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So, yeah, it felt like my fault. And I didn’t like that feeling. I didn’t know if I would feel any better once I ripped into the guys who had ripped into him, but I was looking forward to finding out.
At least, I would be if Marlowe ever got out of my way.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Lawrence, all right?” I snapped.
Marlowe’s face abruptly blanked, and something shifted behind his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was actually going to attack me. I think maybe he did, too, because he froze, and when he spoke again, his voice had changed, deepened, roughened. “I’m supposed to believe you give a damn about a vampire you barely knew?”
“He was my partner—”
“He was a vampire. Just like a thousand others you’ve killed. Don’t insult my intelligence—”
“Is that possible?”
“—by telling me you’re here for him!”
“Fine. I won’t.” Why the hell I ever tried to explain anything to Marlowe, I didn’t know. I must be going senile. I started for the door again, but the arm didn’t budge.
“You may have Mircea fooled,” he told me, getting in my face. “May have won over Radu, may have seduced Louis-Cesare. But I know what you are.”
“Then you know better than to piss me off.”
“Damn it! I want an answer!”
“About what?” I demanded. “About the fact that I should have kept him from going in there? Or followed him in faster? Or done something other than stand there while they blasted him full of holes? Because I know that, all right?”
I jerked out of Marlowe’s grip.
“If he’d been with a vampire he knew—hell, even one he didn’t—he wouldn’t have gone off like that,” I said bitterly. “He’d have waited for her, explained what he was doing, included her. But he wasn’t with another vampire, was he? He was with a dhampir. And he didn’
t expect me to have his back anyway, so why not go off on his own? He probably thought he’d be safer that way. Probably thought you had it in for him, to partner him up with a creature as dangerous as whatever he was hunting!”
I pushed past him, furious, guilty, humiliated—and found myself hauled back. I was about to register my displeasure—forcibly—when Marlowe stopped me by saying the last words I expected to hear. “He requested you.”
I glared at him. “What?”
“He requested to be assigned to you. Several of them did.”
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask them. My guess would be…curiosity. Until recently, many of them didn’t even believe that dhampirs existed. Thought your kind were merely myth. Then they find out that not only do they exist but that one is in their midst, and of Mircea’s family line at that.…”
“Then curiosity got him killed!”
“No. Pride got him killed. He should have waited for you, he should have—” His jaw clenched. “I knew it was trouble when he received a second major gift before reaching first level.…That is rarely a good thing.”
“He was powerful—”
“Not enough! As I tried to tell him, on more than one occasion. But he’d never been in a position that his abilities couldn’t overcome. What the physical couldn’t handle, the mental got him out of, and vice versa. He never had his back against a wall. He never—”
He broke off but I knew what he meant. “He never failed.”
“No. And sometimes, they need to fail. They need the lessons it teaches. Or the first time they do may be their last!” He looked at me, his eyes dark and implacable. “But not tonight. We don’t fail tonight.”
“You’ll have Slava alive,” I told him simply.
He looked at me for a few long seconds, searching my face for something that I guess he found. Or maybe we were just out of time. “Then let’s go get him.”
