“I would put you over my knee if I thought it would do any good,” he told me grimly.

The other vamp looked like he’d just been slapped. I laughed. “He thinks you’re being kinky,” I said, pausing to spit out a tooth that had come loose. No worry. I’d grow a replacement soon enough, and at least it was a back one this time. I grinned at the French vamp, who looked vaguely ill at the thought of anyone doing anything with me, except maybe planting a stake in my ribs. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

The brunet sighed and released me, pausing to yank out the rapier as he did so. I didn’t wince. At the moment, the pain almost felt good, a reminder that, once again, I’d beaten the odds and lived. Not that I’d been in serious danger this time. He wouldn’t kill me when he needed my help. Well, at least not until I turned him down.

“I was planning introductions, had you given me the opportunity,” I was told acerbically.

The redhead’s expression was now bordering on revulsion. There must be a brain inside that pretty head, because he appeared to be putting things together, but not willing to believe what his instincts were telling him. I decided to help him out. I turned to my host, who was looking down at me with an annoyance he wasn’t bothering to hide. I threw my good arm around his neck and gave him a robust kiss on the cheek. “Hello, Daddy!”

Fifteen minutes later I was lying on the floor howling, and it wasn’t from pain. I hadn’t laughed that hard in years, to the point that I almost couldn’t breathe and my ribs actually hurt. Of course, that could have been from one of the new bruises I was sporting—between the bar fight and blacking out, I was a little under the weather—but at the moment I didn’t care. I wiped my streaming eyes and tried to sit up.

Mircea, better known as Daddy dearest when he bothered to acknowledge the connection, was sitting on the sofa with folded arms, waiting me out. The French guy had poured himself a drink—stiff even by my standards—and taken it to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the darkened cityscape. He had his back to us. I wasn’t sure whom he was trying to block out, the abomination or the one who made her.

I crawled into an armchair and valiantly fought to restrain myself. It was difficult, with what I’d just been told. I don’t have a chance to do this often, so I savored the moment. “Would it be out of line to say I told you so?” I asked, with almost a straight face.

“I have never known you to be concerned with proprieties,” was the caustic reply.

“Du-te dracului,” I said automatically, before realizing how ironic telling him to go to the devil was under the circumstances.

“I am proposing to send you to him instead,” Mircea replied evenly.

I nodded at the other vamp. “You tell your friend there that this is a suicide mission?” I glanced at the handsome vamp. “Got a death wish, buddy?”

The Frenchman ignored me, but Mircea decided to be contentious. As usual. “He won’t be going alone. That is why I went to the trouble of locating you. His job is to trap Vlad. Yours is—”

“Did you tell him that you could’ve taken Uncle Drac out last time, but were too busy seducing some Senate member to bother?”

“—to keep him alive. He doesn’t know my brother; you do.”

“Which is precisely why I’m not going anywhere near him.” I stood up, stretched and looked around for my coat. Claire had bought it for me after a hunt ruined my last leather number. She’d hoped it would be more resilient, being washable and all, but I wasn’t so sure. My wardrobe is constantly updated since I trash clothes like other people throw out Kleenex—a hazard of the job. The last time I saw the coat, it had been covered in goo along with my T-shirt. I decided that I must’ve left them lying in the bathroom.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“To see if my dry cleaner can get out whatever it is Varos demons secrete when they spit at you. Pinkish purple ooze, smells like a family of skunks and eats into fabric like acid.”

I headed for the door, but before I could get there, Daddy was in the way, reclining against the doorjamb. “Sit down.”

I sighed. I hadn’t really expected it to be that easy. “There’s no point.” Mircea just stood there, so I elaborated, more for the benefit of the idiot who’d gotten roped into this mess than for dear old Dad. Maybe the poor bastard could still weasel out of it. For his sake, I hoped so, since he was certainly doomed otherwise.

“London, 1889. Dark and stormy night. Ring any bells? I think the exact quote was, ‘If you do not finish this tonight, if you leave him any avenue by which to return, I wash my hands of the whole affair. Next time, you will hunt him alone.’ ” I glanced at the French guy, who’d turned around to stare at us. “I was a lot more pretentious back then,” I explained, “but you get the drift. Barely survived the last go-round, not doing it again, especially when all you’re planning is to put him in another of those oh-so-secure traps and wait for him to find another way out. And that’s assuming he doesn’t eviscerate you and anybody dumb enough to follow you first. Now get out of the way, Daddy dear; I have a real job to do.”

“This is your job, until I say otherwise.”

I smiled. I was feeling fairly mellow for a change. I wasn’t sure if that was because of all the violence earlier or the laughing fit, but either way, I actually didn’t feel like tearing his head off. “And you used to have such good hearing.”

“You will not defy me on this.”

I waited for a minute, but he just stood there, looking all grim and macho. It was the face that usually caused other vamps to sink to their knees, babbling apologies and trying to kiss his expensive, leather-covered toes. It had never worked on me. “Um, I’m assuming there’s another half to that sentence. Because I’m really not seeing—”

“Claire.” That one word stopped me in midrant.

“I had better be misunderstanding you,” I said softly.

“You are fond of the human, aren’t you?”

“If you had anything to do—”

“I did not take her,” he said calmly, “but I could arrange to get her back for you. I can call on the Senate’s resources, which you must admit are far greater than your own.”

“I’ll find her myself.”

He arched a dark, expressive brow and gave me his patented condescending smile. “In time?”

I didn’t answer for a moment, my brain being busy with a replay of that night in London. All I could hear was the faint sound of bootheels on cobblestones, far away but getting closer. That even, measured tread had echoed in my head for years. I didn’t think about what had happened after the steps stopped, right in front of where I was concealed. No. I never thought about that at all.

“Uncle Drac,” as I flippantly referred to him to keep myself from gibbering, was the only thing on earth that truly scared me. I think my laughter earlier had been less about Daddy finally admitting I was good for something, and more hysterics from the thought of going up against Drac again. I had lobbied hard for the final solution to the problem more than a century ago, since trapping him had been as much about luck as skill. With nothing else to do to while away the decades, he must have dissected that night a thousand times, analyzing it in that brilliant, broken mind of his, figuring out exactly where he went wrong. Dracula deserved his legend, however mixed-up much of it was due to that Victorian hack writer. He wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice; in fact, I doubted he would make any at all.

A mental picture of Claire’s face wavered in front of my eyes. She was one of the few friends I’d ever been able to hold on to for more than a few months. It wasn’t that the rages didn’t scare her, but rather that she had never been exposed to them. I had never thought of myself as a magical being before I met her, but there was no doubt that she had the same calming effect on me as on a spell or ward. Living and working alongside her had given me the closest thing to peace and a normal life I’d ever known. I still had occasional fits, but only when outside her orbit, and even then, they were rarer. The idea of never seeing her face screw up in thought as she surveyed my latest painting, trying to figure out what the hell it was supposed to be, was brutal.

But Claire was more than my friend; she was also the only chance for me to master my rage once and for all. She’s from one of the oldest magical families on earth, House Lachesis, who specialize in healing. They have access to ancient lore that even the Circle itself doesn’t know. Claire once told me that there is a branch of the family that does nothing but scavenge, in areas so out of the way as to make Antarctica look like Forty-second and Broadway, for unusual cures, potions and amulets. Another branch researches new treatments, and yet another comes up with debilitating spells to sell to malevolent types to ensure a steady supply of wealthy afflicted.

Despite the fact that she had worked in the business side of things rather than in research and development, she’d been using her contacts to try to find something that would decrease my fits. Because of my metabolism, human drugs don’t stay in my system long enough to register. I was hoping a magical solution would have more effect, but no one had ever thought to develop anything for dhampirs. There are so few of us as to make it impractical, and we’re not exactly top of the popularity chart. There was a good possibility that Claire’s work was the first of its kind ever done. And if I didn’t find her soon, it might also be the last.

I would find her—I had no doubt of that—but Mircea, damn him, was right. I might not manage it in time. Michael was only a low-level master, sixth at a guess, who ran errands for a couple of vamp bosses in Brooklyn. He was nothing I couldn’t deal with half-asleep, but the information I’d gotten from his thugs was that he’d recently skipped town. No one knew where he was, and tracking him with only my own resources to draw on was going to take time. Time Claire might not have.