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I shrugged. “It didn’t come up.”
“It did not come up?”
“What happened?” Mircea demanded.
“I already told you: he tried to kill me; he failed. The point is that he’s here and he has a definite interest in the rune. His mother was the one who stole it in the first—”
“Stole it from whom?”
That was Marlowe, and if I hadn’t been so tired, I’d have really rubbed it in. The guy thought he knew everything. “The Blarestri royal house.”
“The what?” Marlowe was the only guy I knew who could bellow in an undertone.
I glanced at him impatiently. “Well, where the hell did you think they got it, Marlowe? Or didn’t you and Daddy bother to ask?”
He flushed. “You’re telling me that the rune up for sale was a royal fey relic?”
“Yeah. And they want it back.”
“And how do you come to know this?”
“I’m acting for the family.”
“Another fact you failed to mention before now,” Mircea said pointedly.
I smiled. “Like you failed to mention what you really wanted with Ray?”
“That is hardly the same thing.”
“It is exactly the same thing! You sent me after him under false pretenses.”
“There were no false pretenses.”
“You let me believe he was a smuggler.”
“Which he is.”
“And which had nothing to do with why you wanted him. If we’re going to keep working together, you have to—”
“You do not work with Lord Mircea,” Marlowe informed me. “You work for him. It is not your place to question his commands.”
“Is that how you think, too?” I asked Mircea.
Before he could answer, the door opened, and several vamps walked in like they owned the place. Which one of them did, I realized, as Muttonchops’s head jerked up. “Master!”
He obviously wasn’t talking to Elyas, so that cry could mean only one thing. Elyas’s servants hadn’t been the only ones to feel his passing. His master had done so, too.
“Anthony,” Mircea said, straightening, as Muttonchops almost fell over himself trying to get around the table. “I thought we were meeting in an hour.”
“Yes, I received your message,” the dark- haired vamp said carelessly. He wasn’t tall, maybe five nine, and his features were handsome but not outstanding. His nose looked like it had been broken at some point, and his skin was a little weather-beaten. It meant he wasn’t exerting power to alter his appearance, which was strange, considering how much he had to spare. It felt like it seared my skin, even from this far away.
“Anthony?” I asked Louis- Cesare, who was looking a little ill suddenly.
“My consul.”
Oh. That Anthony.
The vamp circled the desk, taking his time, getting a look at the body. “Oh, don’t mind me,” he said, looking up with a smile. “Continue with what you were doing.”
