Asil’s Fifth Date Scheherazade #5
“Like a child playing with a doll,” said The Driver.
She nodded. “Like that. He sends me out with a stranger. Dinner or dancing. Sometimes a charitable event—he has a hand in several local charities. Theater. Then back to the condo.”
“Does he have cameras there?” Asil asked.
“No,” The Driver said. “I don’t think he wants to watch.”
“He makes me tell him,” she said in a brittle voice. “Like giving a book report in high school, except in a dark room with a blindfold on.”
Many creatures grew odd as they aged, but Asil would have thought that he’d remember a vampire with that particular kink. He nudged the wolf who lived inside him but got no answer.
“I couldn’t do that,” she whispered, looking away from both of the males in the car with her rather than looking at anything outside of the car.
“I couldn’t sleep with strangers—with anyone I am not married to.
The first man…he was very understanding.
A gentleman. Kind, even.” She gave a hiccuping horrified laugh.
“He told me I needed to find a different husband. Offered to help.”
She composed herself. “I went home, and like a fool I told my husband what I had done.” She smiled grimly, amused by her earlier self. “One doesn’t wish to live dishonestly, after all.” Her smile fled. “That hubris cost a very nice man his life. I didn’t make that mistake again.”
Her flat tone of repressed horror was enough for Asil, who knew something of old vampires and monsters.
She had not slept with the second man, either. Instead, she had taken her untouched self to her home and made up a sexual encounter mostly derived from a particularly torrid romance book.
It hadn’t taken long to learn how to get rid of the eager men.
“If they understand I am upset,” she said, “they might feel sorry for me, try to help. If I reject them by being awful, by humiliating them—then they go. And they don’t tell anyone about it.”
She had learned to lie—to the men and to her husband. Knowing someone else’s life was at stake, she learned how to do it well. For the men, humiliating judgments and coldness. For her husband, she played Scheherazade, spinning a thousand tales of pure fiction.
After a few months, she’d broken down in tears on the way to one of her “dates.” Her driver, The Driver, pulled over and asked her what he could do to help.
Asil deduced that until the moment he’d pulled over, The Driver had just been part of the wallpaper that lined her lonely life.
After that day, he joined in her conspiracy, sending her dates packing if they didn’t take a hint.
The Driver brought her a deck of cards—Asil gathered these had various sex acts on each card—to help her create a changing, believable story for her husband.
He stayed in the condo or whatever hotel room her husband had paid for and taught her to play poker.
He could only help so much, because he was as much of a prisoner as she was. His family had been serving this particular vampire for a couple of generations, held hostage by the knowledge of what would happen to the rest of his family if any of them defied their lord and master.
Mari-Brigid told Asil all of that and never gave a hint of her driver’s name.
The Driver, after that first comment, said nothing. He just watched Asil with grim suspicion.
Despite four years belonging to a very old vampire, Mari-Brigid believed Asil when he told her that he thought he could help. The Driver did not, but he didn’t say so.
Asil found both of those things interesting.
“And divorce is not possible,” Asil said.
“We are good Catholics,” she said, deadpan. “No divorce.”
Then she turned her head away from Asil and brought her hands up to her face as she laughed. It didn’t sound like a happy laugh.
“Alvarez doesn’t divorce his wives,” The Driver told Asil. “He just kills them.”
He spoke to get Asil to look away from Mari-Brigid. Asil obliged.
“Do you have proof of that?” Asil asked.
“No proof,” The Driver said. Then did what no one ever remembered to do and just shut up.
“Maybe I should ask my question differently,” Asil said after a moment of silence. “Why should I, as an emissary and very humble servant of the Marrok, be interested in seeing that Mr. Alvarez ceases to be a problem to his wife?”
“Werewolf.” The Driver blew out a breath and relaxed, but not happily. “I don’t care who you are, werewolf. You are not up to taking out Mr. Alvarez.”
“What did you think I was?” asked Asil. Then considered the timing of his last struggle with his wolf. “A vampire? Overcome by bloodlust at the scent of your mistress’s blood?”
He didn’t mean to sound amused. But really. Him? A vampire?
“There are fae who feed from blood.” The Driver sounded affronted.
“You have been dealing with creatures formidable and strange, I see,” murmured Asil. “Why don’t you let me worry about whether or not I can kill your vampire?”
“Because you are putting her life in danger,” said The Driver. “I will not allow that.”
“You are what? Forty?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“And you have served in the vampire’s household for how many years?”
“Thirty-seven.” The Driver’s voice was very dry.
“And how many of Alvarez’s wives have you seen die?
” Asil felt that was a fairly safe question, given what he knew about vampires with human wives and what The Driver had said when Asil mentioned divorce.
“How much longer do you think that Alvarez is going to let Mari-Brigid amuse him with her defiance?”
“He doesn’t know,” Mari-Brigid said.
“My dear,” said Asil kindly. “He is a three-hundred-year-old vampire, and vampires are nothing if not paranoid. There are people who probably could lie to him and he would not notice. You are not one of them. He is amusing himself by putting you through your paces.”
There probably were cameras in the condo, too.
“You don’t know—” Mari-Brigid started to say, but subsided at a minute gesture from The Driver.
“Alvarez is brokering several territorial boundary deals for Bonarata,” The Driver said, “among the fae and certain vampire seethes believed to be independent.”
“The ones Frost gathered,” Asil speculated to himself.
“You know Frost?” asked The Driver.
“I met him before he died at the hands of a werewolf.”
“You?” The Driver’s incredulity was faked.
Asil smiled. It was well-known who’d killed Frost. “No. But I was there to watch Adam Hauptman and his mate.”
Yes, he thought. A werewolf killed a powerful vampire not all that long ago.
The Driver looked at him intently. “You intend to kill Alvarez.”
“I do not make deals with people whose names I do not know,” Asil told him.
“Bobby,” The Driver said, holding out his hand. “Bobby Anderson.”
Asil exchanged a firm handshake.
“So,” he said. “Knowing that I am of the opinion that if all vampires ceased to exist at this moment, it would not be a bad thing, why do you think I should kill Alvarez?”
“Bonarata is planning on moving from Europe to the US.”
Not expanding his reach, not growing his empire—but moving.
“Do you know why?” Asil asked. Something was driving him. Was there another Power stirring in Europe? Or something he wanted here?
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “But Alvarez is a key component in Bonarata’s plans. Alvarez owns people carefully placed in the tech industry. And he has some kind of hold on several of the Gray Lords that might stop the fae from interfering.”
“Then by all means, Alvarez needs to die,” said Asil, pleased. He would have killed the vampire regardless—it was obviously the task that had been set before him tonight. But it was good that he would not have trouble defending his actions to the Marrok.
“We need to get going soon,” Bobby said. “If you are too late, Alvarez will know something’s up.”
Asil considered not going. He could use Mari-Brigid as a lure because the vampire who had bitten her could find her wherever she went. But Asil found himself reluctant to go on the attack without knowing more about his enemy.
If the vampire was as old and powerful as Bobby had indicated, then Asil should know him.
Like werewolves, vampires tended to come to an end well before their first century. He didn’t have any idea how many of them died in the process of their making, but once they were actual vampires, they tended to die in their first twenty or thirty years as a monster.
That meant the average vampire had been a vampire longer than the average werewolf, but not by a significant amount.
A three-hundred-year-old werewolf was a wolf that Asil would know by reputation, if not on sight.
He was nearly certain that he could say the same about a vampire.
Alvarez was not a name he associated with any vampire.
“What does Alvarez look like?” Asil asked. “Do either of you have a photo?”
“I’ve never seen him,” Mari-Brigid said. “Neither of us has.”
Bobby nodded. “If he leaves home, he does it with his own people.”
“People?” Asil asked.
“Vampires,” Bobby said, and Mari-Brigid hugged herself.
And this was why jumping too fast was unwise.
“How many vampires? Do you have names?”
“Twelve,” said Bobby.
“Nine right now,” Mari-Brigid said. “Three of them are off on business.”
Nine was a lot of vampires even for Asil. Nine and an old one.
The vampires went by aliases, of course. But Bobby knew some of their older names. Asil recognized two of those. If Alvarez was served by two of such repute, he was indeed a Power.
This was not surprising. Who else would Allah send Asil after but an Elder Vampire?
This Elder Vampire, it seemed, was trying hard to disguise himself, as if there was something very distinctive about Alvarez’s appearance.