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Oh, yeah, I thought, watching Claire. This was going well.
“—why keep someone alive who could possibly identify them?”
“We don’t know that she can identify them,” Louis-Cesare argued. “She did not even know who I was when I found her. She may know nothing—”
“Oh, she knows,” Marlowe said, turning implacable eyes on me. “And she’s going to tell us, if I have to rip it out of her brain my—”
“Kit!” That was Radu again, but this time he was too late.
Chapter Seven
And suddenly it was like the old saying: you could have heard a pin drop. Which is a lot easier with vampire hearing anyway.
“Is that was this is about?” I asked, but Marlowe had clammed up. Not that it mattered; he wasn’t the one running this show.
He never had been.
“Mind tricks don’t work on me,” I said, my eyes meeting Mircea’s.
“Some do,” he said quietly.
And yeah. Some did. Specifically, his did, because they worked on pretty much everyone.
There was one thing I hadn’t gotten around to explaining to Claire in that twenty questions on vamps we’d been doing. Mainly because she wouldn’t have believed me. No one did unless they saw it for themselves, and precious few outsiders ever did.
Every senior master, sometimes even before reaching first level, developed special abilities. It was the crazy stuff the old legends assigned to all vamps but that most never lived long enough or got powerful enough to see. Like turning into mist or morphing into an animal—the kind of things that impressed people at parties. The kind of stuff that was often less useful than spectacular or awe-inspiring or breathtaking.
Except in Mircea’s case.
Mircea’s gifts weren’t like that. Mircea’s gifts weren’t showy at all—were, in fact, completely invisible, and all the more dangerous because of it. Mircea’s talents lay with the mind.
“That’s why you came here, why you had Louis-Cesare bring me back,” I said. “You wanted me in familiar surroundings.”
“It usually works best that way.”
“You ought to know.”
“What is it?” Claire asked, picking up on the sudden change in atmosphere. “What’s going on?”
But this time Mircea didn’t answer. This was the crunch point, and he knew it. His eyes never left mine. “Will you do it?”
I didn’t say anything, because I was kind of surprised that he’d bothered to ask. Maybe whatever he was planning needed my cooperation. Maybe having me fight him would lessen the chance of getting anything useful. I actually wanted to believe that. Because believing the concern in those brown velvet eyes—fake, fake, you know damned well it’s fake—was always a bad idea.
If I had a problem dealing with the flood of emotions Louis-Cesare stirred up, it was nothing compared to the tsunami named Mircea.
It had been this way as far back as I could remember, a strange dance toward and away from each other, a suspicious, snarling, snapping dance, which I guess made sense considering that we were genetically designed to tear each other’s throat out. Lately, we’d been in one of the better cycles, circling closer, teeth still bared and claws still out because you never knew—no, you never, ever knew—but closer nonetheless. And I freely admitted that that had been mostly his doing.
I hadn’t wanted to get closer. I hadn’t needed one more ride on that merry-go-round, one more trip to that particular rodeo, when it always ended the same way. Why play when you can’t win? Why try when you know ahead of time that it isn’t going to work? When it never works? After centuries of the same old same old, I’d given up. I didn’t want to dance anymore.
Which was when Mircea had decided that he did.
And I had to admit, he’d learned a few new steps since last time. Maybe more than a few, and they hadn’t been mere variations on a theme, either. When Mircea did something, he did it full throttle, and that included turning over a new leaf.
He’d started out by killing the creature who had killed my mother, despite the fact that the bastard in question was his own brother. He’d also told me a few things—very few—about the woman she had been, a commoner he’d married despite the fact that a match like that could only harm his ambitions. He had pulled me into his orbit by attaching me to the Senate’s shiny new portal demolition squad, which he happened to head up. He had dangled Louis-Cesare—moody, unconventional, passionate Louis-Cesare—in front of me like bait in front of a starving fish.
Okay, maybe not that last one, since Louis-Cesare was a serious potential asset to the family, if he ever got his shit together. Which he wouldn’t if he kept slumming around with me. So I didn’t know what, if anything, Mircea had done there, and what had been coincidence. But that was the problem with Mircea—I never knew anything for certain.
He was sitting silently, waiting for me to work through it. Other people were talking—I heard Claire’s bright tones, Radu’s soothing murmur, a flash of Marlowe’s thunder—but I couldn’t concentrate on any of it. All I could see were those dark eyes, so like mine, yet so different. So very different.
