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I sighed, and wondered if I could make it to the door without anybody returning the favor. But before I could try, Louis-Cesare squeezed my other arm, completing the awkward triangle. “Tell him.”
“I already did. He doesn’t want to hear—”
“Tell him anyway. Then we’ll have Mircea tell him. Perhaps something will get through that thick skull!”
“While the only thing going through your skull,” Marlowe snapped, “will be my fist if you don’t let go!”
Louis-Cesare let go, but only so he could grab the spy’s lapels and drag him over the table.
“Damn it, man, think! If she’s right, the creature who attac
ked the consul is still at large, and you’re responsible for her safety! If there’s any chance—”
Marlowe broke his hold with a savage upward gesture, and I thought we were about to have round number two, electric boogaloo, only with no holds barred this time. And since that would involve masters’ powers, which in Marlowe’s case included the aforementioned ability to crack skulls, I wasn’t on board.
But then he made an annoyed-cat sound and flung out a hand in my direction. “Fine. Tell me!”
I looked at Louis-Cesare, who raised an eyebrow. And then around the room, at the sea of glowering faces. And sighed again.
Always nice to have an appreciative audience.
“Caedmon told me about Alfhild, the ancient fey princess with a rep for boiling people alive, but I didn’t think much about it,” I said. “But that’s where our current problem started, all those years ago in Faerie, when she was betrayed and murdered—as she saw it. She was furious and vowed revenge, and that kind of anger carries over. Some of the guards told me that fey who claim to remember substantial bits of their past lives are usually either very powerful or very troubled, and Alfhild was both.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Louis-Cesare murmured. Thanks to Marlowe’s theatrics, he’d heard only bits and pieces of this himself.
“Anyway, she was exiled from Faerie and executed on Earth, which should have been the end of it. Except she was fey, and they reincarnate. But since she was on Earth now, she came back as a human, because that seems to be the way it works. The fey soul latches on to the energy of the planet to help it form its next body, and this is a human world. But she was still fey underneath, and kept being tormented with weird flashes of memory she didn’t understand.”
And with that, at least, I could sympathize.
“That’s why she sought out a vampire,” one of Marlowe’s guys piped up. “To give her time to figure things . . . uh . . . out.”
He trailed off when his master glared at him.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “Or maybe she just got bit randomly. Either way, a longer life allowed her to put the pieces together. Enough to find her grave and that damned book, which told her the rest.”
“Why would the fey leave such a thing?” Louis-Cesare asked. “If they knew there was even a chance she’d remember—”
“The guards said that’s probably why it was left: as a warning, in case she recalled anything substantial, and as a reason for her exile. It was supposed to promote repentance, by reminding her of her crimes—”
“Yes, that works so well with homicidal maniacs!” Marlowe snarled. “They may as well have given her a primer! Like leaving young Hitler Mein Kampf!”
I didn’t point out that he had no reason to be angry, since he wasn’t supposed to be buying any of this, because I was just glad that he actually seemed to be listening this time. And because I agreed with him. “They should have destroyed her when they had the chance.”
“Did anyone say why they didn’t?” Louis-Cesare asked.
“No. None of Claire’s guards were alive then. But they said it probably had something to do with the old religion. That her judges would have felt like they were killing off part of the soul of Faerie if they completely obliterated her. And that maybe they thought she’d get it right, the next time.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he murmured.
Marlowe didn’t seem any happier. His brows had lowered and his eyes had darkened. Several of the vamps around me fidgeted, feeling their master’s growing displeasure in their own bodies. This close, they functioned almost like a single organism, to the point that, when Marlowe made another of those angry little noises, several of his boys did, too.
Sounded like a bunch of asthmatic cats in here, I thought.
But he wasn’t ready to officially board the crazy train yet.
“None of this proves that she’s still around today,” he pointed out. “Even if she did become a vampire, and eventually the praetor, as you claim, the consul killed her five hundred years ago!”
“The consul killed her physically,” I corrected. “In fury after Mircea explained who had been murdering all those vampires. What she didn’t know was that she was dealing with the reincarnated soul of an ancient fey princess in a vampire body—”
