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“Someone who wants to make them look bad.”
“What?”
Marlowe nodded. “That could be one point of this whole fiasco—making us look like fools. We finally persuade the senates into an alliance for the war—an alliance, I might add, that is paper-thin and hanging by a thread—”
“You think this is about the war?”
“What else? If someone wanted to make us look weak, they could hardly do better than to kill our agents at will, to attack us in our own base—”
“We think that’s why they—whoever they are—needed Jonathan,” Radu explained. “To attack Central. There’s not too many ways in there, you know.”
“And then there’s the matter of what they did when they broke in,” Marlowe said, and threw something else into the air.
This image was flat, black and white and grainy. A security camera feed, I supposed. It hovered in the air like the other, only it was transparent enough that I could see Radu blink
ing at me from the other side. I shifted in the chair slightly, putting the wall as a backdrop, and saw the main doors at Central. Frick was being buzzed through at the head of the group of Slava’s boys, who filed into the lobby and—
“What are they doing?” I asked, stunned.
“Slitting their throats,” Marlowe said, as the group did exactly that, almost in unison.
And, as anyone would, the vamps at the desk ran forward to try to stop the slaughter—and ended up being part of it. Frick threw something on the ground, sending a wash of smoke into the air that obliterated the camera feed for a moment. And when it cleared, the guards were gone and the gaping hole I had found when I arrived was in their place.
It looked like a pit out of hell, the edges still smoking and on fire. Which didn’t stop Jonathan’s zombies from jumping down into it in orderly rows. They were completely fearless, completely without hesitation, despite the fire and vamp flammability and the resistance they were about to meet. I watched them, mesmerized, the hair standing up on my arms, the eerie quiet making it all the more disturbing.
“They bypassed the main defenses by going through the floor,” Mircea told me. “And then proceeded to kill everyone they came across. The acid compound in their veins made it easy.”
I nodded. The fight with Slava had given me a heads-up—I had known to stay out of range. But the vamps at Central hadn’t. And even if they won a fight, the tainted blood that sprayed all over them would begin eating them alive, slowing them down, and then the next group they met, when they were already confused and weakened and in pain—
I shuddered. And apparently I wasn’t the only one.
“Turn it off,” Radu rasped.
“She needs to see—”
“She’s seen! Turn it off!”
The staticky horror blipped out, like an old-fashioned TV signal, and Radu got up and went to the bar. Which is how I ended up with a glass of very fine port.
It didn’t help much.
“They killed every single person there?” I asked. “I thought maybe someone…was hiding.…”
“No,” Louis-Cesare said. “Only Radu and Ray survived, thanks to you. Those creatures killed everyone else.”
There was a short silence. Very short, because Marlowe wasn’t in the mood for introspection. Marlowe was in the mood for blood.
“But that is all they did!” he rasped. “They didn’t even bother to turn off the damned cameras! We’ve watched the whole event now, several times, and there was no copying of files, no attempt to access the vault, no prisoners liberated. They came in, they killed everyone, the end.”
“Why?” I asked, bewildered. “And how do you get a whole group of people to die for you? Especially like that?”
“We believe they were likely already dead when they arrived,” Mircea said quietly. “And that the throat slitting was merely a diversion. As to the why…It is possible that the idea was to give everyone a reason to question whether the alliance should stand. And, if it does, under what leadership.”
It took me a moment to process that. “You’re saying this could be someone on our side?”
“It is possible. There were a number of consuls who wished to lead the alliance. They were less than pleased to have ours put in charge. And if she is made to look weak enough…”
“But the other side in the war has even more reason to oppose our union,” Marlowe pointed out. “If they’ve found out about it, they’d want to crush it quickly, before it gained us an advantage. Not to mention—”
