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“Sounds familiar.”
“Bullshit! Daughter of a senator, dating another one, you’re practically royalty!”
“And a dirty dhampir.”
“Yeah, but even that. No one knows how to fight that. You’re something out of legend, while the rest of us—”
She suddenly turned around and walked away.
I turned back to see Radu looking at me disapprovingly.
“What?”
“You could have been nicer.”
“Nicer? She’s been trying to kill me all week!”
Radu tutted. “She isn’t powerful enough to kill you—”
“She brought a friend!”
Radu glanced at Trevor, and rolled his eyes. “She simply thinks she has to try, that’s all. They brainwash them into believing that there’s nothing else to do with eternity than rule over everybody else. Then they finally make it, and wonder why they hate it.”
“Are you trying to tell me I won’t like being on the Senate?”
“You’re already on it. How are you finding it?”
“A pain in the ass.”
“Ah. The usual, then.”
“Is that how Geminus found it?”
Most people would have asked why I wanted to know, but not Radu. “Geminus thought he was Caesar reborn, and we were merely his court.”
“Well,
he was the oldest on the Senate, except for the consul.”
“A two-thousand-year-old fool is still a fool.”
“And his family?”
“He trained them to believe that they were meant to rule over us lesser creatures. And yet, he never bothered with any sort of contingency plan for when he died. One had the impression that his plan was to live forever. When that failed”—he shrugged—“it left them scattered, leaderless, and at the mercy of us lesser creatures.”
I remembered Ray saying that at the bottom, you allied with whoever would help you survive, no matter who it was. Who had they allied with? And where the hell did they fit in?
Usually, I had to try to roust suspects out of the woodwork, but this puzzle was the opposite: too many pieces, and none of them seemed to connect. There were smugglers and slavers and smugglers who were also slavers. There were trolls battling the bad guys and trolls who might be the bad guys. There was a vargr who might or might not be a queen of the Light Fey, or possibly an operative sent by her husband to make it look like she was guilty. Or possibly someone else altogether, because who the hell knew?
After four days, I didn’t know much more than I had when I started.
I didn’t even know what the hell they were smuggling!
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Marlowe being thrown into the middle of a very nice baby grand.
“Oh, really,” Radu said in annoyance. “I was going to keep that.”
“Seriously, he didn’t do anything,” I called to Louis-Cesare, who was now pounding out a sonata courtesy of Marlowe’s head. “And we’re broken up anyway. This is childish.”
