of angels and demons, but I know…” Ming stopped and drank deeply again and tossed the emptybottle across the room. It hit the wall and clattered to the floor. I managed not to flinch.
When Rick and Ayatas returned from New Orleans and the coronation, they had referred to the vampires being a very different sort of strangeness from their usual eccentricity, as if very drunk. They had been right.
Cai opened the door to my side, looked at the gun aimed at the back of his mistress’ head, and walked casually across the room to Ming. He held out his arm to Ming and she took it, embedded her fangs in his wrist, and drank. Cai laughed and stroked her hair. It was unexpectedly personal and suggestive, the way he touched her.
When she withdrew her fangs, she licked his wrist to clot the blood and close the wound. “Thank you. You will take the foolish nonhumans in the kitchen doorway into the front parlor. Keep them there.”
My spine went straight. I did not want to be alone with a crazy Ming of Glass.
“Have the boy’s body taken to the driveway so they may remove the filth.”
“Yes, my mistress,” Cai said.
