by Karen Chance
“Like the consul?”
He shook his head. “No, not like the consul. She hasn’t lasted two millennia by being careless. And I told you, she knew him from way back. But she knew her own abilities, too, and thought she could handle him.”
“So what changed?”
Jules just looked at me.
“I—no,” I said, seeing the truth in his face. “No! I had nothing to do with—”
But Jules was already nodding. “It started when he went crazy with that spell and bit you.”
“You mean the geis?” I asked, talking about the spell that Mircea had put on me as a kid, linking us together for my protection at Tony’s. But which had gotten screwed up after I became an adult and ended up almost driving him mad. “But that was lifted.”
“Yes, but before that, he bit you,” Jules said, reaching over and turning my head slightly, to show the two small pinprick scars on my neck. “That put a claim on you in vamp terms that he wasn’t authorized to make.”
“He was all but crazy at the time!”
“So he says—and I believe him,” Jules said, putting up his hands. “Choir, remember? But not everybody is as trusting as I am, and it made you a permanent part of the clan. And bound you—and your abilities—to him in a way that the consul didn’t like.”
“Mircea doesn’t control my abilities.”
“But you’ve used them on his behalf before, right? A lot of times? And no offense, but you’re also kind of obviously, um . . . what’s the term I’m looking for here?”
I just looked at him.
“Sweet on him,” he settled for.
“So, what exactly are you telling me?”
“Just that it’s not too hard to figure out that she might feel a little threatened. When all this started, you were just some kid who’d inherited more power than you knew what to do with, and were clueless enough that maybe the senate could manipulate you. And she liked that version. She really liked it. I heard she was going around almost jolly, creeping everyone the hell out—”
“Must have missed that part.” Jolly plus the consul did not compute.
“—but then she finds out that your mother was Artemis—”
“That doesn’t have any—”
“—and that you’ve been raiding hell because some demon lord took one of your servants and you got pissed—”
“How did you know about—”
“—and suddenly you’re changing me back into a human, something nobody even knew the Pythias could do! I mean, do you have any idea how big a deal that is?”
“I— That was an accident. I didn’t mean—”
“I know.” Jules crouched down in front of me. “I know. And I’m grateful. However things turn out, I’m grateful, okay? I couldn’t have lived like that, how that curse left me, just a ball of flesh—”
He shuddered.
“It’s over,” I said, because the clear blue eyes were suddenly haunted. “You don’t have to think about it now.”
He bowed his head, his curls soft on my hands. “I know. I just wanted—” He looked up. “I don’t think I ever properly said thank you. And I do thank you. However things turn out, I have a choice now, something my kind—my old kind—never get a lot of.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.
“But you can understand, can’t you, that your accident threatens the whole system? Do you have any idea how many unhappy vamps are out there?”
I swallowed. “You think I can expect a stampede to my door?”
“With their masters in tow?” Jules asked archly, and then saw my face. “No. But only because most vamps have a serious superiority complex. There are plenty of unhappy vamps, but that doesn’t mean they want to revert to what they view as an inferior species. It would be like a human hating his life and deciding to become a dog. Most want a better master, or more power and status than they already have.”
I leaned my head against the cool marble behind me. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not, to be told I might not have to worry about a problem I hadn’t known I had. Not when another one was staring me in the face.
“So this is my fault?” I asked. “The consul and Mircea?”
“No. As I said, it always goes this way. It’s the way their world works, and one reason I’m pretty sure I’m better off out of it. But you may have . . . sped things up a little.”
“A little?”
“Like a century or so,” he admitted. “And that was just last night.”
“Last night?” I looked at him, confused again.
“How quickly they forget.” He smiled. “Did you or did you not fight some kind of crazy time duel right here last night?”
“You saw that?”
“No. But again, rumors. So somebody saw it. Probably Marlowe,” he added, talking about the consul’s chief spy. “You know they call him Argus, right? Like the old monster with the hundred eyes . . . Anyway, from what I hear, they got a good, up-close look at exactly what a Pythia can do in a duel. And you do know how consuls are chosen? In a duel?”
I stared at him, unable to even feel surprise anymore. “She thinks I’d help Mircea against her?”
“I told you, I don’t know. But the fact is, you could. You could stop time on her, and she’d never even know it. You could negate all her abilities, without breaking a sweat, and have her dead before she could blink—”
“I’m not going to do that!”
“And I’m sure hearing that from you would make her feel so much better,” Jules said sarcastically.
I massaged my temples. It didn’t feel nearly as good as when Mircea did it. “She saw me duel a Spartoi,” I said, talking about the hideous half-dragon sons of Ares. “Why didn’t she freak out then?”
“Maybe she did. I’m not privileged to her thoughts, just the grapevine. But I saw what happened, and with all the trees and hills in the way, nobody got a great view. Plus, it was all over so fast . . . it mostly looked like he underestimated you, and you got lucky.”
“Which is pretty close to the truth.”
“Yeah, but then you got lucky again last night, and again this morning. You see how it goes. How long until it’s not looking so much like luck anymore, or no more than anyone needs in a duel? That Spartoi might have underestimated you; I’m not sure she does anymore.”
“So she’s taking this out on him?”
Jules shrugged. “She needs you.”
“She needs him, too!”
“For now. But if he was to die tragically in battle, say near the end of the war, after doing most of what she wanted . . .”
My jaw clenched.
“I’m not saying that’s what she has planned. Maybe she just wants an experienced commander, someone she can trust, in charge. After all, she had to appoint someone. But I find it a little interesting that the day after she gets an eyeful of exactly what you can do in a duel, Mircea is suddenly looking at a new position.”
Yeah. So did I.
Chapter Thirty-four
The crowd hadn’t thinned when we emerged. Not surprising. Four a.m. is the equivalent of five o’clock rush hour for vamps, when they’re hurrying to finish up business before dawn comes along and spoils the fun. We rejoined the throng on the main concourse.
“So, what’s the senate doing in the basement?” I asked, because I figured that was a safe subject. And because I wanted to know.
“Beats me,” Jules said. “They’ve been even more secretive than usual and I’m a mere mortal now.”
“You seem to know a lot for a mere mortal.”
He threw me a grin. “People always said that I like to gossip too much. But, you know, it’s strange.”
“What is?”
“Now that I’m not a vamp anymore, people tell me things. Like the human servants. They never use
d to gossip in front of me, but all of a sudden, I’m one of the club. And the vamps—even guys I know—talk like I’m not even there. You’d think I suddenly became invisible.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to talk here, for obvious reasons. But the fact was, for a clairvoyant, I was tragically uninformed. I needed info to do my job, but I always seemed to be the last to know everything.
It hadn’t seemed like such a big deal at first, when it felt like I already had too much to learn. But now what I’d said to Rosier kept coming back to haunt me. There was so much I needed to know, just so much, and not all of it was protocol. I needed help.
I needed my own Argus.
Or, at least, a guy who really, really liked to gossip.
“What?” Jules said, and I realized I was still looking at him.
“We’ll talk later.”
He seemed to accept that, probably because ducking into another alcove, assuming we could find one, might look a little weird. Or because we’d just turned off the impressive main corridor, where the marble floors and walls had reflected the moonlight into some semblance of ambient lighting, and entered a dark stairwell. Very dark.
The only relief came from massive standing candelabras, old and brassy and dripping with wax, which kept me from being completely blind. But they were spaced pretty far apart, just spreading a thin sheen over the gloom on either side, that didn’t quite meet in the middle. Vampires probably didn’t notice, but it left me straining to see anything but jumping shadows.
And babies, because, now that I was looking for them, they were everywhere.
Flinching as they passed through the power fields shed by higher-level vamps. Mouthing replies to mental communications, like they were talking on an invisible Bluetooth. Tripping on carpet and running into walls because they couldn’t see any better than me. Staring in awe at nothing visible, but probably at the auras vamps were said to give off, which acted like a signboard telling you family affiliation, rank, past masters, and a cornucopia of other information.
All of which had to be kind of overpowering to the uninitiated.
They looked like what they essentially were, a bunch of toddlers roaming around in search of a clue.
So what were they doing here?
“Substituting,” Jules said, when I asked.
“Substituting for what?”
“For whatever all the older guys are doing.”
“You mean the masters?” We’d hit a back stairwell, where the crowd was thinner. But even up top, I’d seen fewer masters than I’d expected at what had suddenly become vamp central.
“No. Just older. Like no longer babies. The kind of Joes—and Janes—that used to make appointments and supervise the cleaning crew and answer the phones.”
“What?”
He nodded. “They have the cook down there, from what I hear. Well, the guy who orders the food, anyway. The chef and his boys are human—”
“What are they doing with the cook?”
“You tell me. I mean, seriously, if you find out, you tell me. I’m dying to know.”
The stairs finally ended in a narrow corridor, five floors down. Unlike the swanky areas up top, this was completely Spartan. Just a metal handrail on the stairs, unadorned concrete block walls, and a few bare bulbs overhead, now dark. And a dinged-up metal door at the end of the hall, with two large vamps standing in front of it.
No one was trying to impress anyone down here, which was clearly a staff area. And that included the staff. Who didn’t so much as blink when we approached.
“Put me down,” I told my ride, who immediately did as he was told.
God, I could get used to baby vamps.
The others, of course, continued to ignore my existence. I was too tired to try and read the clues, and figure out how old they were, not that it mattered. Old enough to lift the hair on my arms from the power they were putting off. Old enough to not bother being polite to some human who’d gotten lost. Old enough to be a problem.
Until Jules piped up. “Does the Pythia fight alone?” he demanded—oddly.
Even more oddly, it got a reaction. One of the hulking mountains, bald and stacked and jeans clad—like he wasn’t supposed to be seen by the kind of people who would have his attire as their chief worry—blinked once. And looked at me.
His eyes narrowed.
“No,” he said. And that was it.
“No what?” Jules demanded, because despite being a member of Mircea’s tribe, he’d never been great with diplomacy.
Or with remembering that he wasn’t a vampire anymore, and could be squashed like a bug if he touched that door.
I pulled him back.
“No what?” he repeated. “No, she can’t get in? Because she can get in. She can get in any damn place she—”
“Jules!” I said, and he shut up.
The vamp didn’t say anything, either. For a moment, we all just stood there, not talking. Which they were perfectly capable of doing all day, but I didn’t have the time.
“I could shift through the door, but I’m tired,” I finally said to Mr. Clean. “I need my strength for other things.”
This, of course, also got no response. I sometimes forgot, dealing mostly with Mircea’s crew, that vamps didn’t tend to waste effort talking to humans. It was one reason they and the mages didn’t get on. Mages would talk; vamps would look at them like they were bugs, assuming they acknowledged them at all; mages would get pissed. Unfortunate things ensued.
But I wasn’t up to unfortunate things, not with feet that were killing me and a headache that was starting to pound at my temples again and a day that might not qualify for worst ever, considering the competition, but sure as hell hadn’t been good.
“Let me rephrase,” I said grimly. “I am tired. So, if I have to use power, I’m not going to use it to shift through a door that you could just open for me. I am going to use it to shift you. You will not like where I shift you to.”
Mr. Clean remained impassive, but his buddy didn’t seem quite so sanguine. He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then reached into his back pocket—I would have thought for a gun except he didn’t need a gun. And, sure enough, he came back with something else.
Something like a folded-up newspaper.
“Yeah, okay,” Jules said. “See?” He tapped the paper.
The vamp, who was just as big as his partner, but who had varied the Hulk imitation to include a buzz cut, scowled.
Jules stopped tapping the paper.
The vamp unfolded it and took a look.
I would have asked him what he was doing, but I didn’t need to. Because the whole of the front page was taken up with a picture of my face, blood-streaked and snarling, hovering over Rhea as she lay sprawled on the drag.
Because somebody, in the middle of all that, had thought to take a picture.
Reporters.
They might just be the craziest group I’d met yet.
“Not her,” the other vamp said, glancing at the paper.
Buzz Cut frowned, taking his time. Or maybe it just took that long for the elevator to make it all the way to the top floor. Finally, he looked up at me, squinted, and then looked back down at his paper again. “Dunno.”
“Oh, for—it’s her. It’s obviously her!” Jules said, which got him another scowl.
Warning number two.
I pulled him behind me.
“I don’t have a driver’s license on me,” I began. And then stopped. Because the top of the paper had fallen over, revealing the headline. The massive headline that bisected the entire front page, in roughly the same size letters that had been used to announce the end of World War II.
DOES THE PYTHIA FIGHT ALONE?
“What is that?” I asked, taking the paper before I thought about it.
Strangely, the
vamp let me have it.
“Graphology,” Jules told me, with relish. “With a Carla Torres byline.”
“Which means?”
He blinked. “Carla Torres. Graphology. It’s . . . a major paper, okay? Like our version of the New York Times. And she’s a senior editor.”
“I remember her from this morning,” I said, thinking of frizzy hair and cute glasses. And more of what the older vamps at Tony’s had called moxie than most vamps I knew had.
“She remembers you, too,” Jules said dryly. “And she went off—on the senate, the Circle . . . Hell, she was even bitching at the Weres for a while—”
“Bitching about what?”
“Read the title.” He was staring at it over my shoulder. “I don’t know what happened this morning, but according to her, you basically fought off the entire Black Circle on your own. Except for some probably exaggerated help from a valiant group of reporters,” he added, mouth twisting.
“It wasn’t.”
“What?”
“Exaggerated.”
“You haven’t even read it yet.”
“I don’t have to read it for that. I’d have been dead without them. And without Marco and the others. Even the Circle showed up . . . eventually.”
“Well, not soon enough for her,” Jules said gleefully. “And she’s pissed. That’s the evening paper, so she must have spent all day writing it. You can read it for yourself, but her main line was that, prior to yesterday, she didn’t know what to think about you. She vacillated between some kind of nut who’d gotten into a dangerous position of power, to a stuck-up vampire protégée, to a dangerous rebel intent on upending the system. Or possibly all three. But now . . .”
“Now?” I looked back at him, because I couldn’t read it for myself. The only light in here was what spilled down the stairs, and it had been dim at the source.