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“How? By dying?”
“By allowing overconfidence in his abilities to blind him to the dangers of the situation,” Mircea said, a little bite creeping into his tone. “Having three master abilities made him unusual, but not invincible. As he discovered—after he put you in the untenable position of abandoning him or rushing in after him. And of course, you chose the latter—”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“You weren’t supposed to be in that position in the first place. And you will not be again, not until—”
“Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight. I’m being fired for not leaving Lawrence to die?”
“You’re not being fired—”
“Funny, that’s what it sounds like.”
“You’re being suspended until we determine—”
“Determine what?”
“Why you’re still alive!” Mircea snapped.
Okay, that was a new record. It usually took me a full two minutes to get under his skin. Fair enough; it took him about that many seconds to work his way under mine.
“You want to explain that?” I asked, after a pause.
“If you give me a chance,” he said curtly. “However poor Kit’s choice of phrasing may have been, what he said this afternoon had merit—in any scenario I can envision, you should have been killed as well as Lawrence. That was the point, it would seem, of that whole exercise—to deprive us of as many agents as possible
—”
“Like Radu said, maybe they didn’t—”
“—and clearly, we were not likely to send anything less than our best after a witness as important as Varus. Whether they knew what you are or not, you should have died last night. They had no reason whatsoever to keep you alive—and yet they did.”
“Maybe they—”
“And not just bleeding out on the pier. They took you. They picked you up and took you away, to some misbegotten hole in the wall where we could not find you. You are Mine, but not as a Child born of blood would be. I cannot trace you, and I foolishly did not think to put a trace on you—”
“Wait. I don’t remember any—”
“I know that you do not! But I saw. Through Louis-Cesare’s eyes, I saw it all, and it was very clear that they had some sort of plan for you. And until I know what that plan was, it is too much of a risk—”
“Like it’s not for everybody? From what you’re saying, it seems like I’m in less danger than anyone else. Wherever I ended up, I’m alive—”
“And so you shall remain.”
It was implacable—dry, cold, and hard as steel—in the tone I hated most from him. It was the one that said he wasn’t even listening to me, that he never had been, that he wasn’t going to. It was the one that said I might as well hang up right now, because this conversation was going exactly nowhere. But some of Mircea’s ungodly bullheadedness had dripped down the family line to me, and I wasn’t done yet.
“My partner is dead,” I said flatly. “Do you really expect me to—”
“Your partner. Whom you knew for all of an hour, and whose existence you had completely forgotten until this afternoon?”
“You know damned well that doesn’t—”
“Lawrence was Kit’s man. He was only the third Child he ever made. If you think someone will not bleed for this, many someones, you do not know him as I do.”
“Then let me help!”
“No.”
“If you were short on agents before, it’s twice as bad now! Why in the name of—”
