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“Well, I thought you did more than that,” Radu said, sounding aggrieved. “The bastard was supposed to be dead months ago!”
“He is not so easy to kill,” Louis-Cesare said quietly.
He was watching the revolving head entirely without expression. As if he wasn’t looking at the face of the man who had kept him prisoner for months, taking him to the edge of death night after night, in order to drain him of every last bit of magical energy. And then feeding him up, coaxing him around, relying on Louis-Cesare’s abilities as a powerful first-level master to bring him back from the brink.
But only so he could do it again. And again. And again.
And yet Louis-Cesare just stood there, as calmly as if we were discussing the weather. I didn’t think I could do that, if I were him. In fact, I wasn’t feeling so calm anyway. I had a real, deep-seated desire to grab that smug, revolving face, to sink my fingers into that pasty flesh, to squash it between my hands and watch it explode like a—
I suddenly noticed that everyone was looking at me stran
gely. But nobody said anything. I sat back in my chair and folded my hands.
“If that is all she has for identification, he may well be,” Marlowe told Radu sourly, after a moment. “It’s damned little to go on.”
“He wasn’t in a talkative mood,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “But he knew Radu was my uncle. And not many people do.”
“And it is a favorite device of his,” Louis-Cesare added, “to feign death. To take on a new name and begin again, throwing off his pursuers. He is Waldron this century; when I knew him, he was VanLeke.”
“This century?”
“He was born, as far as we can ascertain, sometime in the Middle Ages,” Marlowe said shortly.
I blinked, thinking I’d heard him wrong. “What?”
Louis-Cesare nodded. “I do not know the exact year, and am not certain that he does. But he mentioned once, while I was his prisoner, that he remembered his father taking him to Cordoba when Spain was still under Muslim rule.”
“But…that would make him what? Five, six hundred years old?”
“At least, yes,” he said, his voice steady. As was his hand when he handed me a cup of coffee. “I would say older. I did not get the impression that the Reconquista was threatening the city at the time. He and his father had fled there specifically because it was quiet.”
“Cordoba was retaken in 1236,” Mircea said. “Meaning he could be eight hundred or more, assuming he was telling the truth.”
“He had no reason to lie to me,” Louis-Cesare said. “At the time, he did not believe I would ever leave his hands again.”
Everyone went silent for a moment, out of respect for what he’d been through. Everyone except me. I wasn’t interested in mourning what had happened. I was interested in making sure it didn’t happen again.
And it could, if one damned necromancer was still alive. Louis-Cesare had fallen into Jonathan’s hands because he’d traded himself for Christine, to be drained in her place. And Jonathan had never forgotten his source of unlimited power or ceased trying to get him back.
“I don’t understand,” I said harshly. “I know it’s possible to extend life with magic, but that much?”
“It can be done,” Marlowe said grimly.
“Then why doesn’t everyone do it?”
“Because not everyone wishes to go mad!” He made a savage gesture, and the disembodied head disappeared.
He was looking a little tense, so I looked to the others for an explanation. Which Radu was happy to provide. ’Du loved to lecture.
“Magical humans are symbiotic creatures,” he told me pleasantly, crossing one silk-hosed leg over the other and sipping at his coffee. “Unlike vampires, or normal humans, they derive energy from two different sources. In effect, they are human talismans, feeding from the natural magical energy of the world as well as from food.”
“I thought they made magic.”
“It would be more accurate to say that they process it, transforming it from its natural, wild form into something they can use. Some of them are better at that than others, of course, and those who are tend to live longer. They can rely more on their magic as their human bodies begin to fade. It’s quite fascinating, really.”
“The stronger the mage, the longer the life,” Ray said, quoting an old saying. Which was a mistake, because it reminded Marlowe that he was there.
“You. Out,” he said, hiking a thumb over his shoulder.
