Demon Blood

Most can’t afford the amount he asks.”
    Deacon’s expression hardened. “That’s complete shit. Did he lift that rule from your brother’s community?”
    “Probably. And, like Lorenzo, he makes it difficult for them to leave after their service is up.”
    Shaking his head, Deacon punched the gate’s intercom button with a stiff finger. None of his disgust leaked into his voice, however; he spoke like a man who expected to attain entrance anywhere he wanted to go.
    She wasn’t surprised when Sardis let them through. Vampires all around Europe must have heard about Budapest by now. If the community here thought that Deacon posed a threat to Sardis, then refusing to face him could be interpreted as a weakness. So Sardis would meet with Deacon if only to show his people that he wasn’t afraid.
    As Deacon halted the car in the semicircular drive at the front of the main house, Rosalia called in her fan from her cache of weapons. Black lace stretched over ribs constructed of steel. She deliberately caught Deacon’s eye, then pressed the release button. Six-inch blades shot out from the tips in an elegant array. She pressed the button again, and the blades retracted. Casually, she began to fan herself, and weighted her Greek with a heavy American accent. The more stereotypes she piled on, the less Sardis and Valeotes would be inclined to look beneath them.
    “Hot tonight, isn’t it?”
    Deacon responded with a gravelly laugh that she felt down to her toes. When he rounded the car and opened her door, she breathed in his scent again. He’d begun to sweat in the evening heat, but she couldn’t detect fear beneath it. She didn’t know if that spoke of his confidence, or if he simply didn’t care whether he made it out alive.
    She preferred to believe it was confidence.
    She followed him up the steps. They didn’t have to knock. The door opened, revealing a giant of a man.
    Dimitrios Maniatis had been a celebrity bodyguard before his transformation. Sardis had recruited him for his intimidating bulk, but he didn’t have too much height on Deacon. As if realizing that, Maniatis drew up a little taller and crossed his arms over a wide chest.
    “No weapons. Leave them here, or stay outside.”
    Deacon hesitated. He must have decided that he’d make use of something inside, with or without weapons, Rosalia surmised. After he gave his short swords over to Maniatis, the big man patted him down.
    Rosalia stepped up, fanning her face and neck as Maniatis manhandled her calves and thighs through her boots. His clumsy search continued upward, and he managed to grope her ass and fondle her breasts.
    She warned Deacon back with her eyes when he stepped forward, his fists clenched.
    The indignity over, she preceded Deacon inside, where an enormous foyer featured a row of Sardis-shaped busts upon marble pedestals. Cold air wafted against her exposed skin. Ah, vampires and their air-conditioning—as predictable as the dawn. As Maniatis escorted them toward the back of the house, she snapped her fan closed and passed it to Deacon.
    “Will you hold this for me, baby? I don’t have anywhere to put it.” With a bubbly laugh, she glanced down at her second-skin shirt. Dear God. Her nipples appeared ready to pop through the material. “Obviously.”
    Realization skimmed through his expression. Followed, she thought, by a touch of admiration. “You won’t need it?”
    “Hell, no. It’s freezing in here.”
    He slipped the weapon into his jacket pocket. Smiling, she tucked her fingers into his elbow.
    Maniatis led them to a large, open rotunda, capped by a dome painted to replicate the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Though Rosalia wouldn’t have been surprised to see Sardis’s face in place of Adam’s, the vampire had employed restraint—a restraint that wasn’t in evidence anywhere else. A white piano stood near a huge curving window overlooking an infinity swimming pool and the sea. Nude female vampires frolicked in the water, while others lounged at the side of the pool—not facing the sea view, Rosalia noted, but the rotunda, where they lay exposed to the vampires inside.
    Kyriakos Sardis waited in the center of the rotunda floor, his hands tucked into the pockets of his white silk pants, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist and revealing the tan he’d sprayed on to conceal a vampire’s paleness. Though young when he’d been transformed, the decadent lifestyle he’d led as a human had already begun to show,