Greywalker - Kat Richardson [88]
I bridled. “Excuse me?”
“You got ’em hangin’ all over you,” he growled, reaching toward me. I shied, but he hooked something out of my hair and pulled it back to the desktop. A wisp of Grey, like a steam-spun cobweb, wafted from his fingertips. He wadded it up and shoved it into his inside breast pocket. “Now, what do you want?”
“I—I’m a private investigator and I’m working for Cameron Shadley.”
“Edward’s little blond toy? That Cameron?”
“Yes, that Cameron.” I gave a sharp, annoyed nod. “But he’s not Edward’s ‘toy,’ as you put it, anymore.”
He sketched a shrug.
“I need to know more about Edward before I attempt to meet with him about Cameron,” I continued. “Alice suggested you might have something to say that I could use.”
Carlos raised an eyebrow and started laughing, bellowing shocks like a gale against a plate glass window.
“You have an ax to grind?” I prompted. I was quaking inside.
He lowered his laughter to a seismic chuckle. “You bet I’ve got an ax to grind, and when it’s good and sharp, I’d like to bury it in that bastard’s skull.”
“Why?” My voice did not shake, though by rights it should have.
“You wouldn’t like the story very much. Or understand it. And if I take you into my confidence, daylighter, I cross a line most of my kind would find unforgivable.”
“I can’t ask you to jeopardize yourself for my client’s sake.” I started to get up, relieved to have an excuse to leave.
“What do you plan to do with this information you’re seeking?”
“Raise trouble.”
Carlos frowned in thought. I shuddered at the rolling weight of his mental processes grinding over me. The Grey had been an encroaching sea near Alice. It was an inescapable drowning pool in his presence.
“You will tell no one what you learn from me.”
I fought the compulsion to agree. “I will tell my client, if he needs to know, and I will use whatever I have to to get to Edward.”
His stare ripped into me. “The details shall not go farther than this room until you face Edward.”
I swallowed dust and shuddered. “Yes. All right.” I sat back down, my knees shaking and my heart thumping weird syncopations.
TWENTY-ONE
Carlos leaned across the desk and pinned me to the chair with his gaze. He spoke in a low, intense voice that enthralled and smothered me.
“It’s not mere blood that sustains a vampire, but the life force that flows with the blood. Our own is weak. We must take this life force from others or we fade to crippled shadows, fall into madness, and drown by slow agony to the true death.
“The most vital and powerful of creatures offers the greatest quality of life. That is why we prey on daylighters, like you. You offer us so much that we need not hunt too frequently and death is not always necessary to acquire what we need. A vampire uses this energy to replace what he cannot produce himself. All creatures need it. Some rare few can give up this energy by will and use it for other purposes.
“When it is given up, it eats your own life as well. If the power required is great enough, it may devour every shred of life and death within you. You must have other lives—other blood—to draw upon. If the undertaking requires great power, it may require many lives. Or the blood of a vampire, which commingles life and death. Neither blood nor this power are to be coerced or commanded. The price for them is too high. But Edward demanded them—ripped them—from me.
“We met in Lisbon. Edward was still young, but his ambition burned like an equatorial sun. He schemed and clawed to raise himself, but only antagonized the rest of our kind. He had few friends but I—fool—was among them.”
His voice fell into older rhythms as he spoke, and I felt the past rise around us in a Grey curtain I could not turn back.
“He had a plan to destroy his enemies at a single blow, but it required that power which he, himself, did not command.”
His words began to press on me.
“He brought his plan to me. I told him it was too risky. The blood required, the deaths, would be noticed, and the spells were