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“I think you overpaid.”
“They were free.”
“I still think you overpaid.”
“What is it?” Purple Hair asked, peering over my shoulder. Because most vamps don’t need to buy the kind of insurance that I do.
“Junk,” I told her, and tossed her the orb. It looked exactly like the ones James had found at the warehouse.
“Where did you get it?” I asked Radu.
“From a smugglers’ warehouse out in Queens. We’d planned a raid for earlier tonight, but somebody beat us to it. They managed to evade us, but one truck hit a light pole and was left behind. It was full of these.” He gestured at the containers.
Huh. Well, that couldn’t have been Blue; he’d been busy tonight. So maybe the reporters had been right, after all. There really was an underworld war going on. But over these? Why not just knock over another semi, or hit up the manufacturers, if you wanted them so badly? According to James, that’s what everyone else had been doing.
“That’s what the Senate wants to know,” Radu said, when I asked. “I was hoping you’d have an idea. You know about magic, Dory.”
“Not this kind.”
But still. There was something going on with these “weapons.” Somebody was risking their lives for the magical equivalent of whoopee cushions, and I didn’t know why.
Radu sighed. “No more do I, I’m afraid. But you know how the Senate is. Everything they don’t understand is automatically my purview. Of course, it would be easier if, at the same time they’re increasing my workload, they weren’t also kicking me out of house and—”
His lips kept moving, but I couldn’t hear anymore. Because an alarm had gone off, loud and insistent, drowning them out. And then the lights flickered off, and an electric frisson flooded over my skin, a wash of power so strong that it lifted my hair like a lightning bolt had just struck nearby.
“The wards?” Purple Hair yelled, looking around. Because the big boys had just come online, and they don’t play well with modern power sources.
“How odd.” Radu frowned. “Must be a malfunc—”
The whole house shuddered, hard enough to almost knock me off my feet, and to send Purple Hair to one knee. Hard enough to set the chandeliers swinging violently, throwing small scintillations of light everywhere, moonlight refracted through crystal. Hard enough to stop the fight in its tracks, and to have Marlowe yelling, “What the hell?” from under Louis-Cesare’s arm.
Too hard.
Mircea was a senator; senators have enemies. They also like to sleep in safety. And while he always had some human servants hanging around during the day, just in case, good wards were simply what you did.
The kind that didn’t shudder fr
om a single blow.
Or blow inward in a carnage of expensive glass and fine painted wood a second later, followed by a bunch of guys in masks.
Looked like somebody wanted their stuff back, I thought, right before the world whited out.
Chapter Forty-two
Mircea, Venice, 1458
For a moment, everything was quiet. The ship creaked, the girl snored, the footsteps of the two men echoed vaguely from somewhere overhead, their master having disappeared back through the portal. But that was all. The hold full of unconscious vampires didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, didn’t move.
Except for the one with the broken arm, which finally finished twitching itself back together and then fell off to the side, pulling the rest of the vampire along with it.
He hit the boards hard, and the sound reverberated in Mircea’s brain. For a moment he didn’t know why, the panicked hurry, hurry, hurry in his veins clouding his thoughts. But then he realized: if he fell off his own stack, he’d end up sprawling either on the girl below or right beside her. He would almost certainly come into contact with her, might even touch her skin. And then—
Maybe nothing. Touch helped his mental abilities, but even at his best, he couldn’t control people with his mind. He couldn’t make them do something they didn’t want to do. But he could influence them, especially if what he was pushing for was something they wanted anyway.
Of course, he didn’t know that the girl wanted to help. She might just want to get away. In her position, he definitely would, since her life expectancy with what she knew was probably about the same as his.
But he wouldn’t know if he didn’t ask.
