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“Understandable,” Louis-Cesare murmured dryly.
“—and so didn’t realize that her nemesis remained, just in an altered form. Because Alfhild was a vargr—”
“Based on?” Marlowe cut in.
I looked at him incredulously. “Did you hear anything I said about what happened here the other night? The manlikans might have been Efridis, trying to get Aiden out of the house, but the vargr attack definitely wasn’t. The person doing that didn’t know she already had a potential avatar in the room, and couldn’t have cared less about Aiden. She went straight for the troll kid, the only living witness to what Alfhild has been doing—”
“That doesn’t prove anything. There are other vargrs—”
“The plural is vargar, and I wasn’t finished yet! In Faerie, she was known as Alfhild Ambhofði: Alfhild the Two-Headed. It’s a common nickname for vargar. It’s probably how she escaped from that tower the fey imprisoned her in, and it’s definitely how she got away from the consul. Her body died, but she threw her consciousness into her secretary—”
“Who just let her ride him around for the last five hundred years?” Marlowe scoffed.
“He didn’t have a choice! Something happened to him that night, when Mircea and the witch stole the shield. I called Mircea while we were waiting for you, and he filled me in on some of the things they figured out afterward.
“He thinks Alfhild intended to put all the power she was stealing from those vampires into a single receptacle, knowing that the consul would call up a sandstorm during their duel. As soon as the view of the fight was obscured, the praetor would hit her with all that power, all at once, crippling her. Then finish her off on her own, making it look like she’d won the duel fair and square.
“It was a good plan—if she’d been faster. But she knew how powerful the consul was, and wanted to make sure she overpowered her, so she was still collecting bones when Mircea and the witch discovered her plans and made their escape. She hadn’t even had the receptacle made yet, but suddenly she was hours, perhaps only minutes away from an enraged consul if she couldn’t find them—”
“She put the power in the shield, didn’t she?” Louis-Cesare asked. He hadn’t heard this part before—I hadn’t gotten this far last time—but no one’s ever accused him of being slow.
I nodded. “It was the only thing she had on hand strong enough to hold that much energy, because it was designed for traveling through the ley lines. So she had one of her mages spell it to absorb the power in the bones. I don’t know if she planned to stay and fight, or run and try her luck later, but either way, she wanted her stolen power with her.”
“But Mircea stole it first.” Marlowe suddenly grinned, showing fang. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen him smile before, but it was . . . disturbing.
I decided I liked him angry better.
“Uh, yeah. But not before the shield almost killed her avatar. Mircea said he thought she must have been using her secretary to oversee the operation in Venice, based on the height of the ‘fisherman’ he’d been chasing. The praetor was paranoid, and didn’t trust anyone besides herself to manage things. So she rode her secretary around to have her cake and eat it, too, and to have plausible deniability if anyone found out what was going on.”
“That is why he received favored status among her servants,” Louis-Cesare said. “I did wonder what a non-master was doing in such an important place in her household.”
“But he paid for it that night. He tried to use the altered shield to suck the life out of Mircea, but instead the witch turned it back on him. He didn’t die, but Alfhild was left with a crippled avatar, or else we’d have heard from her before this.”
“That’s absurd,” Marlowe said, no longer smiling. “Who the hell would choose to live like that? With two consciousnesses in a single body!”
I stared at him, wondering if it had been deliberate. But I guess not. Because he flushed suddenly, as realization hit. And, for once, Marlowe actually looked flustered.
“I . . . didn’t mean—”
“Someone who wanted revenge badly enough,” I cut him off, because we didn’t have time for this. “Reincarnation ran the risk of her not remembering who she was next time. We don’t know how many human lifetimes she lived before one was long enough to jog her memory. What if it never happened again? As for the secretary, he was weak, but any other body she chose would have fought her, whereas he probably didn’t have the strength. Or maybe he didn’t want to. Alfhild knew how the vampire world worked, and could protect him. In his weakened state, who else would have bothered?”
“So he was the albino we saw at the fights,” Louis-Cesare said. “With Alfhild in control.”
I nodded. “And back to her old tricks. The parallels between the praetor and our current problem were everywhere: preying on the same type of vulnerable communities, using the same method with the bones, even having the same target. But they were separated by five hundred years, so whenever I noticed anything, I put it down to coincidence—”
“Which it probably is!” Marlowe said, resuming asshole mode and pissing me off.
“Damn it, Marlowe!” I slapped my hands down, sending flour billowing. “Do you think I like this? I’d prefer for you to be right—then the villain is in custody and all’s right with the world. Instead, I have to deal with the fact that I left a friend to be used by that . . . thing, and ignored every hint he gave me!”
“Friend?” Marlowe’s guy said, his forehead wrinkling. “I thought we were talking about some albino?”
I put a hand to my head, and contemplated having an aneurysm. “Okay,” I said. “One more time. Alfhild is a disembodied consciousness. She needs a body in order to get around and execute her revenge. At first, she took over her secretary, because h
e was loyal and didn’t fight her. But after he died at the burnt-out-building fight, she needed a replacement, and she needed one fast.”
“Because vargar can’t hold free flight,” Louis-Cesare said.
At least somebody had been paying attention, I thought gratefully.
