Even Vampires Get The Blues

"Ah. I thought perhaps you might put things together. Please, Paen, take a seat. There is no need to be uncivilized about this. You are naturally upset by what would appear to be some sort of trickery on my part, but I assure you that there is none intended."

Paen snorted something rude under his breath, but sat down next to me.

Do you believe him? I asked Paen.

No.

Good. Neither do I. He's lying. All my elf senses are tingling.

Sweetheart, I'm beginning to believe your elf senses are easy tinglers. But I agree—he's not telling us the truth.

"The situation is a little more complicated than I originally led you both to believe," Caspar said, making another of those hands-spread-in-honesty gestures that I didn't for a moment buy into. His face was blank, unreadable, although he seemed to be watching us with sharp, dark eyes. "In hindsight, I am perhaps a little guilty of muddying the waters, so to speak, but I assure you that everything I told you, Paen, and you, Samantha, was the absolute truth. The demon lord Oriens has called the statue due as payment for services rendered to Sir Alec."

I shot Paen a questioning look. Your father is a knight?

Baronet, Paen said, his arms crossed over his chest as he waited for Caspar to continue.

So, someday when your father decides he doesn't want the title, you'll get it?

Eventually, yes. He will pretend to die of old age in a distant location, and I will take over the title until he has passed from mortal memory, then we'll reverse the procedure. It's worked quite well the last few hundred years.

Let me get this straight—you're a brooding, sexy titled Scottish vampire?

Paen shot me a quick puzzled look. What's your point?

Nothing. But remind me to write a book about you someday when this is all over. I bet women would eat you up with a spoon.

"Are you finished?" Caspar asked politely, brushing an infinitesimal bit of nothing off his knee.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to stop you. Please, continue. This is fascinating," I said, blushing a little at being caught mind-talking to Paen.

Caspar smiled, and I swear if I had been mortal, I'd have lost a couple of years off my life at the sight of it. "I have been remiss in congratulating you on finding your Beloved, Paen. My felicitations."

Paen was made of sterner stuff. "What exactly haven't you told us about the statue?"

"So forceful, so blunt and to the point," Caspar said, the creepy smile still on his lips. Something about him had changed since I last saw him. Before, he seemed like a relatively pleasant, if a bit intense, man. Now I could swear I felt tendrils of dark power snapping and crackling around him, as if he sat in the middle of an electrical charge. "You two will do well together, I think. The information I perhaps unwisely kept from you is in regards to the statue's origin."

I thought back to our last meeting. "You said that it had been commissioned from a Chinese artist and later given to Marco Polo by the emperor."

"As indeed it was. But the person who commissioned it… well, there is no avoiding this revelation. The person who commissioned the statue was none other than myself."

Now, that took me by surprise. I don't know what I was expecting him to say, but it wasn't that he was the one behind the creation of the statue some two thousand years ago. "So the statue was originally yours… Wait a minute." I dug through my recent memories and came up with something that didn't make sense. "You told me that the statue depicted Sun Wukong, the monkey god."

"As indeed it does," Caspar agreed.

I looked at him, a sense of dread building inside me until it was so great it spilled over onto Paen. He took my hand in his, rubbing his thumb over my fingers. What's wrong, love?

So many things, I don't know where to start. "You also said that the person who ordered the statue created was the god of death."

Paen's thumb stilled. Outside the room, the normal sounds of Edinburgh traffic faded away until it was as still as the room in which we sat.

"That is so," Caspar said finally, a tiny muscle twitching in his eyebrow the only sign that he was less than pleased that I had such a good memory.

"You are Yan Luowang, the god of death?" Paen asked.