Read Laws of the Blood 4: Deceptions: Deceptions for Free Online Page B

submit triplicate forms requesting a Hunt to go through a screening committee if they could manage to wrest any more power from the Nighthawks. It was hardly any fun being a vampire anymore; at least she hadn’t had any fun for a long time.
    She’d had fun that night, the night she’d died as Olympias the queen and become Olympias the companion. She’d seduced the dear, idealistic boy. She hadn’t known she still had it in her to make men want her, but the one who Hunted her was no man; his needs were different, more complex than mere hunger for soft, youthful flesh. He’d come to eat her, but she’d run at the head of a pack of maenad priestesses in her youth in Epirus; she understood the Hunt. Old woman she might have been, but her spirit was strong, and she knew how to call up the magic within her, though the flame of it had been beaten down long ago by the husband she’d buried. Hers had been the final triumph, for her place beside him in his tomb was never filled. Instead she’d gone into the bed of a vampire. First he gave her back her youth, slowly, sip by sip, then he gave her immortality. Lover or executioner, at least he’d accomplished his mission to take her from the mortal world, which was how he justified his conscience and taking Cassander’s gold to himself.
    Except she’d never quite completely slipped away from the stage of mortal affairs. She was too well versed in the power games and politics mortals played. She understood kings and generals and the intrigues of courts and harems. Her bloodsire could go about his merry way—he didn’t call himself Orpheus anymore, and the last she’d heard he’d moved to Alaska and was running with a wolf pack. . . she really ought to send him a note—but Olympias carried on the work she’d taken up helping to protect the strigoi from mortals when she was barely more than a newborn Hunter.
    And, frankly, she could use a vacation as much as Istvan could.
    And here she was, thinking about her lurid past, when she’d planned to spend her resting hours dreamwalking in search of the horny Lora’s potential love bunny. Last night she’d had too much work getting him to forget about what happened to get information out of him as well. The man’s mind was strong, the strongest she’d encountered in centuries. Lora was right in believing that he’d make a magnificent vampire, but Olympias was not in the recruitment business. The world had more than enough strigoi already, in her opinion. He was a magnificent specimen. Though she hated playing matchmaker, Olympias couldn’t blame anyone for wanting him. If she still had interest in that sort of thing . . .
    She had made a promise to check the man out, and though she’d wasted most of the day with dreams and recollections, she managed to slowly turn from her side onto her back—because a vampire her age wasn’t as dead in the daylight as she seemed—and attempted to focus her psychic energy on traveling outward, into the minds awake to the world. It didn’t help that Bitch decided to jump up on the bed when she moved and tried to get her to wake up by licking her face for at least an hour.
     
    “This is not going to be pretty,” Gerry whispered to Sara as the first of the people they were meeting entered the restaurant’s private dining room.
    “It never is,” she whispered back.
    “True. I’m here to insult you to your face while you buy me an expensive lunch,” Gavivi said, going to a seat at the head of the long table.
    She either had amazing hearing, or no compunction about showing off her psychic talent before them. Either way, this did not put Sara in her place. It pricked her pride, of course, but she also thought it was stupid for anyone higher on the food chain to be impolite to Olympias’s chief slave. They tended to forget that the Enforcer of the City was one of the Strigoi Council. Olympias was among the most ancient and dangerous of their kind, andSara was the person they had