All Together Dead

the legendary Yankee rudeness, I thought.
    The bag didn’t have a roller mechanism; no telling how long the owner had had it. I picked it up and marched back over to the door to the stairs. There was another elevator close to the door, I noticed, but it wasn’t half as large as the huge one that had access to the outside. It could take up coffins, true, but perhaps only one at a time.
    I’d already opened the stair door when I realized that if I went up that way I’d have to pass through the service corridor again. What if Eric, Andre, and Quinn were still there? What if they’d ripped each other’s throats out? Though just at the moment such a scenario wouldn’t have devastated me, I decided to forgo the chance of an encounter. I took the elevator instead. Okay, cowardly, but a woman can handle only so much in one night.
    This elevator was definitely for the peons. It had pads on the walls to prevent cargo from being damaged. It serviced only the first four floors: basement levels, lobby, mezzanine, human floor. After that, the shape of the pyramid dictated that to rise, you had to go to the center to catch one of elevators that went all the way up. This would make taking the coffins around a slow process, I thought. The staff of the Pyramid worked hard for their money.
    I decided to take the suitcase straight to the queen’s suite. I didn’t know what else to do with it.
    When I stepped off at Sophie-Anne’s floor, the lobby area around the elevator was silent and empty. Probably all the vampires and their attendants were downstairs at the soiree. Someone had left a discarded soda can lying in a large, boldly patterned urn holding some kind of small tree. The urn was positioned against the wall between the two elevators. I think the tree was supposed to be some kind of short palm tree, to maintain the Egyptian theme. The stupid soda can bothered me. Of course, there were maintenance people in the hotel whose job it was to keep everything clean, but the habit of picking up was ingrained in me. I’m no neat freak, but still. This was a nice place, and some idiot was strewing garbage around. I bent over to pick the darn thing up with my free right hand, intending to toss it into the first available garbage can.
    But it was a lot heavier than it should have been.
    I set down the suitcase to look at the can closely, cradling it in both my hands. The colors and the design made the cylinder look like a Dr Pepper can in almost every respect, but it just wasn’t. The elevator doors whooshed open again, and Batanya stepped off, a strange-looking gun in one hand, a sword in the other. Looking over the bodyguard’s shoulder into the elevator car, I saw the King of Kentucky, who looked back at me curiously.
    Batanya seemed a bit surprised to see me standing there, smack-dab in front of the door. She scanned the area, then pointed her gunlike weapon carefully at the floor. The sword remained ready in her left hand. “Could you step to my left?” she asked very courteously. “The king wants to visit in that room.” Her head nodded toward one of the rooms to the right.
    I didn’t move, couldn’t think of what to say.
    She took in the way I was standing and the expression on my face. She said in a sympathetic way, “I don’t know why you people drink those carbonated things. They give me gas, too.”
    “It’s not that.”
    “Is something wrong?”
    “This isn’t an empty can,” I said.
    Batanya’s face froze. “What do you think it is?” she asked very, very calmly. That was the voice of Big Trouble.
    “It might be a spy camera,” I said hopefully. “Or, see, I’m thinking it might be a bomb. Because it’s not a real can. It’s full of something heavy, and that heaviness is not fluid.” Not only was the tab top not on the can, but the innards didn’t slosh.
    “I understand,” Batanya said. Again with the calm. She pressed a little panel on the armor over her chest, a dark blue area about the size of a credit card. “Clovache,” she said. “Unknown device on four. I’m bringing the king back down.”
    Clovache’s voice said, “How large is the device?” Her accent was sort of like Russian, at least to my untravelled ears. (“Hau larch…?”)
    “The size of one of those cans of sweetened syrup,” Batanya answered.
    “Ah, the burping drinks,” Clovache said. Good memory, Clovache, I thought.
    “Yes. The Stackhouse girl noticed it, not me,” Batanya said grimly. “And now she is