by Karen Chance
“No,” Louis-Cesare said. “Only Radu and Ray survived, thanks to you. Those creatures killed everyone else.”
There was a short silence. Very short, because Marlowe wasn’t in the mood for introspection. Marlowe was in the mood for blood.
“But that is all they did!” he rasped. “They didn’t even bother to turn off the damned cameras! We’ve watched the whole event now, several times, and there was no copying of files, no attempt to access the vault, no prisoners liberated. They came in, they killed everyone, the end.”
“Why?” I asked, bewildered. “And how do you get a whole group of people to die for you? Especially like that?”
“We believe they were likely already dead when they arrived,” Mircea said quietly. “And that the throat slitting was merely a diversion. As to the why…It is possible that the idea was to give everyone a reason to question whether the alliance should stand. And, if it does, under what leadership.”
It took me a moment to process that. “You’re saying this could be someone on our side?”
“It is possible. There were a number of consuls who wished to lead the alliance. They were less than pleased to have ours put in charge. And if she is made to look weak enough…”
“But the other side in the war has even more reason to oppose our union,” Marlowe pointed out. “If they’ve found out about it, they’d want to crush it quickly, before it gained us an advantage. Not to mention—”
“No,” Mircea said stubbornly. “This is a vampire plot.”
“We don’t know that!”
“It’s too intricate for anything else.”
“But…wait,” I said, my head starting to hurt again. Which was what usually happened when politics were brought up. “Jonathan is with the Black Circle. He’s a dark mage.”
“And we are fighting the Black Circle.”
“Yes, but…the Black Circle has always been involved in the slave trade with Faerie. And wasn’t that the assumption we were going on—that someone is trying to control the smuggling trade now that Geminus is out of the picture? Why not them? It would be a lot easier to bring things through for the war if they controlled most of the portals.”
“Yes, but Dory,” Radu said gently, “it’s a question of ability, not of desire.”
“Come again?”
“The Black Circle can’t manage the sort of communications shutdown we saw last night,” Marlowe said bluntly. “No mage can.”
Mircea nodded. “Telephones, computers, that sort of thing—yes. Merely activating the more powerful wards would take care of that. And if not, there are spells. But no spell can shut down a vampire’s ability to communicate with other vampires.”
“No spell you know of.”
“No spell at all,” Marlowe said flatly. “There are limits to magic, as with everything else, and we know what those limits are. We have lived with the mages—and fought them—for centuries. We know what they can do and what they can’t, and they cannot do what Radu described last night!”
’Du nodded. “I don’t pretend to be all that powerful, but I am second-level. And I was, er, motivated. Yet I could not reach anyone.”
“You reached me.”
“Yes, once you came inside the sphere of whatever influence was being exerted. But not before that. You didn’t hear me outside.”
“No.”
“And yet, believe me, I was screaming my head off.”
“That bring us to the question,” Marlowe said grimly. “Who the hell is working with Jonathan?”
“A senior master?” Radu offered, looking at his brother.
“It would have to be someone more powerful than Radu in order to block him,” Mircea agreed. “Someone with significant mental abilities.”
But Marlowe didn’t seem to like that idea. “There are only a handful of masters in the world capable of that kind of demonstration.”
“That we know of—”
“And I do not relish approaching them and accusing them of treason! Not at any time, but particularly not now.”
“It would not serve to strengthen the alliance,” Mircea said drily.
“That’s why you wanted Ray gone,” I said, catching up. “You’re worried about Cheung.”
“Not Lord Cheung himself, no. His gifts lie in other areas. But his lady—”
“I thought he and Ming-de didn’t get along,” Radu said, talking about the head of the East Asian Court.
“That is the story,” Mircea said wryly. “But it could have been manufactured. And Ming-de is a powerful mentalist. I was selected to go to her court as our ambassador over a dispute some years ago, because she had managed to influence everyone else we had sent.”
“Ray isn’t a spy,” I told them. “Cheung has been trying to kill him!”
“And perhaps now he is trying to use him.”
“Then why did he want him back? Ray said Cheung wanted him to help bring in something big. But Zheng just told me that they don’t need him anymore.”
“It could be unrelated,” Marlowe said. “Unlike Lord Mircea, I am not convinced that this is part of our problem. Cheung might have been planning to bring in a shipment at one time, but is now attempting to distance himself from the smuggling issue.”
“Why? What changed?”
“What changed is that more smugglers have been turning up dead. My men have been trying to question them, but finding only houses full of corpses.”
“Someone is tidying up loose ends,” Louis-Cesare said.
“But that someone doesn’t have to be a vampire,” Marlowe pointed out.
“What’s the alternative?” Radu asked. “There’s just not that many creatures who—”
“Æsubrand,” I cut in. “He was there. At Slava’s.”
“Yes, but he’s fey,” Radu protested.
“So?”
“The fey are known for their abilities with the natural world, not with the mind.”
“Caedmon has mental abilities.”
“Yes, well. That’s Caedmon,” Radu said sardonically. “We are talking about—”
“His nephew, who could have inherited all sorts of—”
“Could have does not mean did.”
“He’s fey. It’s possible.”
“Don’t let your animosity for the creature cloud your judgment,” Mircea told me. “It’s possible that he was there for an entirely unconnected reason.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that the fey are vindictive little shits,” Marlowe said impatiently. “Slava was rumored to import fey slaves—”
“Something he’s been doing for years, and nobody has seemed to care.”
“—and then there’s the weapon you found last night, which had fey magic written all over it. Or so it appeared.”
“You didn’t examine it?”
“I might have, had you managed to bring the thing back!”
“Or you might have asked Æsubrand about it, had you caught him,” Louis-Cesare murmured blandly, handing Marlowe another cup of coffee. And getting a blistering glare in return.
“Wasn’t it at Central?” I asked.
“No,” Marlowe said shortly. “Of course, considering the amount of acid leaking about the place, it could have melted into a puddle before we got there. But we didn’t find any stray .45s inundated with a fey spell.”
I shook my head. “I think it was just a regular gun. I used standard ammo in it without a problem. It seemed to be the bullets that—”
“Yes, but since we don’t have it, we can’t know for sure, can we?” Marlowe asked sweetly.
One of these days, I swore to God…
“So you think it was some rare fey thing we’re not supposed to have?” I asked, gritting my teeth. “Because we’re talking about bullets here, not some rune or—”
“I have no bloody idea! I was merely pointing out that Æsubrand could have had a reason for being there that had nothing to do with us. And indeed, that was likely the case, since he was attacking Slava, n
ot helping him!”
And okay, he did have a point there.
“But it doesn’t matter because he isn’t the one we want!”
I blinked. “Then who is?”
“Oh, no, not again.” Radu sighed, and got up to get himself another drink.
“What?” I asked.
“Have you forgotten?” Marlowe asked. “The Irin.”
“Now who is letting prejudices cloud judgment?” Mircea murmured.
“But what possible interest would a demon have in human smuggling?” I demanded.
“For the last time, this isn’t about smuggling!” Marlowe snapped. “And if that creature’s performance at Slava’s was anything to go on, he is perfectly capable of causing the kind of mental disruption—”
“To what end?” Mircea broke in. “The demon lords—”
“Have every reason to keep us disunited. The stronger we are, the more restrictions we place on them. They didn’t like our alliance with the mages, and I doubt they enjoy seeing a strong, united vampire coalition any better!”
“And to that noble end, they send one operative?” Mircea asked drily, looking like a man who had discussed this about all he wanted to.
“They sent an Irin, and you know what they—”
“Um,” I said, and stopped.
Everyone turned to look at me. I sighed. I’d been hoping to keep that particular piece of less-than-stellar work out of this, but I should have known. It just wasn’t how my luck was going.
“He helped me at Slava’s,” I admitted.
“What are you talking about?” Marlowe demanded.
“The charm broke,” I said bluntly. Because how I phrased it wasn’t going to make a difference.
“We knew it was likely to do that.”
“Yes…but not twenty stories up.”
“Twenty—” Mircea broke off, but his expression said volumes. I was never getting rehired.
So I might as well come clean. “I’d be dead now, but he caught me,” I told them. “And if he was working against us, why bother to do that?”
“To ensure that you returned to Central with Slava’s corpse,” Marlowe said, glaring at me. I don’t know why. For messing up, for poking holes in his pet theory, or just because he felt like it.
I glared back for the last reason. “Yeah, except Slava wasn’t needed. His boys were doing a pretty good job of trashing the place all on their own.”
“And yet, you were let in—”
“—to lead them to ’Du. The question should be why did they want him?”
We all turned to look at Radu. “Well, I don’t know,” he said crossly.
“We’ve been through this,” Marlowe said savagely. “We’ve been through all of this, over and over, and none of it gets us anywhere! Radu knows entirely too much about too many things to even begin to guess—assuming it was his knowledge they were after in the first place.”
“Well, what else would they want him for?” I asked.
“Thank you very much,” Radu told me.
Marlowe said a bad word. “We can speculate all bloody night and get nowhere! There are too many suspects and too many possible motives. We don’t need guesses; we need to know. And there is only one way to do that.”
And suddenly everyone was looking at me again.
Shit.
Chapter Thirty-two
“You want me to go back under, don’t you?” I asked. “To see if I remember anything else.”
It was kind of obvious. It wasn’t like I got invited to these high-level meetings often. I should have known they were leading up to something.
But Mircea surprised me. “Not…precisely.”
He and Louis-Cesare exchanged a glance, and for some reason, it almost looked like Louis-Cesare was the aggressor. His lips tightened, his brows lowered, and he looked…well, he looked pissed. Which was not an expression Mircea was accustomed to getting from many people.
Even weirder, he didn’t object. He just sat there and took it, without saying anything, at least not audibly, and without glaring back. It was bizarre.
But not as much so as when he broke the eye contact to look at me. And his expression then…I’d never seen that expression. Not from Mircea. It was…raw. Pained. Almost…afraid.
Why would Mircea look afraid. Of me?
“There is something your father has to tell you,” Louis-Cesare said forcefully.
Mircea didn’t say anything.
“We discussed this,” Louis-Cesare prompted after a moment.
“Discussed me?” I asked. “When?”
“After your…after the events in the garden,” Louis-Cesare explained. “I was…confused.”
“About what?” I asked harshly. My little descents into madness weren’t my favorite subject. “You’d seen it before.”
“Yes, but you had not. And you were afraid—”
“I was not.”
He just looked at me.
I looked back. I wanted another topic. “If you want me to try to go back to the wharf, to see if I remember anything else—”
“Yes, but not yet,” Mircea said, finally speaking.
“Why? I’m willing to take the risk.” I hadn’t enjoyed the last trip, but Marlowe was right. We needed facts and we needed them now.
“I…am not sure you are.” Mircea got up and went to the bar, but then didn’t fix himself anything. He just turned around, his hands on the polished wood behind him, his face expressionless. And looked at me. “I am not sure that you know what the risk is.”
I glanced at the others, but didn’t get any help. Everyone else was looking at Mircea. Everyone but Louis-Cesare. He was looking at me, but he didn’t say anything.
Obviously, this was Mircea’s story to tell.
And he told it.
“Do you remember when we met for the first time?”
I just stared at him. It was pretty unforgettable. I’d tried to stab him, mistaking him for his brother—the man who had ordered my mother’s execution.
Mircea had fled the country after becoming a vampire, horrified at his transformation and afraid that he would hurt the ones he loved—including her. He hadn’t known she was pregnant at the time he left, and found out only when he returned—and saw an unmistakable resemblance in the features of the child trying to gut him. He had gotten the story out of me—what little I knew. That she had gone to ask for help from the local lord, who was the brother of her missing husband.
And been brutally murdered for her trouble.
“Of course you do,” Mircea said, looking at me. “It was a stupid question.”
He started to pace. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he was stalling, nervous. But Mircea didn’t get nervous. Or if he did, he never showed it.
“I took you to Italy,” he said, staring out the window. “I didn’t know what else to do. Vlad knew it was only a matter of time before I discovered his treachery, and he intended to kill me before I could kill him. If I had had a master, a family, to rely on, that would not have been a problem. But I did not.”
I nodded. Mircea had been cursed with vampirism, not made through a vampire’s bite, and therefore had been on his own from day one. I often wondered if that was what had made him as chary as he was, as loath to trust anyone. Maybe he’d never had a chance to get in the habit.
“I don’t remember Italy,” I told him.
“No. You wouldn’t.” Mircea had wiped my mind of all things related to Vlad, so that I wouldn’t go back and try to finish the job. And for some reason, it had taken a ton of other memories as well.
“I do,” Radu said suddenly. “We had a lovely villa. Not that I was there then, of course, but later…” He trailed off as everyone looked at him. “Er, I…I think I shall go get some fresh coffee. Kit?”
“I don’t want coffee,” Marlowe said shortly.
“Yes, but I could use the help.”
“Get a servant to help you.”
“Kit—”
“
Don’t bother,” I told Radu. “He’s probably got the room bugged, anyway.”
Marlowe didn’t bother to deny it.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked Mircea.
“It is…somewhat relevant to our current situation. But if you would prefer privacy—”
He looked almost hopeful.
“I would prefer to know what you’re talking about.”
Mircea never talked about the past—or almost never. I was getting what I could, while I could.
Before he changed his mind.
“Very well. We went to Italy,” he said, and then he stopped. But this time it was apparently just to gather his thoughts, because he continued a moment later. “We didn’t have a villa,” he told me. “Or a palazzo, as we were in Venice at the time. I had had to leave Wallachia with very little money, and much of that had been spent in the years before we met. But I made a tenuous living as a gambler—”
“A gambler?”
An eyebrow arched. “That surprises you?”
“No,” I said slowly. I could see it, strangely enough. Mircea always sounded like the voice of reason, a sea of calm in comparison to Marlowe’s tempest. But he took chances when he needed to. He just didn’t gamble on the small stuff.
“I discovered that it is easy, when you’re a vampire,” he said wryly. “Although I did not make as much as I would have liked. Venice was not so large in those days and word spread when someone never lost.”
“But we did okay,” I guessed.
“Financially, yes. But there were…problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“The usual. I was a foreigner, and although Venice was a port city, there was a certain amount of prejudice in the human community. And among the vampires, there were always those wishing to add a lone, masterless vampire to their fold, if they thought he might be of use, whether he wished it or not. And then there was the difficulty of monitoring the situation back home from a distance, and health concerns with my old tutor, who was with me, and all of the things about my still relatively new condition that I had yet to figure out, and—” He looked up. “And then there was you.”
“What about me?”
“You were manageable, at first. Hostile at times, and suspicious, isolated in a new city where you did not speak the language, and resentful of the clothing I made you wear and the manners Horatiu was attempting to instill.”
