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“What you’ll have is nothing if you don’t shut up!” That was the woman, putting herself between her family member and the dark-haired master. She looked at her uncle. “Forget about him. Will you answer a few questions for me?”
He scowled, but after a moment he relented. “Make it fast. Your aunt was still in hysterics when I left, after that damned farce tonight. You’re lucky we got shields up in time, vampire!”
“I would hope you could manage that much,” the dark-haired master sneered. “When we were saving your lives upstairs from some of your own kind!”
“That’s it.” The man’s fury had coalesced into grim resolve. “I won’t stay here and be compared to a bunch of damned black magic users—”
“You think that’s what they were?” the woman asked.
“What the hell else would they be? Normal mages don’t go around experimenting with ground-up bits of fey!”
“Just ground-up bits of vampire,” the dark-haired master said, showing some fang.
“Damn it, man! That was hundreds of years ago!”
“Officially, maybe.” That was the other master, commenting in a smooth, unruffled tone. He sounded like a bureaucrat, and had some sort of device he kept checking. “The traffic continues, in small amounts—”
“Maybe among the Black Circle—”
“That’s always the excuse!” The dark-haired master flushed. “Every time we catch you lot in anything. ‘Oh, it wasn’t us—it was the bad type of mages!’”
“Because it usually is!”
“Not tonight! The Black Circle attacked us several times recently—here and at a stronghold in Las Vegas. They suffered enormous casualties, yet didn’t use these powerful new weapons—not even once. Which makes me suspicious—”
“Are you accusing me, vampire?”
“I’m asking for an explanation! Your own life was imperiled tonight, and your family’s. I’d think—”
“Something that would not have been the case if you’d taken precautions!”
“We did! Those spells tore through them like they were tissue paper! Who the hell is making them? And how and why and where? I want to know and I will!”
I stopped listening. The master was wasting his time; the man didn’t know anything more than he’d said. I could see the bewilderment in his mind, along with fear and anger. The vampire would get no answers tonight.
But perhaps I would.
I followed the annoying niggle back down the corridor, to where a dining room lay behind a door. There was a fireplace in here, too, but not for heat. I pushed my head through the illusion and found what I’d expected: a secret passageway, a spy tunnel, and a way for she-who-saw-everything here to move her servants about quickly.
No one surprised her in her own home. Not even me. I would be spotted in moments by one of the masters I could feel roaming the pathways that snaked through this great house. I would never make it to her, not through all this.
Well.
Not without some help.
* * *
* * *
I woke up in a strange bed, with a familiar vampire. And in alarm, but not because Louis-Cesare was looking like a corpse. But because—
What the hell?
Dorina, I thought blankly, and fell out of bed.
And then proceeded to go snuffling about, like my counterpart was currently doing. Because she wasn’t in my body anymore. She was—
“Ew!”
