"I don't want a fight. I'm not up for it tonight. I just need to know some stuff, like why the Senate grabbed me and…"

Billy Joe held up a hand. "Please, I know my job." He settled back on the tub and talked while I examined my knees. Raw-looking scrapes and bruises had flowered on both of them despite the height of my boots, promising stiffness by tomorrow. I knew I should feel lucky that I was alive to be an aching mess, but somehow that thought failed to cheer me up. Maybe because I didn't think I'd stay that way for long. "That vamp outside, Louis-César, is on loan from Europe. He's some kind of dueling champion. It's said that he's never lost a fight, and from what I hear he's been in hundreds."

"He can add another to the total after tonight." Not that it had looked like the guard was much of a challenge, but I guess it counted since he had decapitated the guy. "Did you know Tony bribed some lunatics to kill me right in front of the Senate?"

"That's nuts. Mircea'd kill him."

I brightened slightly. I hadn't thought of it that way. If Tony had been behind the second attempt on my life, he'd just made Mircea look bad, since nothing lowered your rep quicker in vamp circles than not to be able to control an underling. Even though I usually liked him, I'd always gotten the impression that Mircea would be a bad person to cross.

"We can only hope so."

"Yeah, well, it don't sound like Tony's style to me." I shrugged. In my opinion, Tony didn't have any style. "Anyway, when I learned Louis-César is second in the European Senate, I did some digging for you."

"Great. So tell me something I care about."

Billy Joe gave a long-suffering sigh. "All right. You're in the main headquarters of MAGIC, the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation, better known as party central for things that go bump in the night."

"I know that." Actually, I think I had figured it out, at least subconsciously. I'd never been there before, but where else could a mage bust in on a Senate meeting and a vamp greet a were like an old buddy? I just hadn't had time to think about it, and it wasn't like I knew a lot about what passed for the supernatural UN. Tony wasn't interested in talking through problems. He was more the stake-'em-and-forget-'em type, a practice that worked on much more than vamps. It's one of the similarities among species that MAGIC hasn't chosen to highlight: nothing lives too well with a big piece of wood stuck through its heart.

"Well, maybe here's something you don't know. The Senate is leading on this one because it's a vamp who's causing the trouble, but everybody's upset. You know that Russian master Tony used to do business with, the guy running half the rackets in Moscow?"

"Rasputin?" The old adviser to Nicholas II, the last tsar of all the Russias, had been poisoned, shot, stabbed and drowned by some prince who thought he had too much influence over the royal family. He was right: the tsarina loved the unkempt, self-proclaimed monk because her son was a hemophiliac, and only Rasputin's hypnotic stare was able to heal him. In return, Rasputin got power, and a lot of his friends were appointed to important government jobs. The prince and the group of nobles he'd talked into helping him remove the new power in town had been real surprised that poison, stabbing and gunshot wounds hadn't seemed to faze Rasputin. It wasn't until he fell off a bridge and they hauled his apparently lifeless corpse out of the freezing water that they were satisfied. Historians had been arguing ever since about why it took him so long to die. The Russian mafia could have told them: it's hard to kill somebody who's already dead.

"Yeah, that's the one. Rasputin got annoyed 'cause the Senate seat he wanted went to Mei Ling. He doesn't stand a chance of getting onto the European Senate—most of those crazy sons of bitches make even him look soft—but he thought he was a shoo-in over here. Word is, he didn't take the rejection well. He disappeared for a while, then about six months ago showed up again and began attacking Senate members. He's killed four and wounded two others so bad, no one knows if they'll pull through, and now he's challenged the Consul to a duel to try and take over the whole shebang. She called in a favor from the Consul in Europe and brought this Louis-César over as her champion. But, of course, that didn't make Mei Ling happy."

"I bet." I'd met the Consul's second, a tiny Chinese American beauty who was all of four foot ten and weighed maybe eighty-five pounds, when I was seven. She'd left quite an impression. The second's position isn't like that of an American vice president. He or she isn't there to take over if the Consul is killed—the remaining Senate members will vote on a replacement unless a duel decides it, in which case it's winner take all. The title also doesn't imply that the holder is the second most powerful member on the Senate—it's possible, but it isn't a job requirement. Each Senate member has a specific function for that body, sort of like the presidential cabinet. Seconds are appointed for one reason and one only: they're intimidating. Whoever holds the office is also known as "the Enforcer," because he or she enforces the decrees of the Senate by whatever means are necessary. Those can include everything from diplomacy to violence, but Mei Ling was known to prefer the latter.

She'd made that clear the day she'd visited Tony's audience hall to drag off one of his vamps for questioning. Whatever the guy had done, he definitely didn't want to talk to the Senate about it. In fact, he was so opposed to the idea that he issued a challenge. Mei Ling was new to the position and didn't have much of a reputation; she was also only about 120 years old and looked like a China doll, so I guess he thought he could take her.

It amazes me how even old vamps sometimes forget that it isn't size but power that matters, and while that often correlates to age, it doesn't always. Some vamps many centuries older than Mei Ling will never have her strength, and I've seen hulking bruisers forced to their knees by the glance of a child. The transition to vampire doesn't make you gorgeous if you were plain, intelligent if you were stupid or powerful if you were weak: a loser in life is a loser vamp, spending his or her immortality serving someone else. It's one of the major drawbacks to the condition, something the movies never seem to highlight. But occasionally it does give someone who was overlooked as a mortal a chance to shine. That day I saw a tiny, fragile-looking flower literally rip a vamp into bloody shreds. I also saw how much pleasure she took in it, how her dark eyes glowed with a fierce joy at the fact that she could do this, that once again a man had underestimated her, and this time he would pay for it.

She never did kill him that I saw. His head was intact and screaming when she ordered the pieces packed into baskets to be carted off to the Senate. I never saw him afterwards, and nobody present that day, to my knowledge, ever again challenged Mei Ling.

"Why did the Consul bring in a ringer? I'd think she or Mei Ling could deal with a simple challenge."

"The Consul's powerful, but she ain't a duelist. And Mei Ling don't have Rasputin's experience. He was already old when he tried to take over in Russia; rumor is that he's never been defeated in a fight, and that he don't much care how he wins. No one saw the fights with the dead senators, but the first two to be attacked are still alive—so to speak. And Marlowe stayed conscious long enough after they found him to say that Rasputin somehow turned three of his own vamps against him, and one of them had been with him over two hundred years."

A few scattered puzzle pieces started to come together. I filled Billy Joe in on my most recent escape, and he looked thoughtful. "Yeah, that would make sense. I don't know how the Senate guards are chosen, but it's almost sure to be from the stable of one of the members, since who'd ever think any of them would turn?"