“Did Took try to call you?” he pressed Lawrence on the other side of the computer screen. “He should have been in touch to update you about Waring.”
She hunched over on her desk, her face too close to the screen. “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe he stopped to feed.”
Jealousy scratched at the inside of Madoc’s throat. Or maybe that was just the scars healing. He took a swig of tainted whiskey. It was petty, worse it was selfish. He’d wanted Took there to swear over his injuries and bare his throat for comfort, the cradle of a lover’s hand against his torn scalp as Madoc gave pleasure instead of pain.
He shifted as his cock thickened at the idea, his fantasy eager to expand further to Took naked under him and the low, hungry noises he made as Madoc fucked him.
“Maybe,” he said. His voice caught and he took another drink to moisten it. “The boyars agreed to release Waring to our custody. The case is ours. So if West obstructs any of you, if he even drags his feet, remind him exactly who he works for.”
Lawrence raised her eyebrows. “My mother?”
Madoc tilted his glass toward the screen in acknowledgment. “And those whom she answers to.”
“The boyars,” Lawrence said. Her voice trembled with something too close to awe for Madoc’s liking. “Did you really speak to them?”
“To one,” Madoc said. “Elizabeth.”
Lawrence sighed and absently brushed a hand over her hair. “Is she still as beautiful as ever? Of them all, she gave up the most when they agreed to confine themselves for the Accord.”
Not how Madoc remembered it. Not quite.
He set the whiskey down. It didn’t have much effect on him, but most of a bottle was still enough to loosen his tongue more than he should allow, if only from the old habits of company.
“She hasn’t changed,” he said. It wasn’t much of a lie. The withered raisin thing in the shroud of salt had already plumped back up to simply raddled from her feast of Madoc’s blood. She could be beautiful again if she wished, and the person under the salt was the same monstrous bitch she’d always been.
Madoc had given her his loyalty, but it had never blinded him.
“Why bring him back?” Lawrence asked. “I thought you were going to just interview him there.”
“There were developments,” Madoc said. “Is Pally there?”
Lawrence scowled but turned the laptop around to aim it at the other side of the desk. The sight of his face caught on camera made Pally scowl, as if that would make it less pretty. His beauty had never pleased him, not when he was a Knight who viewed his own comely face as an invitation to sin or as a new vampire whose beauty had become a commodity. Behind him Quick looked up from something that flashed on his laptop. He gave Madoc a quick nod.
“What could develop under The Salt?” Pally asked.
Madoc grabbed the tablet and got up. He walked up to the front of the plane, where he’d left Waring cuffed to the steel rings sunk into the structure of the jet.
“Don’t look into his eyes,” he warned as he turned the tablet around. It was likely that Waring had ruined his spell when he spoke, and it would take a full year to cast another. And unlikely that he could do… that jump… through a computer screen. That wasn’t a risk Madoc was willing to take, however, when it would end with Waring in Pally’s body. Once upon a time, under another name, Pally had been the closest thing Madoc had to a peer in slaughter. “Our young murderer has more… esoteric talents.”
Waring looked more the sorcerer now. Char marks fluttered under his skin where the magic had turned on him, flecks of ash caught in his eyes and inked over his lips. He’d been bridled with a nail, a leather strap twisted around the back of his head to hold it in place, and the other nails were driven through his hands and feet.
Barbaric, but Madoc had done his best to minimize the damage. The nails were laced between the bones, not through them, and by rights, he should have put one of the nails through Waring’s tongue.
Despite his situation, Waring looked aggressively placid and had remained silent even when they pierced his hands. Now he just stared blankly to the left of the screen. His eyes only flickered slightly when Pally snarled at him.
“Sorcerer,” he spat. “What else can you expect of Hunters? First they lie down with dogs, now they get up with demons.”
Madoc could have pointed out that Tepes was a sorcerer himself, or had been before he was bitten. It was Tepes’s sorcery that let him bind his boyars to him, seal the blood-hungry greed that always destroyed Anakim alliances, and rise up to rule the Empire. He didn’t.
Pally’s prejudices might not make any sense, but they were his.
“Took thinks….”
Madoc paused as he considered how to shorthand the possession and eviction and then how to convince Pally and Lawrence that Took’s story of those “tufts” of memory caught in his mind wasn’t just the rags of old trauma.
“Took managed to get him to talk,” he said. It wasn’t even a lie. “That’s why his magic backfired on him—it had its pound of flesh.”
Waring groaned out something like a bitter laugh and leaned his head back against the headrest. It mustn’t have counted as communication by magic’s rules, for his skin didn’t darken any further.
