by Karen Chance
“I will,” I said, trying to calm him down. Because he’d finally settled on an emotion and it was panic.
And I didn’t get that. I glanced around the room, but it didn’t seem so bad to me. No windows, of course, but presumably this was a vampire residence, so no big shock there. And everything else seemed comfortable enough. There was even a small TV.
And he’d been here only a couple of days.
Of course, Jules wasn’t exactly the most stoic of guys. Jules tended to freak out over a hangnail. But still.
“What’s so terrible?” I asked, honestly puzzled.
“Everything!” He lowered his voice; why, I don’t know. It wasn’t like Mircea couldn’t have heard him half a mile away. “Nothing. I don’t know.” His eyes darted around. “It’s creepy!”
“Creepy?”
“This place is crawling with vampires!”
“Jules. You used to be a vampire.”
“Yes, but I’m not one now. And they don’t look at me the same way anymore. All of a sudden, I’m not a person. I’m . . . lunch. Or a lab rat or—I don’t know. But they’re planning something, I know they are, and I need to get out of here before they figure out what!”
“A lab rat? Why a lab rat?”
He looked at me incredulously. “Cassie. Don’t you get it? Don’t you know what you did?”
“Made history,” Mircea said from the door.
I looked up and oh, goody, Kit had come, too. He looked even more rumpled than before, because he’d found an overcoat that had apparently been at the bottom of a laundry hamper somewhere. Or possibly been towed behind a van. With his wrinkled clothes and messy curls and sharp, dark eyes, he looked like a slightly better-looking Columbo. Or maybe more than slightly better, if he hadn’t been standing next to a shirtless Adonis.
And frowning at me.
“Mircea . . .” I said, starting to get creeped out, because I wasn’t imagining it. Kit’s dark eyes were boring a hole into mine.
“I let him into my mind,” Mircea explained. “Not into the spell,” he added, at my look of alarm. Because the last thing I needed was the Senate’s chief spy probing around my cranium. “I don’t control that; you do.”
“My mother did,” I corrected.
But Mircea shook his head. “She may have laid the spell, but she wasn’t powering it. You were. And unless this magic runs counter to every other kind we know, the one who powers a spell controls it.”
“But I haven’t been controlling it. I don’t know how to control it.” I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and didn’t even know how to get home.
“Yet you have been placing it on other people. On me, and on Jules.”
“By accident.”
“And that matters why?” Marlowe said sharply. Because vampires didn’t get concepts like extenuating circumstances. At least, their law code didn’t. If you did something, you were responsible for it, no matter why it happened.
So, as far as Marlowe was concerned, the loss of a master vampire was one hundred percent down to me. But Jules hadn’t been his vampire, so I didn’t see what his beef was. Jules had belonged to Mircea, and he seemed to be taking it in stride.
Seemed to be taking it suspiciously in stride.
It was one of the reasons it had taken me a while to notice that he’d been avoiding me lately, because I’d kind of been doing it right back. I’d expected him to have a few things to say about Jules, along with some other stuff that had happened recently. But he was looking awfully good-humored for someone who had just been deprived of the vamp equivalent of a winning Powerball ticket.
I started to get a bad feeling about this.
“These things happen,” Mircea said easily, causing my alarm meter to tick up another few notches. “However, your new ability may be the solution we’ve been looking for.”
“What solution?” I asked, looking back and forth from him to Kit. But, strangely for a guy who prided himself on knowing everything, it didn’t look like Kit knew this. He had transferred his frown to Mircea, and it was growing.
“What were we just discussing?” Mircea asked me.
It took me a moment, because I didn’t see what the two had to do with each other. “The . . . invasion of faerie?”
Mircea smiled.
Marlowe didn’t. But his eyes narrowed. And shifted from Mircea back to me, with a new expression in them.
It wasn’t one I liked.
“What?” I asked him bluntly.
But it was Mircea who answered. “As we just discussed, the only option for ending this war is to ferret out the ones responsible for it. And we must do that soon, before they manage to bring another of the gods back to fight it for them. Yet that has seemed impossible. They are hiding in faerie, and no one goes into faerie in force. It has never been done. We have therefore been stymied, waiting for our fey allies to aid us or at least to tell us where our enemies are to be found. They have done neither.”
“And they don’t intend to,” Marlowe said. “They won’t even help us stop the damned smugglers; how can we expect them to do something that requires actual risk?”
“We can’t,” Mircea said, still looking at me. “The onus is on us. We alone among the supernatural community are unaffected by faerie. A vampire is a vampire, wherever he is. We do not acquire our magic in the same way as the other groups, and therefore do not feel the effects of a strange world as they do.”
“You do when it’s time to feed,” I pointed out, wondering where he was going with this.
“But a master does not need to feed often—”
“He does if he’s injured.”
“—and he can draw strength from his family in the case of injury, feeding through his connection to them. We alone have a link to this world, to our family, to our source of magic, that remains the same regardless of where we are.”
“If you’re a master,” I pointed out, because all vamps had links to their families, but masters were the only ones who could pull the kind of power Mircea was talking about. “And most aren’t.”
“No,” he agreed. “Most aren’t.”
There was a pregnant pause.
Which stayed that way, because I still wasn’t getting this.
“I don’t get how you expect to do this alone,” I said. “Or why you want to. The vampires aren’t the only ones in danger, so why does it all fall to—”
“Think about it, Cassie,” Mircea said, sitting on the bed beside me. “The mages are all but useless in faerie; the demons likewise. The Weres might be somewhat of a help, but they are too few in number and too unreliable to be counted on. Who does that leave?”
“The covens, for one,” I said, talking about the groups of magic users who had never come under the Circle’s control. “And they use a form of fey magic—”
“But one designed for use on earth. And they have the same organizational problem as the Weres, only more so. They are leaderless, fractured, unreliable. To avoid being subsumed by the Circle, they withdrew from it. But in doing so, they ceded much of their power in the community the Circle now governs. You would be wise not to put too much faith in them. They may need you, but they cannot be an asset to you.”
Which, in vamp terms, made them irrelevant.
“But the vamps can’t invade on their own,” I said, feeling like I was taking crazy pills. “You barely have enough masters to run everything now.”
Masters were the backbone of the vamp world. They were the administrators, the ambassadors, the rulers, and the police. Not to mention the font of all new vamps, since no one below a master could make any, and the reason the whole vampire world hadn’t been wiped out by the mages centuries ago.
Back in the day, vampirism had been viewed like the plague, and the mages who hunted them thought of themselves as doctors trying to eradicate it. And they’d done i
t easily, killing the rank-and-file vamps they came across by the hundreds and then by the thousands. Until they met with a bunch of masters who had banded together to fuck some shit up.
And they had. And it led to centuries of conflict thereafter, with each side renewing the war anytime one of them got what they thought would be an advantage. I’d been taught it as a child mostly from the vampire perspective, but the vamps had caused just as much damage, viewing a world without mages as a paradise where they could live and feed and spread at will.
But that didn’t happen because the two groups mostly stayed at equilibrium with each other, and so served as a kind of unofficial checks-and-balances system. They’d signed a treaty years ago professing “friendship and cooperation,” but no way would that last if there was suddenly some big advantage to one side or the other.
Like most of the world’s masters being wiped out in faerie, for instance.
“You don’t have that many vamps to spare, or to risk,” I pointed out. “Even with all six Senates, you don’t—”
I stopped, the clue bat having just smacked me sharply between the eyes.
I looked at Jules, who was now sitting on the far side of the bed, since Mircea had taken his space. He looked back at me, blue eyes wide and oblivious. Marlowe, on the other hand, was practically vibrating.
No, I thought.
No, I’m imagining things.
But one look at Mircea’s face told me I wasn’t.
He was watching me, a small smile on his lips, the kind that said he’d already done all the math and was just waiting for me to catch up. But I wasn’t catching up, because there were diseases and then there were cures, and some of the cures were just as bad as the illness.
“What happens after the war?” I asked abruptly, and had the tiny satisfaction of seeing him blink.
Not because he hadn’t thought of it, too, but because he hadn’t thought I would.
“We have to win it first,” he pointed out.
“Yes, we do. But not this way.” I started to get up.
He caught my arm. “Then what way? What would you have us do?”
“I don’t know. But there has to be another—”
“Do you think we haven’t looked for one? Do you think we haven’t had every expert we possess working on the problem? For months? Where faerie is concerned, there simply aren’t many options.”
“Then look some more! This is crazy!”
“Why crazy?” Mircea asked, still sounding oh so reasonable. “If you can unmake a vampire, you can do the reverse.”
“No, I can’t! I can age him, but I can’t give him power—”
“But his master can.”
I stopped. I’d been about to point out that this whole discussion was a waste of time, since what I could do would result in nothing but an older baby vamp, like an eighty-year-old toddler, which wouldn’t help anybody. Which meant we didn’t have anything to discuss, did we?
But then Mircea’s words sank in. “Meaning what?”
“That there has long been a way to speed up the process, for the right candidate.” He glanced at Kit, who scowled ferociously.
“Now I know why I was invited into this little conversation,” he said sourly.
“Tell her.”
Kit looked like there were a few things he’d like to tell both of us, especially Mircea. But he didn’t. His expression didn’t get any happier, though.
“It’s called the Push,” he said tersely, and Jules gasped. Like the clue bat had just found another victim. Marlowe ignored him. “It’s a method used to make a master in a few days instead of a few centuries. It originated in wartime, when too many masters had been killed and replacements were needed immediately to avoid disaster. I was made this way, and almost died as a result. Most who attempt it do, which is why it is used only in extremis.”
He didn’t look like he wanted to talk about it, so I didn’t ask. Except for the obvious. “And this has what to do with me?”
“You know how vampires are made,” Mircea said.
“Of course.”
“The bite infects the body, but the strength to rise again, to live as a new creature, that comes from the master,” he said, telling me anyway. “But with the Push, the new Child is not given merely the basic energy needed to rise, but much, much more. For most, it is too much, too soon. They can’t absorb it, and never rise, dying not from the power but from having too little time to properly absorb it.”
“You want me to age them up while their master feeds them power,” I said. I didn’t bother to make it a question.
“Yes.”
“And risk killing them if it doesn’t work?”
“There are many who would gladly take that chance. Many who have given up hope of such a thing, of a status they were never destined to earn.”
“And there’s a reason for that, isn’t there?” I demanded. Masters were the powerhouses of the vampire world, but they were also dangerous. Extremely dangerous. And hard to control.
Mostly, it didn’t matter, because there weren’t that many masters and the Senate ruled them with an iron first. And because the hundreds of years of time it usually took to make one gave even the most crazed specimen, even someone like Jack, the Senate’s happy-go-lucky chief torturer, time to gain a measure of self-control. Jack liked his work, but he didn’t go running around making extra for himself these days, as he’d done in life. When he’d had the cute little nickname of The Ripper.
But what if he’d gotten master status early—real early? What if he’d never had that time? What if he had the same power but none of the control?
I shuddered in horror, and that was one man. And if they were planning an invasion . . .
“How many?”
“Cassie—”
“How many?” I said tightly, hugging myself. The towel had felt okay before, but it was suddenly clammy. Like my skin.
“I don’t have the exact figure—”
“Then ballpark it!”
“No more than necessary—”
“The fact that you don’t want to tell me is really worrying me right now.”
Mircea frowned, like he honestly hadn’t expected this to be difficult. Like, sure, I’ll make you an army of master vampires to lay waste to faerie, no problem. And then pretend it’s not my fault when they turn around and do the same thing to earth!
“We will be careful about the selection,” Mircea said, watching me.
“You won’t have to worry about that.”
“Cassie—”
But before he could reconfigure his plan of attack, the same vamp who had called him out last time came back.
“Showtime,” Marlowe said grimly.
“We’ll talk later,” Mircea promised me.
“No, damn it! We’ll talk—”
And just like that, I was back at Dante’s. Sprawled on the floor of my half-flooded bath, because I hadn’t turned off the sink before I was abruptly snatched away.
“—now,” I finished furiously.
Son of a bitch!
Chapter Thirty-one
I spent the next twenty minutes mopping up. I must have knocked the liquid hand soap when I toppled over, and it was the frothy kind. So I’d woken up in a sea of bubbles, with a loofah bumping me in the nose, and a sink cascading over everything like a miniature Niagara.
And an imminent flood, because I’d had my butt on the drain.
I got up, turned off the water, and started shooing the tide toward the exit. But that was only somewhat helpful, since it left me with soap scale all along the walls, like a high water mark. It took every towel I had to scrub it off and to soak up the rest of the overflow. Except for the one I appropriated for me, because my old one was as drenched as everything else in here.
The boys would have told me to leave it
for housekeeping, but we gave them enough trouble as it was. And cleaning gave me a chance to work off some energy. And right now, I had a lot of it.
Because I was pissed.
Which was both infuriating and seriously confusing, because I didn’t know why.
I mean, I knew why. The obvious why, anyway. Mircea was running scared, just like Jonas. But when master vamps were scared, they didn’t circle the wagons and go on the defensive. They ran toward whatever was scaring them, weapons out and fangs bared. They became more dangerous when afraid, not less so, their every instinct telling them to go for blood. And Mircea, being smarter than most—about some things, I thought, scrubbing fiercely—had found a nifty new way to do that.
“We’ll be careful about the selection.”
Yeah, I bet. But say they were. And say the Senate could keep all those giddy-with-their-shiny-new-power masters under control. Which was debatable because the ones they already had caused them enough trouble sometimes. But just for the sake of argument, say they could do it. That still left some big damned questions, didn’t it?
Like whose vamps would they be?
After the war was over, who would they fight for? Because there was an alliance between the vampire Senates right now, but it was shaky at best since they all pretty much hated one another. They just happened to hate the gods more. So right now, the world’s vampires were one big, unhappy, seriously dysfunctional family, but normally, there were six separate Senates. And there would be again about a nanosecond after the war ended.
So I had to wonder. When all the dust settled, assuming we won, because otherwise it didn’t really matter, did it, who would they fight for? Or, more important, who would they fight against? Other Senates? The Circle? Humans?
Because they could. With an army of master vamps, the Senate so very, very could do any damned thing they pleased. And old or not, mature or not, responsible or not, you didn’t give a vamp unlimited power like that. You just didn’t. Because they would use it. Sooner or later, somehow or other, and what would be the point of all this then? Save the world from Ares just so we could rip it apart ourselves? Yeah, that would be an improvement!
