Black Arts: A Jane Yellowrock Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

shadow, and the other half brightened into creamy gold; the dim bulb shaded her hair into honey with pale highlights. Her eyes met mine, dark in the lamplight and full of compulsion. She held me with her eyes, and a deeply twisted gleam brightened her gaze as she parted her lips, the motion slow and sensual. “This I shall accept: You will find my girls. You will free them. You will return them to me, with the names of the ones who took them. I will take care of the rest.”
    I knew what she meant. She would take the names I gave her, track them, drain them, and kill them. She would leave their dead bodies where no one would ever find them. And it would be my fault. Totally my fault. As much as if I took their lives myself.
    Katie smiled sweetly as the facts found a place in my brain, and returned her attention to the computer screen. “Tom has all the information you will need to locate my employees. You are dismissed.”
    I didn’t know how to reconcile her demands, and though my Beast fought me to challenge her, predator to predator, and fight it out on the desktop, here and now, I shoved Beast down and walked away. Katie was my employer and landlady, the owner of my freebie home. Katie was a vamp no one crossed, and if I wanted to keep my own peace of mind and my own blood in my veins, I would need to find a way to deal with Katie wanting to kill the kidnappers—which would totally be my fault, if I gave her the names. But I could worry about that later. Was I a Scarlett O’Hara or what?
    Inside me, my Beast—the soul of a mountain lion I had dragged into me during an act of accidental black magic, when I was five years old and fighting for my life—turned her back to me, a predator insult of the worst kind. I held in the frustration the gesture brought on.
    Troll, whose real name was Tom, and who was Katie’s primo blood-servant, was waiting for me in the hallway, his face like a stone bust, emotionless and cold. He had been listening.
    Dumbly, I followed him to the kitchen, where Deon, Katie’s three-star Jamaican chef, was putting a rack of lamb into one of the commercial ovens he supervised. We sat at the kitchen bar, my right foot on the floor, the other on the bar stool footrest. Troll handed me a paper with all the pertinent info about the missing girls written on it in his neat block printing.
    “Is she . . .” I stopped, not knowing what to ask.
    “Sane?” he said softly. “I don’t know, but I’m careful around her, treat her with kid gloves. Her girls are careful. According to Mithran definitions, and within Mithran parameters, she’s fine. She’s not drained anyone. She’s injured no one.” He rubbed his bald pate in consternation. Troll wasn’t the most communicative man, but even I could tell he wasn’t finished. “But she’s powerful and strong and different from what she was before the blood-burial.”
    With palpable relief at the interruption, he accepted a glass of white wine from Deon, looked at it, swirled it, sniffed it, and sipped it. “Buttery and rich,” he said. “The best Chardonnay to date. Order up five cases.”
    He set the glass on the counter and said to me, “I’ve asked around. The few blood-servants who’ve heard of a rising after a blood-burial aren’t real helpful, except to say that all Mithrans who survive are changed, are different. It takes months for the mixed blood to work its way through a Mithran’s system. Sometimes years. And they’re always left with extraordinary strength and speed and what George Dumas calls mental acuity . What she’ll become, I don’t know and can’t say.”
    “Ducky.” I looked at the paper and said, “I need to talk to the driver who came to pick up the girls. I also need to talk to the others who were at the party. That isn’t listed here. No names from the party at all.”
    “Katie wasn’t informed of the party. The girls were out on the town together, not working for her.”
    I tried to put the two sentences