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“We need whatever you can give us, Dory,” Radu said. “The smugglers are bad enough, but with the Black Circle—”
“Damn it, Radu!” Marlowe exploded.
“Oh, pish. She already knows they’re working together.”
“But other people don’t!”
“Such as?”
“Such as a yard full of fey, not one of whom we know a damn thing about!”
“They’re my security,” Claire said indignantly. “And part of the royal guard.”
“Oh yes?” Dark eyes flashed. “And would that be the same royal guard who betrayed you and almost got your son killed—what? Two weeks ago?”
“I’ll vouch for them!”
“And who will vouch for you?”
“Kit, please. This lovely young woman isn’t going to say anything,” Radu said, patting her hand. And thereby saving Marlowe a world of hurt without even knowing it.
Not that he was grateful. “How the bloody hell can you—”
“She is the daughter-in-law of one of our senior fey allies,” Mircea murmured. “Is she not?”
Marlowe did not look pacified, maybe because the first time they’d met, Claire had thrown him out of the house. And judging by the narrowed emerald eyes, she was contemplating an encore. “Not to mention that this area isn’t secured,” he continued. “There could be listening devices all over the place!”
“Like the ones you left in here that we had to remove?” Claire snapped.
“Why bother to remove them if there was nothing to hear?” Marlowe snapped back.
Claire flushed almost as red as her hair. But before she could say anything, Radu broke in. “And what if people are listening? Our allies already know what we’re doing and our enemies…Well, after last night, I think it’s safe to say they have figured it out.”
“All right. What happened last night?” I asked, dropping the pretense. Because it was starting to look like maybe I did need to know.
“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to tell us,” Radu said reasonably. “But I’ll see what I can do to jog your memory—without compromising anything,” he added before Marlowe could intervene again.
He waited a moment, but the chief spy didn’t say anything else. That had a little smirk flitting around the edges of Radu’s mouth that shouldn’t have been there, because Marlowe was perfectly capable of delivering a smackdown if he felt like it. But it looked like he wanted the info more than he wanted to bitch about security.
“Now,” Radu said complacently, “you’ve been working with us on a task force to destroy a network of illegal portals—”
“I know that. I lost a day, not a month, ’Du.”
“Hush.” He leaned over to swat my knee. And then proceeded to tell me a lot of other things I already knew, because the Great Portal Hunt, as I had started to think of it, was the biggest thing in otherworldly vice at the moment.
All sorts of dangerous crap from Faerie was being smuggled through portals that weren’t supposed to exist. Only they did, and a bunch of fat cats had been getting noticeably fatter as a result. The fattest of them all had been a douche named Geminus, who had used
his portals to smuggle in Dark Fey for a series of underground fights that had gotten him a lot of money and them a lot of dead. This had continued until he recently met his own maker, and not in the vampire sense of the word. Who was probably as skeeved out as the rest of us who had known him.
But as bad as Geminus had been, things weren’t any better with him dead. In fact, the reverse was true, as would-be successors popped out of the woodwork to divvy up the very large pie he had left. Lately, the infighting had been getting pretty vicious, as every crook with delusions of grandeur struggled to become the new king of the hill.
There was just one problem, namely that Geminus hadn’t been the trusting type, and had failed to share the location of his portals with the riffraff. And it wasn’t like they could just go out and replace them. Even the few smugglers with money and connections enough to manage it had to contend with the fact that every time a new portal was brought into existence, it lit up the metaphysical skyline like a searchlight. Which tends to be bad for businesses that run on secrecy.
So, the criminal element was trying to find Geminus’s portals in order to beat each other out in the smuggling game. The Black Circle, a group of dark mages, was trying to find them to bring in more weapons for the war they were waging on the Vampire Senate. And the Senate was trying to find them to shut them down before either of the other groups got lucky. But the only person who actually knew where they were was Geminus’s lieutenant, who had been smart enough to guess how much fun life would be with everybody breathing down his neck.
“Varus,” I said, interrupting Radu as my memory coughed up a name.
“Yes, well, I was getting there,” ’Du said.
