by Karen Chance
Lucky accident, but I’d take it.
“Hi,” I said again, a little louder. “I’m Cassie. The new Pythia.”
And, okay, it looked like some people had read the paper. Others clearly hadn’t, or else they’d missed today’s edition, because they were looking a little confused. But at least I had their attention.
Now I had to keep it.
“First, I want to assure you that no one is going to force you to do anything. You can go if you like, with no repercussions.”
There was an unhappy stirring from behind me while the vamps in front just looked at me blankly.
“It’s true,” I said. “I was just informed, by a reputable source, that forcible possessions are rarely successful, and often do more harm than good—to both parties. If you’re not on board with this, you won’t be of any use.”
More of them were looking at each other, and at their masters, but nobody got up. Probably being told mentally to stay put. The senate always thought it could order anyone to do anything, and most of the time it was right. But not this time.
I looked over my shoulder. “Was I told wrong?” I asked Adra.
“Oh no,” he said. “A perfect possession, I’ve always thought, is rather like a marriage. It requires commitment in order to work. From both parties.”
“Then you see the situation,” I said, turning back to the vamps. “No one can make you do this—not your masters, not even you. If you were to try, but not be able to fully commit, it still wouldn’t work. So, yes. If you don’t want to be here, you can go.”
Some of the former guinea pigs were maintaining the proper blank face of a vamp talking to a human, but a lot more were showing serious signs of relief. Several were openly grinning, and the fat little chef in the back row was all but vibrating. A black girl at the end of the first row jumped to her feet, with a toss of her braids and a defiant look at somebody behind me.
She would almost certainly pay for that later, but she didn’t look like she cared much.
“However, I’d like to ask you one question first, if I could,” I said, and saw her scowl. But at least she didn’t take off. “Do any of you know Casanova—Dante’s general manager?”
Looks were exchanged, and several hands were raised.
“Those of you who don’t can ask the others. I’d like those of you who’ve met him to let this sink in for a moment: Casanova is a third-level master.”
Nobody said anything, but several of them blinked.
Yeah, they knew him.
“Let me repeat that,” I said. “Third. Level. Casanova, the guy with the world’s largest cuff link collection. Casanova, who has his cologne made especially for him in Italy, because he says American scents break him out. Casanova, who once took an entire afternoon off because he accidently drank cut-rate champagne. Casanova, who is almost sure that he dated Marilyn Monroe once, only it was actually a transvestite hooker named Carl and nobody has the heart to tell him. Casanova, who by all rights should never have even made master, but who made it faster than many who eventually go on to become first level. And do you know how?”
“He belongs to Lord Mircea,” a dark-skinned vamp in the front row said, looking envious. I wondered who his master was. Somebody who wasn’t a senator, probably.
“Now, yes,” I agreed. “But it’s recent. He had a guy named Fat Tony for a master originally. Mircea made Tony—it’s true—but you know grandfathered power doesn’t always trickle down. Anyone else?”
“He came from a large family.” That was a woman with hair curlier than mine, almost a blond Afro.
“Good guess; the larger the better, more power circulating around for everyone to share—unless your master is known as Fat Tony partly because he doesn’t like to share. And Casanova’s own crew is about normal-sized. Most of them work security at Dante’s.”
An Asian vamp, one without the tiger tat, raised his hand. “He has a demon. No, it’s true—” he said as several others made noises.
“Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. He has a demon. Her name is Rian. Oh yes, they come in female versions,” I said as several of the guys’ eyes widened. “And she’s quite something. She picked him up when he was so new, so green, so fresh-out-of-the-grave confused, that he didn’t know that vampires don’t do possessions. He had no idea. And she was hot, and she told him she could teach him things—”
“I bet,” one of the guys said, until his neighbor elbowed him.
But I smiled. It was good to see a few of them not looking so traumatized anymore. I’d had enough traumatized vamps to last me all day. And it wasn’t like they actually had anything to worry about. Adra wanted this to work; he wouldn’t have brought anybody he wasn’t sure of.
“She did,” I told the guy, who was a Latin lover type himself. “She took a poor farm boy, with no relatives, no connections, not even a decent master, and made him a star. She also did something else, because—did they mention this? Did they tell you?”
“Tell us what?” the Casanova clone asked.
“That when a demon possesses a body, part of its power leaks to that body. I mean, that’s the whole point, right? From your masters’ perspective? That you suddenly become supervamp?
“Well, I saw it happen. Just a few days ago. Casanova got himself into the duel of all duels, and as he’ll tell you himself, he’s a lover, not a fighter. No way was he walking out of there. But then Rian possessed him, and all of a sudden, not only did he win, but he walked away with it. But because of her power, her knowledge, not his—”
“And when they leave?” the black girl who had been first to her feet asked. She was standing to the side of the bleachers, arms crossed, looking far from sold. “Then we’re right back where we started!”
“Are you? Casanova wasn’t. Now, it’s true, nothing happened overnight; he’s almost four hundred years old. But then, he didn’t become a master yesterday, either. And his demon—well, I don’t want to hurt any feelings, but incubi aren’t known to be the strongest demons around, and Rian wasn’t even the strongest incubus, or succubus, in her case.”
The girl frowned, as if this was news to her. “So you’re saying her power leaked . . . and stayed?”
“I’m saying that every time she got a hit, he did, too. They share a body—or they did; she’s gotten powerful enough to make her own now. But while she was in-house, he picked up some of the power she was generating. And over time, it accumulates. Of course, if you have more demons involved, or if they’re stronger, or if they’re using a lot more power than it takes to seduce somebody . . . say, like in a war . . . well, the person in question might not have to wait so long.”
“You’re saying we could be masters,” she said sharply, coming half a step toward me. “Is that it?”
“I’m not promising anything. I’m telling you how it works. Some people have the drive, the determination, the—” I stopped, because conversation had burst out everywhere. Most of the vamps didn’t appear to be from the same families, and so couldn’t communicate mentally with each other, at least not yet. That was another master’s perk, one they had probably wondered if they’d ever see.
And which they were currently making up for with shouting.
“Shut up!” she told them, and for a wonder, they did. She looked back at me, expression fierce. But her voice was surprisingly polite when she said, “Please continue.”
“Um, I was just saying that there’s no guarantees. Part of what makes up a master is power, sure, but the rest?” I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Some can hold on to the power that comes their way; some can’t. But what this gives you,” I told her—and the rest of them, since most of them were staring at me now—“is the chance to find out.”
“And what if we find out we’re not?” a tall, thin guy asked, out of a face that was mostly nose. “Cut out for it, I mean?”
I shrugged. “Then you’re not. Some enjoy a life of service—” There was a burst of derisive sounds from different parts of the crowd, but the thin guy wasn’t one of them. “—and there’s nothing wrong with that,” I added. “Those who feel that way probably shouldn’t go. And let’s be clear: not everybody who goes will return a master. It took Casanova two hundred years to hit that mark, even with Rian’s help—”
“But we could shave off time. We could shave off a lot of time!” That was Latin Lover again, looking a lot less loverlike and a lot more martial suddenly.
“You could,” I agreed. “Some of you might even go all the way; others might speed up the process for themselves considerably. But some might get very little out of it, unable to hold on to the power that becomes available. And some . . . will die.”
The crowd was suddenly quiet again. It looked like all this was new to them, like nobody had talked to them at all. And they probably hadn’t. They’d been ordered here by their masters like so many guinea pigs, with no chance to say no, with no chance to say anything. Because who gave them a voice?
“I’ve seen something of what the fey can do in battle,” I said. “The demons give us an advantage: the fey don’t know them like they do us, can’t predict them as well. But it’s not going to be an easy fight. Whatever power you get, you’ll earn. But . . .”
I stopped for a moment, trying to find the right words. I hadn’t expected to do this, hadn’t come prepared. But I wasn’t sure it mattered. They didn’t need a pretty speech; they needed the truth.
And they deserved it.
“We’re not doing this for the usual reasons,” I said. “We’re not going in for power or wealth or . . . or any advantage at all. We’re doing this because, if we don’t, we’re not going to have to worry about who’s master and who’s not. I’ve seen the creatures we’re fighting, and they don’t care if you’re a baby or a master or a senator. It’s all the same to them. They hate us equally and they will kill us equally, unless we find a way to fight them. That’s what we’re doing today. That’s why we’re here.
“And we could really use your help.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
“Good speech,” Jules said, when I rejoined him.
“But did it work?”
“I think you convinced some of them.” He looked over my head at the vamps, who had burst into conversation as soon as I left. “You were doing better till you got on the whole death thing.”
“If the gods return, it’s not going to matter if we’re here or in Faerie. They have to know that.”
He looked down at me, blue eyes rueful. “Unfortunately, that’s the thing about imminent demise. People tend not to take it seriously until it’s, you know, imminent.”
I nodded, because he was right, and then had to stop to stifle a huge yawn.
He eyed me. “You look like you could use some caffeine.”
“Is there coffee?” I asked hopefully, trying to see what the tables being used as a bar had going on.
“No such luck. There’s a Coke machine, though, at the end of the hall.” He nodded at the door.
“The consul has a Coke machine?”
“We human types get thirsty.”
“And she makes you pay for your own?”
He laughed. “You know it. Got a preference?”
I shook my head. “Anything’s fine.”
He left and I made my way back to Adra, who had found himself a perch in the stands to watch vamps and masters have it out. It seemed like the demons had bothered to give Possession 101, after all; it just hadn’t been communicated. It was being communicated now, and the result was . . . really weird.
I’d never seen so many young vamps talking back to their masters before, both loudly and in public. And from the shocked look of some of the masters, neither had they. But the usual power dynamic wasn’t at play here. The masters, even those at senate level, couldn’t force this on their servants, putting them in the unusual position of having to persuade.
And they sucked at it.
Adra seemed to agree. “They appear to be having some trouble with their servants,” he murmured.
“That’s what comes from giving orders for hundreds of years. You forget how to do anything else.”
He smiled slightly. “I think Lord Mircea might remember.”
“Hopefully, he’ll be here soon.” The senate could really use his diplomatic skills right about now. I looked at Adra. “Keeping him around would seem like a good move, if you’re going to need his persuasive ability.”
The eyebrows crawled up the forehead again. “Is that a roundabout way of asking if we have a deal?”
“And if it is?”
“Let us see how this plays out,” he said, amused gray eyes meeting mine. And then narrowing, as he caught my expression. “Is there something else?”
I nodded. “A question—about possession. I thought—” I stopped. But then I went on, because whether I sounded stupid or not was the least of my problems right now. “I thought I saw Ares on the drag this morning, in possession of a mage.”
“A mage?”
“The leader. The one rallying the troops.”
“The one you yourself possessed?”
I didn’t bother to ask how he’d known that. Three of his creatures had been there. “Yes.”
“And when you entered him—”
“I found someone else already there. He attacked me, and I barely escaped. And then I saw him again, this afternoon—”
“Again?” That was sharper. “I was told the mage was dead.”
“Not in the mage. In—” I stopped again, because everyone in the room could hear me if they wanted.
Until a second silence spell snapped shut around us, one that felt different somehow. And looked it, too. Partly opaque, it browned out much of the room. I didn’t know why. And then I realized: no lipreading.
Adra wasn’t taking chances.
“Tell me.”
“Nimue,” I said simply. “Fifteen hundred years ago. It was the same as on the drag: a darkness, a . . . coldness.” I gestured futilely. “I know I’m not explaining it very well, but I knew him. And he knew me—or at least he knew what I was. He called me vlva—it means seer.”
“I know,” Adra murmured, his face going blank.
It didn’t bother me so much this time, because I hoped the reason was that he was thinking too hard to bother keeping up the facade. But I still didn’t like looking at it. I stared out at the room, wondering where the hell Mircea was, and why nobody seemed to be noticing anything unusual about us.
But they weren’t. The crowd ebbed and flowed beneath us, the ones who weren’t part of the ongoing argument taking the opportunity to refresh their drinks or to group up, talking quietly. Nobody seemed to notice us at all—well, almost nobody.
I sighed, catching sight of the baby vampire, blundering over in our general direction. He must have seen Adra and me talking a minute ago, and now he couldn’t find me. And he was getting distressed again; I could see it on his face, although I didn’t know why. The most dangerous thing happening at the moment was that they’d run out of vermouth.
Even worse, Marlowe was following him.
Not obviously, not unless you were looking for it, but when the baby moved, a few seconds later, so did the chief spy. He was hunting for us, hunting for us using that poor, scared baby vamp as bait, and that was just—
“I see two possibilities,” Adra said abruptly.
I turned back to him.
“A true possession requires a spirit physically entering someone’s body. And Ares isn’t here.”
“But I saw—”
He quieted me with a gesture. “However, there is an interesting story in the Iliad. Ares was badly wounded in the Trojan War by Athena, and forced to withdraw. But before he left, he infu
sed part of himself into the armor Achilles was to wear, hoping to cause him to throw the battle. Achilles was a leader on the opposite side,” he added, seeing my frown.
And misinterpreting it.
“Infused?”
He nodded. “It appears that, on rare occasions, the gods would shear off a small part of their power, as Apollo did when he gave some of his to the Pythian Court. In this case, it was Ares, but instead of leaving it free, to take on a life of its own, he bound it to an object.”
“A suit of armor?”
“Not just any suit; one made by the god Hephaistos, to protect Achilles at the siege of Troy.”
“You’re saying Ares could possess Achilles through the armor?”
“I am saying that he tried. But Achilles was a demigod, son of the sea goddess Thetis, and remained unaffected. However, when he lent the armor to his human friend Patroclus, it promptly drove him mad. He fought to his death, in a crazed frenzy. And the victor of that fight, a man named Hector, who took the armor as spoils of war, later committed suicide.”
“Then Ares can possess an object?” I didn’t know why I’d never even thought of that, when I wore something similar around my neck.
“In a manner of speaking. But there appear to be limitations. It isn’t as strong outside its element, in this case war. It isn’t an independent ghost, but merely some of Ares’ energy, which is bound to an object and cannot leave it. It can therefore only influence one person at a time.”
“Whoever’s using it.”
He nodded, and I immediately thought of Nimue. Rosier had seemed shocked by her actions; even some of her people had been freaked out. Like the fey in gray. His expression, as he knelt beside that girl, had been angry, but there had been confusion, too. Like that hellscape was out of character for the woman he knew.
Maybe because she wasn’t the one calling the shots.
“You said two possibilities?”
“The attack you suffered at Dante’s is . . . puzzling. A spiritual assault of the kind you describe should have left you unconscious at best, in a coma or dead at worst. Yet you slept for an afternoon and were on your feet again. Hurt, yes, exhausted, yes, traumatized, most certainly. But functional . . .”