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“Yes.”
“So these masters you sent out last night, you’re saying they were the equivalent of what? Eleven war mages?”
Louis-Cesare snorted.
Claire frowned.
“More like eleven armies,” I said, since she was looking at me.
“Then why are they dead? If they were so strong—”
“That is the question,” Mircea said, cutting Kit off, who had been about to say something rude, by the look of him. “We not only sent some of our best agents, but we sent them in pairs, with each selected to complement the other’s strengths and weaknesses. They were ordered to locate Varus and then to call for assistance, if need be, from a group of
additional operatives we had standing by. No one called.”
“Then whatever happened, happened fast,” I said, thinking about a vampire’s lightning reflexes.
Mircea nodded. “I would assume a trap or snare, although there are few that would be sufficient. And our people have been trained to recognize and avoid those. But even if I am able to accept that both operatives on a team forgot their training, or were somehow overwhelmed in another way, I cannot believe it for all six! Nor can I account for why none of them managed to send a warning.”
And yet, he was going to have to, I realized. Mircea was in charge of coordinating the Senate’s anti-smuggling crusade, which drew assistance from other senators’ families. Other senators who were probably already demanding to know what had happened to their people. And if he couldn’t tell them…Well, I didn’t actually know what would happen if he couldn’t tell them, but I doubted it would be anything good.
I wondered what he planned to do about it.
“If they didn’t send a warning, how did you know Dory was in trouble?” Claire asked.
“I didn’t.” Mircea glanced at Louis-Cesare.
“I heard her scream, in my mind,” he said briefly. “It was cut off, almost immediately, but the voice was unmistakable. I knew approximately where she was from the last time her team had reported in, and was able to track her from there.”
“But I thought you couldn’t…not unless she was—” Claire looked at me, the frown growing. “I thought you weren’t taking that stuff anymore.”
There was no need to ask what “stuff” she meant, since there was only one thing that ramped up my mental abilities. It also helped to control my fits, but so did living with a magical null like Claire. And the wine had a lot of other side effects, like decreasing my edge in battle, that had me worried.
I hadn’t worked out a long-term solution yet, like what I was going to do when she went back to Faerie. But my usage lately had gone way, way down. Too much so to explain how Louis-Cesare had been able to tune into my brain like a freaking shortwave radio.
“I am not able to read your mind,” he said, reading my mind.
“What the hell!”
“But when you are in trouble, you project—”
“Not halfway across a city!”
“I was not halfway across a city,” he said calmly. “I was leading the response team, which meant I was in Manhattan—”
“Okay, not across two miles, then!”
I didn’t know why I was so upset, but suddenly it felt like the walls were closing in. I abruptly stood up, even though there was zero chance of going anywhere until they were finished with me. But it was like Marlowe and the counter; he’d had to crack it or someone’s skull, and I had to move—now—or run screaming down the road like Ray.
Stinky snarled and spit in my arms, not because I was squeezing him too tight but because he was trying to get away. We had a lot in common, and he wanted to sink his teeth into somebody. Fey are formidable pretty much from the day they’re born, as far as I can tell, but while he couldn’t really hurt anyone in this group, the reverse wasn’t true.
“It’s okay,” I told him, stroking his soft baby hair, but I wasn’t sure who I was talking to—him or me.
“It is not ‘okay.’ You are upset,” Louis-Cesare said, undoing whatever soothing qualities Stinky had imparted.
“Stop doing that!”
“I do not need to read your mind to know that, Dorina. You are backing away—”
