Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer 8)

“Do your servants do as they’re told?”

He snorted. “If I watch them like a damn hawk. But mine aren’t part of some bizarre hive mind. They have free will.”

“Vampires have free will.” He shot me a look. “Okay, it’s limited, but it’s still there.”

“For masters, maybe,” Jules piped up. “Everybody else is screwed.”

“You know that’s not true,” I said.

“What I know is that this isn’t cheese.” He regarded a small package of crackers with distaste. “And why is it sticky?”

“There’s some peanut butter ones—”

“I’ll wait.”

The baby was eating his uncomplainingly—why, I didn’t know. It wasn’t like it would nourish him. But maybe the familiar felt comforting. Something normal and human in the midst of a world that was anything but.

I decided he had a point and crinkled cellophane—somebody had to eat the peanut butter ones—while Rosier scowled some more.

“Would you stop talking about snacks and tell me what you meant?” he demanded.

I looked at him. “About what?”

“You said vampires have free will, even nonmasters.”

“Because they do. Technically, a master can force his servants to do what he wants. But he has to expend energy for that, plus, well . . .”

“Well what?” He looked more interested than I’d have expected.

“Well, there’s service and then there’s service. It’s better to have them want to help you, to view the family as all in it together. Otherwise, when you need them the most, they might be just a little too slow, you know?”

“A little too slow?”

I opened up a cracker to lick off the peanut butter inside. “Alphonse—he was second-in-command of the vamp family I grew up with—used to tell a story about a guy named Don who’d had an abusive master. The guy had mental problems in life, and those don’t exactly get better after death, you know?”

Rosier nodded.

“So, anyway, Don got sick of being beat on all the time, and cursed at and generally made into a whipping boy for his master’s issues—and his master had a lot of issues. Final straw came when his master traded Don’s girlfriend to another family for a tough-guy type to help with security.

“It didn’t help with security.”

Jules snorted.

Rosier frowned. “Why not?”

“Alphonse knew Don because his master was in the same not-exactly-legal line of work. Guys like that have enemies. One night, not too long after the girlfriend incident, Don’s master was caught in an alley by an ambush and was really getting hammered. Now, it takes a long time to kill a master with bullets, and the guys assaulting him weren’t getting close enough for anything else for fear he might drain them. So there should have been time for a rescue.”

“Should have been?”

“Oh, shit,” Jules said.

“Don’t spoil it,” I said. “Anyway, the master put out a call for help, and Don dutifully loaded up a vanload of guys and took off—on the most circuitous damn route he could find, with the most traffic and the most stoplights. Think of those taxis in Vegas that take you via the tunnel—they’ll get you to your hotel, but you’ll have a hell of a bill, considering the airport is actually visible from the Strip.”

“But the master had given him a direct order!” Rosier seemed upset. Which was strange, since he’d never struck me as a rules-loving kind of guy.

“And he obeyed. But the master had neglected to give step-by-step directions, being kind of busy at the time, so what route Don took was up to him. By the time he got there, there was nothing left but the mopping up.”

Rosier looked really annoyed for some reason. “But didn’t that endanger him, too? I was under the impression that vampires can draw energy through the bond no matter where they are. The master could have drained his whole family trying to save himself!”