The Ruby Blade Read online

  “Why does she want to talk to me?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask.”

  There was no reason not to, other than I was hoping to get another long shower, some more biscuits, and a good sleep in a soft bed. I had a few things I’d like to say to her, anyway. I might have almost forgiven Raj, but my stomach hadn’t yet forgiven her.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I DROVE US to New Orleans because Raj was a terrible driver and regardless of my immortality, I didn’t feel like risking it if I didn’t have to.

  “Eleanor,” Raj said after we’d been riding in silence for about a half hour. I ignored him. I still didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to discuss my feelings right now.

  I tried to find a radio station, but nothing was coming in. I didn’t know how radios worked, but for some reason, I’d thought there’d be underground ham radio operators out there getting the message of the upcoming apocalypse out into the world.

  The freeway was almost completely empty, and I took advantage of the lack of traffic and traffic cops to exceed the speed limit. I rolled down my window and let the wind roar through the car—partially because it felt a little like flying, and partially to drown out any further attempts at conversation Raj might make.

  When we pulled into the city, Raj directed me to park on a side street that looked like it’d been abandoned for a lot longer than a few months.

  “This is part of the city that was decimated during Katrina,” Raj said. “They never got the funds to rebuild here, so most of the residents moved. The only people still living here are squatters and homeless people. They barely have enough resources to stay fed and clothed.”

  “I wasn’t criticizing, Raj,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t react to every thought that crosses my mind. It’s intrusive and weird and a little uncalled for.”

  “You’re right. I’m on edge. I don’t like that you’re still angry with me, but I don’t feel like I deserve to be forgiven. What I did to you was reprehensible. I’m no better than your erstwhile friend, Finnegan.”

  I started to protest, but he held up his hand. “I am not often prone to fits of self-recrimination, so let me have this moment.”

  “No,” I said. “Florence doesn’t let me flog myself, and I’m going to pay it forward. Do you know what the biggest difference between you and Finn is? You feel bad about what happened. You did what you did for the greater good and still feel bad. The only greater good Finn believes in is the greater good for himself. His actions were always purely selfish. He misled me so many times, kidnapped me, tried to have me bound, tried to curse me into being his helpless love monkey, and has hurt or tried to hurt almost everyone I know. And he doesn’t feel an ounce of guilt or remorse. That, right there, is the difference between you and Finn.”

  “Thank you,” Raj said. A gulf of debt loomed between us.

  “Never thank a Fae,” I reminded him. “I’ll call in your debt someday.”

  “I look forward to it.” He opened his arms. “I’d prefer to fly the rest of the way there. I don’t want your car anywhere near her safe house, in case we’re being followed.”

  My heart rate accelerated. I wasn’t ready to be back in his arms again. I might have forgiven him, but I was still hurt. He dropped his arms. “It’s okay. We can walk.”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s a lot more efficient to fly.” I walked up to him until there was barely a sliver of air between us and tilted my head back to look at him. “Please, Raj?”

  His arms encircled me and pulled me in close. I wrapped my arms around his neck, tucked my head into the space between his chin and his chest and breathed in the scent of him. My pulse sped up again, but this time it wasn’t a nervous reaction. After all this, I still wanted the vampire.

  “I will always want you,” he said as he launched us into the air.

  I looked around the room where Raj had set me down. We were on the third story of a huge old house with wrap-around porches on every floor. Everything was pink. The house’s exterior, the walls in the room I was in now, and most of the furnishings. “This place is…” I didn’t know how to end that sentence. There weren’t enough words to describe the Pepto-Bismol hellscape we were in.

  “It is not my first choice for receiving guests,” Marie said from behind me. I jumped. Damn vampires. Every single one of them should have to wear a bell. I turned around to face her.

  “Marie.” I inclined my head slightly.

  “Eleanor.” She did the same. We stared at each other, and it felt like a werewolf dominance contest. Finally, a ghost of a smile flitted across her face, and the tension broke.

  “Raj,” she said. “Leave us.”

  He started to protest, but she turned the full force of her gaze on him. He took a half-step backwards before he caught himself, then bowed deeply, and left the room. It was weird seeing him cowed like that. I was a little impressed.

  “What do you want, Marie?” I asked. No point in beating around the bush.

  “Just to talk. There is no one in this house but us, so there’s no one to overhear.”

  “I only have your word on that,” I pointed out. “The place could be crawling with vampires and ghouls.”

  “You’re right, of course. But, I will swear to you that it isn’t, and you can either trust me or not. I am a woman of my word, even if I do have the very handy ability to lie.”

  There were many reasons not to trust her, but for some reason I did. “Fine. I will take you at your word that we are alone. What would you like to talk about?”

  “Would you like to sit?” She gestured towards the pair of overstuffed pink velvet chaises facing each other in the middle of the room under an oversized crystal chandelier. It was revolting, but the chaises looked comfortable at least. There was a small table between them with a bottle in a champagne bucket and two flutes.

  “Why not?” I settled myself onto the crushed velvet and glanced up. The chandelier, adorned with pink candles that were burning away merrily in their sconces, had dozens of pink ceramic roses that had been placed at random on the pink body in-between the pink crystals. I couldn’t look away, and only the pop of a cork leaving a bottle tore my attention away.

  Marie had opened the champagne and was pouring it into the glasses. Naturally, it was pink.

  “What else was I going to choose?” she asked. “If I’d thought to serve food, we’d probably be eating watermelon. This is the home of one of the vampires in my clan. She has graciously allowed me to use it while I go about locating a new residence.”

  “It’s a unique decorating scheme,” I said.

  “I love talking to the Fae when they’re trying to be polite,” Marie said. “You have such a way with words.”

  I couldn’t think of a polite response, so I sipped my champagne and tried to smile.

  “Your army destroyed my house and several dozen of my ghouls,” Marie said. Small-talk time was over.

  “They weren’t my army. I was in prison when they showed up.”

  “It doesn’t matter who raised them. They flocked to your banner.”

  “To be fair,” I said, “You had imprisoned me. It’s not like they were wrong about that.”

  “I really that house. And my throne. It’s going to take ages to restore.”

  “You have the time,” I pointed out. “Neither of us is getting any older.”

  “I demand reparations,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “What do you need reparations for?” She looked shocked.

  “My unjust imprisonment? That I’ve mentioned repeatedly?”

  She waved her hand. “That was not unjust. It was all part of a larger scheme to fulfill a promise to Medb and to pull the wool over her eyes at the same time.”

  “A scheme I was not a part of.”

  “It doesn’t matter that you weren’t aware of the finer points, what matters is that it was successful.”
/>   Sometimes, I hated the pragmatism of the very, very elderly. I smothered my irritation and returned the conversation back to her reparations. “Why should I pay your reparations because an army that I had no knowledge of nor control over burned down your house attempting to rescue me from an imprisonment that, regardless of purpose, was still against my will?”

  “Because it was your army.”

  I wasn’t getting very far with the “out of my control” argument, so I tried a different tack. “Once I was freed from your dungeon and found out that I did have an army, I got them to stop, didn’t I?”

  “So, you admit that it was your army?”

  I groaned. I was not going to win this argument. Marie was too skilled. “What kind of reparations do you want?”

  A grin spread across Marie’s face in slow-motion, revealing her fangs and causing an involuntary shiver to travel up and down my spine. Marie was scary as fuck, and I needed to be very careful. “I want a favor,” she said. “A future favor, to be determined later at the time of my choosing. When I call it in, you will answer, no matter what.”

  I mulled that over. It was much too broad, and I knew now why she’d sent Raj away. He would’ve been able to negotiate on my behalf to make sure I wasn’t getting locked into something I’d regret. I countered, “I will owe you a favor sometime in the future, but if what you ask isn’t something I can do in good conscience, I have the right to refuse. Likewise, if it would put someone I love in danger either due to the nature of what you want or the timing in which you want it, I can defer.”

  “That’s not a favor freely promised,” Marie said. “And you can’t claim your conscience to avoid repaying me.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to lie,” I pointed out.

  “That’s not the point. Your conscience is already over-developed and not suited for the world in which you walk. I don’t want to be bogged down because you don’t know how to see the big picture. I will not ask you to permanently damage anyone you love, but I might ask you to make them uncomfortable.”

  “How do you define permanent damage?”

  “Death or unrecoverable maiming,” she replied with no hesitation.

  “Recoverable maiming is on the table?”

  “Of course.”

  “No deal,” I said. “I will not hurt the ones I love.”

  She sighed noisily and unnecessarily. “I will not ask you to harm anyone that you care about without a very good reason that I will explain at the time of the request so that you may enter into a situation with the full knowledge of what you’re doing and why. If you refuse, you will owe me a second favor, in addition to the unfulfilled favor, but with the same terms.”

  “And the timing?” I asked. “I can’t come fulfill a favor the day before I open the last gate or if I’m in the middle of a conflict.”

  “I won’t ask you to do something if it will take you away from something of universal import, but I also won’t wait around to be attended to at your convenience.”

  “Which of us decides if the event is of universal import?”

  “I do, of course,” Marie said.

  “Nope. We’ll appoint a neutral third party. How about Raj?”

  Marie laughed her stomach-curdling, nails-on-a-chalkboard, three-part harmony laugh. “You can’t mean to imply that Raj is neutral when it comes to you.”

  “He’s old, he’s pragmatic, and he knows how to look at the big picture. I think his recent actions prove that.”

  Marie pursed her lips as she considered. “You’re right. He might care deeply for you, but he is still under my aegis. We both have a claim to him. I agree.”

  “I agree to pay you reparations for the damage done to your home, possessions, and your ghouls by the army of Fae loyal to me. The payment is to be one future favor of your choosing. You will not ask me to harm someone I love without reason, and if I decide that reason isn’t good enough, I will owe you two favors with the same terms. The timing of this favor will not interfere with events important to the world and Raj, as a third-party, will decide if any event that I might feel is important ranks high enough.”

  Marie smiled again, showing her fangs. “We have an agreement,” she said, with her voice hitting three registers simultaneously. Too bad her extra voices were so nauseatingly creepy. She could’ve made a fortune as a singer doing harmonies with herself.

  We shook hands, and I felt the deal solidify in my mind—a different type of binding than either my dragon’s chains or my connection with Isaac. My body vibrated as the contract took hold and I felt the blood drain from my face. Regardless of what had been done to me in Marie’s dungeon, my Fae nature was strengthening every day. I tipped back my glass and finished the champagne in a single gulp.

  “I think in any other circumstance, I would’ve very much liked to get to know you better,” I said as she refilled my glass.

  “Come back when it’s all over, and we’ll see.”

  Marie and I finished the bottle of champagne and were more than halfway through a second (this time, thankfully not pink) before Raj reappeared. He was disgruntled, and for the first time since I’d met him, his lack of impassiveness in front of other people wasn’t a momentary, almost imperceptible slip.

  “Are you finished?” he asked Marie, which none of his usual charm or the deference he’d shown her before.

  “You forget yourself, Rajyapala,” she said.

  “My apologies, my queen,” he said. The mask he usually wore settled back over his face, and he smiled up at her even as he bowed.

  Marie looked at me. “I think you got the better end of the deal. Raj is not as impartial as you would’ve had me believe.”

  “I didn’t claim he was impartial; I claimed that he had ties to both of us and often took the long view of current events.”

  Marie laughed, and I shuddered. “I underestimated you. That’s a mistake I will not make again.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread that around,” I said.

  “Oh, no worries. If I ever must speak of our deal, I’m going to let it be known that I cheated you terribly. Better for my reputation, and, for the time being, better that people continue to underestimate you.”

  I nodded my head at her. “It’s a win/win situation for us both.”

  “One more item,” Marie said. “We should talk about your coronation gift.”

  I tilted my head to one side. “My coronation gift?”

  “The head of the pretender, of course. Should I deliver it on a platter? Or would you prefer that I procure a bowling ball bag”—heh—“and send it to you that way?”

  “I’m partial to the ball bag—heh—myself because then I can zip it up and not look at it again. I’m not sure, though, if Medb’s head will keep as well as Rasputin’s. How is he? Settling into his new home? Oh, no! He didn’t burn up, did he?”

  “I’m not sure he could, even if he’d been left unattended,” Marie said. “He’s grumpy, but that’s probably to be expected since he doesn’t have a body anymore.”

  “It’s so weird,” I said. “As for the head of the pretender, would it be possible to give that to me with the body still attached?”

  Marie sighed. “You are a spoilsport. If that’s what you truly want. Let me know between now and then if you change your mind, though. I would very much like to be the one to end her miserable existence.”

  “So, there’s some history there?”

  “When this is all even, and the debt between us is cleared, come over, and I’ll tell you the story,” Marie promised.

  “This is great,” Raj interrupted. “I’m glad you two are getting along. I’d like to know what deal you roped Eleanor into without me there to advocate for her.”

  “It’s between us,” Marie said. “You’ll find out in due time.”

  “Eleanor,” Raj said. “I would like to take you home now. I have a long drive ahead of me yet, and you should get some sleep.”

  I finished my glass of champagne and ros
e to my feet. I held my hand out to Marie, and when she took it, I said, “Tonight was a very interesting night. I appreciate your honesty, your hospitality, and would be delighted if you never invited me to this particular room again.”

  “I make no promises about the room,” Marie said. “I’m thinking of buying her a shag rug to pull it all together.”

  “Pink?”

  “Naturally.”

  I stepped back into Raj’s arms, and he wrapped them around me and took off.

  He set me down at the front door of the house in Hattiesburg, I turned to face him, and he grazed my cheek with one knuckle. “I’ll see you soon,” he said and then disappeared into the night sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “WHERE HAVE YOU been?” Florence was standing in the living room, arms akimbo, when I walked in the house. Emma and Petrina were both absent, so I knew she’d been waiting up for me specifically.

  “New Orleans, taking in some nightlife,” I responded.

  “Nightlife?”

  “Well, night unlife is probably more accurate,” I amended. “Raj took me to see Marie.”

  “And you couldn’t have told someone you were leaving?”

  “Florence, I love you. You’re my best friend, but you are not my mother nor are you my older sister. I was with Raj.”

  “How was I supposed to know? You’re not at full power, and you have a lot of enemies out there.”

  “I understand you were worried, but I think you’re overreacting. It’s late. I’m tired. I’ve had more champagne than was strictly necessary, and I’d like to get to bed.”

  Florence pursed her lips but didn’t say anything further.

  I felt like an errant teen but decided I could throw her a bone anyway. “If I ever do anything like that again, I’ll leave a note. Satisfied?”

  She considered my olive branch, then nodded.