The Senate’s jet sat on the runway, looking pure and innocent under a brilliant blue sky. It gleamed a blinding white, like someone had recently washed it. A fuel truck was rumbling away as we watched, so it was all gassed up and ready to go. It gave me the creeps.

“Are you coming?” Louis-Cesare was impatient, and I couldn’t really blame him. I’d been standing behind an empty luggage van for almost twenty minutes, waiting for the refueling to finish, trying to tell myself that it was perfectly okay to go ahead. But the base of my spine wasn’t having it. The tingle that had initially made me stop and wait on the humans to exit the area had now become a full-fledged shudder. There was something wrong with the airplane.

I stared at it, ignoring the look on Louis-Cesare’s face. It said that he frankly couldn’t care less whether I liked it, and was about to go without me. Since wrestling him to the ground was the only way to keep him from doing so, and that hadn’t been working so well lately, I was resigned to dealing with whatever or whoever was waiting for us. But I didn’t have to like it.

Not that I thought Drac would kill us, even if he was waiting inside. He enjoyed cat-and-mouse games, and he’d only begun to play. He’d want me to pay for those long years he’d spent in captivity, something a quick death wouldn’t begin to cover in his estimation. In the old days, he’d had people impaled on blunt, well-oiled stakes, ensuring that it took them a couple of days to die, and that was when he wasn’t even all that annoyed. I was pretty sure he had something much more inventive planned for me. But then, that was the problem with maniacs: you could never be entirely certain what they’d do. Maybe he was in a hurry to get to Radu and would mow us down at the first opportunity. I didn’t think it likely, but I wasn’t willing to risk my life on it.

“We discussed this,” Louis-Cesare reminded me, more calmly than I would have expected. “We must contact Lord Mircea and inquire what he wishes to do.”

I didn’t give a damn what Mircea wanted. My hand stayed on Louis-Cesare’s arm, just above the elbow, where I’d instinctively gripped him when he started to leave. “I think there’s a problem with the plane.”

He tried to shrug off my hand, but I held on. “You are being ridiculous! That is the only secure line to the Senate available to us.”

Actually, it wasn’t. We could drive out to MAGIC, the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation, and speak to Marlowe in person. Mircea probably wasn’t there, but I wasn’t nearly as concerned about keeping Daddy informed as Louis-Cesare seemed to be. Keeping my head firmly attached to my shoulders was more on my mind at the moment, and for that, I needed backup. Marlowe could provide it, and although he’d doubtless give me a hard time first, it was nothing to what I could expect from Drac. But Louis-Cesare didn’t want to leave the area where Dracula’s men had been sighted to drive all the way to the isolated canyon near Vegas where MAGIC was located.

“I’m telling you, getting anywhere near that plane is a bad idea. They knew we were meeting at the Hog. Kristie could have told them we were getting there by plane, and that thing is hard to miss.”

His lip curled back slightly from his teeth. It made him look more like the predator he was instead of Mr. January. “You’re afraid.”

I shrugged. “Call it what you want, but I didn’t last five hundred years by being stupid. You go in there and you aren’t coming out.”

“And this would bother you?”

“Not especially,” I admitted, “except that I could use help stealing a car.”

“For the last time, we are not driving to Las Vegas! It would take all day.”

“Not the way I drive.”

Louis-Cesare pulled away from me in an abrupt movement that almost left me lying on the concrete. I guess he was tired of arguing. He stepped out of the narrow strip of shade cast by the luggage van and flinched when the sunlight fell directly on him. “Stay here if you are concerned. This will not take long.”

I watched him stride away, knowing I wasn’t strong enough to stop him. It was an unaccustomed sensation, and not one I liked. Damn stiff-necked vampire. If he was jumped when he got on board, there’d be no way for me to reach him in time. On the other hand, dying alongside him wouldn’t help either of us. I suddenly recalled all the reasons I hated working with vamps. Hunting them was a hell of a lot more satisfying.

I watched him walk through the heat haze shimmering over the tarmac and tried to ignore the prickle of worry that had its teeth in my guts. For a moment after he entered the jet, nothing happened, and I began to think that maybe I was being even more paranoid than usual. Then he reemerged, dragging the pilot and steward with him. The steward was motionless, and I didn’t like the way his neck was lolling about. He was either dead or giving a good impression of it. The pilot was mostly out of my line of sight, having been slung over Louis-Cesare’s shoulder, so all I could see was his uniformed rear and a blood-soaked left pant leg.

I was about to move forward when I noticed several other shapes doing likewise. Within a few seconds, the plane was surrounded by a group of dark figures that, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get my eyes to focus on. Mages, then, under a cloaking spell. This was not good, especially considering that Louis-Cesare had emerged from a Senate jet and the vamps happened to be at war with the dark mages. I thought about the irony of our being killed by someone else before Drac could find us, and bent to open the bag of contraband at my feet.

My hand closed on a small, dark sphere about the same time that the first of the blurs reached Louis-Cesare. I took aim at the circle of shadows that were closing in, and the sphere landed in the middle of a group of them, exploding as soon as it touched the tarmac. A silver flash later, and three of the figures were on the ground. They did not much resemble humans, but considering that they’d just been hit by a dislocator bomb, that wasn’t surprising.

One of them had had his head magically reattached to his thigh, and an arm now grew out of his forehead. Since the arm was the wrong color to match the rest of his skin, I assumed it had recently belonged to the figure at his side, who had acquired a new set of ears on his left cheek but lost his nose. Unlike these two, who were kicking up the kind of fuss you’d expect under the circumstances, the third shape lay still. I realized why as I approached, my remaining dislocator in hand. A large number of once-internal organs were now attached to his outside, and the heart, I saw at a glance, was no longer beating. He was the lucky one; the spell was not reversible, which meant that the other two faced an interesting future.

I ran past them toward where at least six other blurs had reached the ramp and were climbing over a body that partially blocked the way. I hadn’t seen what happened, but Louis-Cesare must have killed his attacker, thrown him down the stairs and dragged the jet’s crew members back inside. Being Senate property, the plane was, of course, designed to resist certain forms of magical attack, but I doubted its defenses would hold for long against that many mages. Besides, how had the crew been injured unless a way had already been found inside?

I stopped well short of the shapes surging up the ramp and tossed my other bomb. Only half of them managed to get shields up in time. The other three rolled down the ramp to land at my feet, puddles of displaced flesh that in two cases couldn’t even scream: they no longer had all the requisite parts in their proper places.

One of the remaining mages, who was either really focused or completely oblivious, kept going for the jet’s door, but the other two turned to face me. I didn’t wait to find out what the closest one had planned, but rolled another little surprise up the ramp. It, too, wasn’t on the approved-magical-devices list, but unlike the dislocators, it was an old invention that I was hoping she wouldn’t have seen before or know how to defend against. Either I was right or her reflexes were slow, because the little red marble came to rest beside her booted foot. She instinctively pulled back, but not fast enough.