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I rested my hand on his wrist. His pulse was steady under my fingers. “Confusion to our enemies, eh?”

He nodded, making it almost a bow. “Indeed, ma petite, indeed.”

I walked beside him towards the hallway, my right hand in my pocket on the Browning, which I’d rescued from the floor. When we got a clear view of the hallway, Jean-Claude’s pulse sped under my fingers.

Damian lay on his side curled around a sword. Blood had soaked around the blade into the dark material of the vest he wore as a shirt. The point came out his back. He’d been spitted. Hard to be a hundred percent sure, but it looked like a heart blow.

There was a new vampire standing beside him. He held a two-handed sword in his hands, point down, like a cane. I recognized the sword. It was the one Damian slept with in his coffin.

The new vamp was tall, six foot six or more, broad-shouldered. His hair was cut like a bowl of yellow ringlets around his face, leaving his ears bare. He wore a white tunic, white trousers, white on white in layers. He stood rigid, at attention, like a soldier.

“Warrick,” Jean-Claude said. “I had hoped you escaped Yvette’s tender mercies.”

The tall vampire looked at us. His eyes flicked to my hand on Jean-Claude’s wrist. He dropped to one knee and held Damian’s sword across his hands. He bowed his head and offered the sword to us. “He fought well. It had been too long since I had such an opponent. I forgot myself and slew him. I would not have wished death on such a warrior. His final death is a great loss.”

Jean-Claude took the sword from the vampire’s hands. “Save your apologies, Warrick. I come to save Damian, not to bury him.”

Warrick raised pale blue eyes to us. “But I have pierced his heart. If you were the master that had made him, then there would be a chance, but you did not call him from his grave to his second life.”

“But I am Master of the City, and Damian took a blood oath.”

Warrick laid the sword on the ground near Damain’s still form. “Your blood may call to him. I pray that it will be enough.”

I stared at him. I’d never heard a vampire say “I pray.” Vampires, for obvious reasons, didn’t pray a lot. I mean, who was going to answer? Oh, yeah, there was the Church of Eternal Life, but they were more a humanist religion, sort of New Wavey. I’m not sure they talked much about God.

Damian’s hair was nearly blood-red, a startling color against the alabaster whiteness of his skin. I knew his eyes were a green that any cat would envy, but tonight his eyes were closed, and if things went badly, they’d never open again.

Jean-Claude knelt beside Damian. He laid his hand on Damian’s chest, near the sword. “If I pull out the sword and his heart does not beat, his eyes do not open, then he is gone. One chance, and one chance only. We could put him in a hole somewhere for a hundred years and until the sword was pulled out of his heart, there would still be a chance. If we do it here and now, we risk losing him forever.”

That last bit of lore is why you never ever remove a stake from a corpse’s heart no matter how dead it appears to be.

I knelt beside them. “Is there a ritual for it?”

He shook his head. “I will invoke the blood oath he took. That will help call him back, but Warrick is correct. I did not make Damian. I am not his true master.”

“No, he’s older than you are by about six hundred years.” I looked down at the vampire, spitted on the sword, lying in a pool of his own dark blood. He was wearing a pair of dress pants that matched the vest. Without a conservative shirt under the vest it looked strangely erotic. I could still feel Damian in my head. His power, the beat and the pulse of centuries flowed through him. He wasn’t dead, or at least not completely dead. I could still feel his aura, something.

“I can still feel Damian,” I said.

“What do you mean, ma petite?”

I had a horrible compulsion to touch Damian. To run my hands over his bare arms. I wasn’t into necrophilia, no matter how close I walked the edge. What was going on?

“I can feel him. His energy