“Beats me,” Jules said. “They’ve been even more secretive than usual and I’m a mere mortal now.”
“You seem to know a lot for a mere mortal.”
He threw me a grin. “People always said that I like to gossip too much. But, you know, it’s strange.”
“What is?”
“Now that I’m not a vamp anymore, people tell me things. Like the human servants. They never use
d to gossip in front of me, but all of a sudden, I’m one of the club. And the vamps—even guys I know—talk like I’m not even there. You’d think I suddenly became invisible.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to talk here, for obvious reasons. But the fact was, for a clairvoyant, I was tragically uninformed. I needed info to do my job, but I always seemed to be the last to know everything.
It hadn’t seemed like such a big deal at first, when it felt like I already had too much to learn. But now what I’d said to Rosier kept coming back to haunt me. There was so much I needed to know, just so much, and not all of it was protocol. I needed help.
I needed my own Argus.
Or, at least, a guy who really, really liked to gossip.
“What?” Jules said, and I realized I was still looking at him.
“We’ll talk later.”
He seemed to accept that, probably because ducking into another alcove, assuming we could find one, might look a little weird. Or because we’d just turned off the impressive main corridor, where the marble floors and walls had reflected the moonlight into some semblance of ambient lighting, and entered a dark stairwell. Very dark.
The only relief came from massive standing candelabras, old and brassy and dripping with wax, which kept me from being completely blind. But they were spaced pretty far apart, just spreading a thin sheen over the gloom on either side, that didn’t quite meet in the middle. Vampires probably didn’t notice, but it left me straining to see anything but jumping shadows.
And babies, because, now that I was looking for them, they were everywhere.
Flinching as they passed through the power fields shed by higher-level vamps. Mouthing replies to mental communications, like they were talking on an invisible Bluetooth. Tripping on carpet and running into walls because they couldn’t see any better than me. Staring in awe at nothing visible, but probably at the auras vamps were said to give off, which acted like a signboard telling you family affiliation, rank, past masters, and a cornucopia of other information.
All of which had to be kind of overpowering to the uninitiated.
They looked like what they essentially were, a bunch of toddlers roaming around in search of a clue.
So what were they doing here?
“Substituting,” Jules said, when I asked.
“Substituting for what?”
“For whatever all the older guys are doing.”
“You mean the masters?” We’d hit a back stairwell, where the crowd was thinner. But even up top, I’d seen fewer masters than I’d expected at what had suddenly become vamp central.
“No. Just older. Like no longer babies. The kind of Joes—and Janes—that used to make appointments and supervise the cleaning crew and answer the phones.”
“What?”
He nodded. “They have the cook down there, from what I hear. Well, the guy who orders the food, anyway. The chef and his boys are human—”
“What are they doing with the cook?”
“You tell me. I mean, seriously, if you find out, you tell me. I’m dying to know.”
The stairs finally ended in a narrow corridor, five floors down. Unlike the swanky areas up top, this was completely Spartan. Just a metal handrail on the stairs, unadorned concrete block walls, and a few bare bulbs overhead, now dark. And a dinged-up metal door at the end of the hall, with two large vamps standing in front of it.
No one was trying to impress anyone down here, which was clearly a staff area. And that included the staff. Who didn’t so much as blink when we approached.