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Something cracked, loud as a gunshot, and I jumped, before I realized it was the counter under Marlowe’s hands. “Tell her,” he said harshly.
“I don’t think—”
“Tell her!”
I glanced at Mircea, who didn’t see it because his eyes were on the chief spy. Like his brother’s hand, which had slipped onto Marlowe’s shoulder. Probably in case he lost his shit and tried to go for Claire across the table.
Not that that was likely. He wasn’t an idiot, and despite appearances, he didn’t really suffer from a lack of impulse control. He was just furious. And only one thing caused that kind of impotent rage in a senior master.
“Lawrence was one of yours,” I guessed.
There was no spoken acknowledgment; Marlowe looked like he might be past it at this point. But his head jerked down in a half nod. And at least a few things started to make sense.
I glanced at Claire, who had figured out that she’d stepped in it, but wasn’t sure how. “Senior masters are like…supernatural tanks,” I told her, even though it was a lousy analogy. In a contest between the two, the tank would be toast. “They have abilities that are hard to explain—”
“I know what vampires can do,” she said quietly.
“No. You really don’t.” I glanced around, but no one was stopping me—or helping, and this wasn’t exactly easy to explain. The basics, yes, but conveying the scale…It was like trying to describe a trillion dollars. Newscasters threw that number around all the time, but it was hard to get a grip on it—until you were standing in the middle of a city block hip-deep in hundred-dollar bills.
“You know how a master vamp is stronger than a regular one, right?” I finally asked.
“Of course.”
“A lot stronger.”
“Yes.”
“Well, take that difference, and increase it by an exponential amount, every time a master goes up a level. It’s not just a step higher, it’s…a different world,” I said, floundering, because there really was no way to convey the difference.
But Claire seemed to understand something, because her eyes narrowed. “You’re saying that—what’s the next to lowest level of master? Sixth?”
I nodded.
“You’re saying that a sixth-level master compared to a seventh is like a seventh-level compared to someone like…like Ray?”
“Hey!” Drifted in from the hall.
“No,” I told her, biting my lip. “Ray is a master—”
“As hard as that is to believe,” Radu murmured.
“—he’s just not a very good one.”
“Okay, that’s enough!” Ray said, appearing in the doorway. And then dodging out again shouting, “Shit, shit!”
Claire looked after him, frowning slightly. Clearly, he was messing with the tidy little box in her mental file labeled VAMPIRE, which wasn’t supposed to contain anything quite that pathetic. “Okay, so it would be like comparing a seventh-level to a regular old vampire?”
I thought about it, and decided that was actually pretty close. “Something like that.”
“So each level…” Claire wrinkled her forehead. “It’s like they’re strong enough to be a master to the next level down?”
“That depends on the individual. Power varies a lot within levels, even before you get to first—”
“And what happens at first?”
“It isn’t really a level. It’s more a catchall for anyone who’s too powerful to fit into the system anymore. It basically means, well—”
“Really, really powerful.”
