“Son of a bitch!” I heard someone say, I think it was Saffy. I wasn’t sure, because the door behind me burst open at almost the same moment, and a bunch of people ran out. And one of them tackled me to the floor.
Make that several of them, I thought, as someone else opened fire.
Fortunately, it didn’t last long.
“That’s enough!” a familiar voice bellowed, loud enough to threaten my ear drums. The gunfire abruptly stopped. I looked up, trying to see past whoever was on top of me, but it was at least two and possibly three guys, so all I saw was expensive couture.
Even worse, I couldn’t breathe.
I decided to do a Hilde and say to hell with it, and shifted out from under the little mountain of vamps, who hit the floor with an oof. I looked up from my own bit of floor, winded and pissed off and seriously worried that one of those bullets had connected with somebody. But all I saw was legs.
I hauled myself back to my feet in time to see Saffy—with a wand out and glaring—and Hilde having a standoff with Marco, my lead bodyguard. Marco is six-foot-five in his stocking feet, and probably six-foot-six or so in the expensive Italian loafers he favors. Which is why the gun-happy vamp’s toes weren’t even touching the floor. Marco had him in one hand and was shaking him like a maraca, even while he informed Saffy that this was his vamp and—
“Your idiot, you mean!” Hilde was red-faced and pissed, probably because the shield she’d erected in front of her was riddled with bullets.
She dropped it a second later and they rattled to the floor, rolling around underfoot and threatening to trip people up. Meanwhile, the overflow from her magic, which had been a little sloppy due to speed, was sending sparks pinging off the marble, shocking some of the vamps who had poured into the room and were standing too close to the sides. A few of them jumped like they’d been bit, while others stared upward at the slowly rotating packages, some of which now had holes in them.
“What . . . the hell . . . just happened?” I wheezed, trying to get my breath back.
“Somebody earned himself a one-way ticket back home,” Roy snapped. He was a red-haired charmer—a broad-shouldered Southern vamp who liked checkered suits and inventing new cocktails to get us all plastered on a regular basis. Although he wasn’t looking so charming at the moment.
Maybe because the idiot in question was his.
“Who did we lose this time?” I asked, because the new guy had to be a replacement for someone.
“Paulie,” Marco said, his eyes still on Hildegarde. “Mircea pulled him back two days ago.”
Damn.
I’d liked Paulie.
“This has to stop,” I told Marco.
“That it does,” he said, looking pointedly at me. Because this wasn’t a problem he could fix. I sighed and went indoors, snagging a low-hanging package on the way in.
“Get Mircea on the phone,” I told one of the boys, who was so new that
I didn’t even know his name yet. But he looked slightly more with-it than the maraca outside. He nodded and pulled out a phone, while I dealt with problem number two.
“It’s okay,” I said, grabbing a friend’s arm as she headed past.
A hundred tiny beads on a hundred tiny braids clacked together as her head spun to look at me. “One rule,” she said, her voice trembling. “I have one rule—”
“I know. It won’t happen again.”
“That’s what you said the last time! Why are there idiots running around—”
“Tami—”
“—with guns where there are children playing?”
She gestured across the living room to where a bunch of kids were gathered around a tall, exquisite creature, whose long arms were holding them protectively against his body. I blinked, because I’d never seen Augustine, couturier to the stars, give a damn about anybody but himself. It was almost . . . wholesome.
“It’s okay,” I told them. “There was just an, uh, accident.”
“The last one,” Tami said flatly. “I’ve had enough. I’m taking their guns.”
On the surface, it seemed like a ridiculous statement. My bodyguards were mostly massive vamps, master-level rank for the most part, and armed to the teeth, not that they needed to be, considering the teeth in question. They sent most people into cardiac arrest with barely a glance.