Read Rusted Veins: A Sabina Kane Novella for Free Online

Zen said. “He could have been asking her anything.”
    I nodded. “True. But still, with his resources, it seems odd he’d resort to asking a mage for help.”
    “Have you met him?” Brooks asked.
    I grimaced and shook my head. “Not formally.”
    “Wait,” Giguhl said. “Does that have something to do with what you said last night about not being on good terms with NOLA’s vamps?”
    I hesitated before nodding.
    Several pairs of judgey glances shot my direction. “What did you do?” Giguhl asked on a sigh.
    “It’s all because of that time we came here to look for Maisie.” My grandmother, Lavinia, had kidnapped my twin sister, Maisie, and brought her to New Orleans a couple of years earlier. Adam, Giguhl, and I had spent a few weeks in the Big Easy looking for Granny Dearest and ended up having a huge battle in a cemetery that ended in her demise. Good riddance. “I guess Damascus took over as the leader after a lot of New Orleans’s vampires got recruited by Lavinia and her goons. Apparently we killed several of his friends, though.”
    Several groans filtered through the room.
    “And then when we moved to town permanently, I was so busy trying to get the Dark Races Council up and running that I neglected to set up a meeting with White and he took it as a deliberate snub.”
    Adam frowned at me. “How do you know all this if you’ve never met him?”
    I shrugged. “Nyx told me. Apparently White went to her to lodge a complaint. She called to tell me about it, but I guess the harm had already been done because when I offered to meet with him, he refused.”
    “Yep, that sounds like Damascus,” Zen said, nodding.
    “Wait, you know him?” I asked.
    “Of course. Not that it’s anything to brag about. He’s a real jackass.”
    One of my favorite things about Zen was she didn’t mince words. Plus she was an excellent judge of character. I blew out a resigned breath. “Well, if we want to get to the bottom of this, we’re going to have to talk to him. Do you think you could arrange a meeting?” I asked her.
    She laughed. “Please. He would never accept an invitation from a human.”
    “Well,” Brooks said, “we definitely need to talk to him. The last entry in Cadence’s diary mentions that she finally agreed to meet with him.” He looked up. “That was the night before she went missing.”
    Everyone looked at me expectantly. “Crap. All right. I’ll talk to Nyx.”
    Brooks’s face cleared. “Thank you so much, Sabina.”
    *  *  *
    OCTOBER 29
    Nyx agreed to meet me the next night at Muriel’s, one of my favorite restaurants in the Quarter. Luckily, she’d decided to stick around town after the council meeting to enjoy the Halloween festivities.
    The room the maître d’ put us in held a single table and two walls covered in racks of wine. A third wall held a large window that looked down on Jackson Square and the inky expanse of the Mississippi at night. Down on the street below, revelers were dancing through the streets in costumes with plastic cups of Abita or hurricanes from Pat O’Brien’s clasped in their hands.
    Nyx looked up as I approached. “How do you think they’d react if they knew monsters like us actually exist?”
    I frowned at her pensive tone. “They’re all too drunk to care.”
    I took my seat next to her and ordered a drink from the hovering fae waiter who’d shown me to the table. He was of slight build and had long hair pulled back into a neat queue; most humans wouldn’t know he wasn’t one of their kind. I only knew he was fae because of the telltale lavender scent rising off his pale skin. I was glad he wasn’t a vamp who might report the details of our chat back to Damascus White.
    “So,” Nyx began, “how was the trip to Europe? I didn’t get to ask during that clusterfuck of a council meeting.”
    I rolled my eyes at the memory of the drama between Queen Maeve and Mike Romulus. “Everything was fine. Just glad to be home for a while. How