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But then he saw it, a faint, ever-so-gentle aspiration, and he unclenched the hand he couldn’t remember closing. He pushed her over onto her back and checked out the damage. Two bullet wounds, a few too many contusions—damn it, he’d told them to avoid the head! But she would live. Long enough to do the job, anyway.
It was about time something went right.
It had been the perfect plan—his plan—calculated down to the last detail. Others had played their part—Geminus had come up with the idea for the weapons, the damned Black Circle had put him into contact with the man who could bring the idea to life, the fey had provided the army to use them. But he had been the one to stitch it all together, the one to watch Kit like a hawk, the one to steer the investigation away from their activities for what felt like forever.
He who was poised to pull off the greatest coup in vampire history.
But the sheer moronic incompetence that surrounded him was threatening to bring it all down. Geminus managing to get himself killed after two millennia of avoiding it, just when the lazy son of a bitch was actually useful for something. Then Varus suddenly gaining a conscience and Mircea—devil take him—being put in charge of the Senate’s smuggling investigation instead of Kit.
Mircea, whose family Lawrence didn’t know and over whose actions he had no influence. Mircea, whose skills with the mind rivaled his own, and whose secrets were closed to him. Mircea, who had charmed away the best investigators from a dozen families and formed them into a unit that was closing the noose tighter every damned day…
Sometimes Lawrence thought it was a wonder he was still sane.
The only thing that kept him going was the thought of what he was going to do to his allies once this was all over. He felt his face crack into a smile, felt the men tense and shift uncomfortably. And then he slid into the girl’s mind as smoothly as a fish into water.
The easy pathways and uncomplicated patterns of the human brain opened up before him, like an unfolding flower. Such a relief after the twisty, dark paths of the vampire mind, where barriers were everywhere and hidden traps could suddenly lunge out and grab you, threatening to shred your consciousness if you weren’t nimble enough to get away.
Like Varus, who had proven impossible to read. Or Mircea, who had almost trapped him the one and only time he’d ventured into that quagmire of a brain. He thought it fitting that the freak Mircea had sired and inexplicably continued to shield was Lawrence’s way out of the mess her bastard of a father had made. All Lawrence had to do was to plant a few memories, adjust a few others and—
What the hell?
Lawrence stopped abruptly, gazing in disbelief at the…thing…at the center of her mind. If “mind” was even the right word. But all of the others—“maze” and “jungle” and “labyrinth”—that he’d used to describe some of the more unusual minds he’d encountered fell completely short. It was a gigantic snarl of impossible patterns and massive barriers and odd dark places and strange duplicated synapses and…
And it was like nothing he’d ever encountered.
It wasn’t human. It wasn’t even vampire. He didn’t know what the hell it was, or how she functioned with it at all. It was…insane, he thought, horrified.
And then jumped at the feel of a hand on his physical arm.
He pulled back abruptly, the jumbled-up mess retreating, to be replaced by another mess, in the form of one of his allies’ faces. “Are you almost done?” the idiot asked, looking anxious.
Lawrence reminded himself that he couldn’t kill him. Not yet. “If I was done, I would have said so,” he hissed instead.
“It’s just…you’re needed at the third site. Jonathan’s having trouble with one of the masters.”
Lawrence glared at the man, furious. “I instructed him to wait for me!”
The man shook his head, and glanced at his partner. “Jonathan doesn’t take instruction well. Not from anybody. He does what he wants.”
“Then he’s a fool, and he can die as one. Danieli has mental gifts. He’ll resist the compulsion.”
“He is resisting. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You gotta get over there or this is all going south—tonight.”
“As it will if I leave the woman’s memories intact!”
The man’s partner, who was slightly more intelligent, if no more capable, uttered an expletive. “What is taking so long? You said she wouldn’t be a problem.”
“She isn’t.”
“Then what—”
“Her father,” Lawrence said viciously. Of course it had been Mircea; of course it had. Cobbling together some form of bastardized consciousness for his pet. Why, Lawrence couldn’t even begin to imagine. The man gave him the fucking creeps sometimes.
“That vamp isn’t here,” the partner said sharply, challenging him.
And causing Lawrence to have to clench a fist to keep from dropping the SOB, then and there. “He’s done something,” he said shortly. “Something I’ve never seen before. I don’t know what it is, or how to counter it.”
“You’re saying you can’t manipulate her memories?”
