Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab 2)

“Ray. They put you back together already?”

“Good as new.” He walked over and bent down to show me his scar. “Better, really,” he said in a low voice. “The Senate’s got some good bokors on their payroll. When they finished with my neck, I had them look at… other stuff.”

“So no more Mr. Lumpy?”

“Naw. I’m a stallion, baby!”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I told him as he settled off to the side, well out of the sun.

I looked at Caedmon. “How did I end up with Naudiz? I wasn’t at the auction and I never met Jókell.”

“But I did,” Ray said.

“What difference does that make?”

Ray leaned back against the wall, getting comfortable. “We think it went down something like this. Jókell’s in the office, waiting on the luduan to authenticate the stone so he can get his money. The door opens, but he doesn’t sense anything dangerous, just some human looking for the john or something.”

“Because Christine’s power signature was deceptive,” I said. “She was one of those rare vampires able to hide her true strength.”

“Right. So he’s not worried. No human is gonna be a problem for him. So he gets caught flat- footed and she guts him.”

“That’s not speculation,” I said. “I talked to the luduan yesterday, and that’s what happened.”

“Yeah, we talked to him, too, this morning. He said Jókell had the rune in his hand and was about to hand it to him to verify when Christine showed up.”

I nodded. “He told me that, too.”

“Okay, so there’s Christine, who must have heard about the rune from eavesdropping on Elyas. She knows he’s coming to do his own snatch and grab any minute, so she doesn’t have much time. She checks Jókell’s clothes, turns out his pockets, but doesn’t find the rune. And then she senses Elyas approaching and has to leave or blow her cover too early.”

“Following you so far.”

“Then Elyas comes in. He sees Jókell lying there, all but dead, with the carrier he’d seen at the auction around his neck. He grabs the carrier, assuming it has the stone, and hurries off before anyone spots him. Leaving Jókell behind with the rune still in his hand.”

“But if he had it at that point, why didn’t he cast it?” I asked. “He had to know how it worked or he wouldn’t have been able to sell it. Any buyer was going to need that information.”

“He did cast it.”

“Then why is he dead?”

“Because he made a mistake. Naudiz takes a few seconds to activate once the incantation is said. He was half unconscious with blood loss and in a lot of pain. When I came back, all he could think about was getting my attention, to let me know he needed help.”

Light dawned. “H grabbed your ankle.” I remembered Ray mentioning that, but it hadn’t seemed important.

“With the hand holding Naudiz,” Ray agreed. “It transferred to me and the next second, Jókell was dead.”

“That still doesn’t explain how I got it.”

“Naudiz is designed to sustain life,” Caedmon said. “It cannot function properly on a creature that, by its definition of the term, is already dead. It lent him some additional energy while it searched for a living body to fulfill its function, but it could do no more.”

“The bokors said that’s why I came through the whole dismemberment thing so good,” Ray added. “According to them, I should have been pretty out of it.”

Come to think of it, Ray had seemed remarkably… resilient. “But why transfer to me?”

“No reason other than you were the first living body with which Raymond had extensive contact,” Caedmon explained.

“Yeah, your hands were all over me,” Ray said with a cheerful leer. “And at some point—boom! It transferred. Probably during that crazy pursuit. I mean, who would notice, right?”

“But I’ve been hurt since,” I protested. “subrand broke my wrist!”