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Ray hurt worst of all, maybe because he was my direct responsibility. Or because I had seen what happened to him. Dragged through the portal, not by the fey, who had thrown him aside like so much garbage, but by the power of the vortex itself.
My stalwart defender, he’d had no reason to trust a dhampir of all things, had no reason to trust anyone after the life he’d lived, but he’d pledged himself to me nonetheless. Even without the usual blood bond, which I could not do, he’d been loyal, more loyal than anyone, and I’d lost him. I’d lost both of them. And now I was doing it, I was crying and screaming and clinging to Louis-Cesare, who I vaguely realized was rubbing my back in long strokes up and down the spine that did no more good than anything else. The pain was too great. I couldn’t think past it, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t—
I couldn’t bear it.
He held onto me when I tried to get up. I didn’t know where I was going, but the crushing guilt and anger and horror all set in at once, making me need to move. And when I couldn’t, to fight the very man who was trying to help me.
“Let me go. Let me go!”
Louis-Cesare did not let me go.
“I understand,” he said instead, his grip gentle but implacable. “It is the worst feeling in the world, when a master loses a Child. I have seen some go mad with grief, have felt
the red claws of it shred my own soul. I have lost servants, too.”
“Ray wasn’t a servant,” I said harshly. “He was my friend. And he died because those bastards . . . those bastards . . . and I didn’t . . . I couldn’t—”
“You did everything you could have done.” He pulled back far enough to look at me, and his face tightened at whatever he saw. “This was not your fault, Dory. It was mine.”
“Yours?” I stared up at him, his image blurry through my furious tears. “How the hell was it yours?”
“You would not have been out there except for me. The fey dangled the bait in front of my nose, and I fell for it, utterly and completely—”
I stared up at him. He wasn’t making sense, or else I couldn’t think straight. Either could have been true right then.
“What bait? What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t hear me?” he frowned. “I called back to you, but then, the ballroom was deafening. I should have thought . . .”
I vaguely remembered seeing Louis-Cesare shout something, just before leaping through Hassani’s shield. I hadn’t been able to hear what it was, but it wouldn’t have mattered. There was nothing he could have said that would have kept me from following him.
“But I wasn’t thinking,” he continued, his voice ragged. “I was reacting, and stupidly so. I lost your sister, I lost Raymond, and I almost lost you.” His arms tightened, bruisingly hard.
I pushed at him until he let me go. “What are you talking about?”
“Jonathan,” he said, uttering the most hated name I knew, and one of the few that could focus even my currently jumbled thoughts.
“What? That’s impossible.”
Louis-Cesare shook his head, his jaw tight. “He was there, outside the ballroom, smirking at me. I went for him without hesitation. And in doing so, I endangered all of us.”
I stared at him, my head spinning. I was still half asleep, and what few faculties I had were stuck on horror—and that name didn’t help. It was even worse than the damned Svarestri, the silver haired bastards in jackal’s clothing that we’d fought tonight.
Jonathan was a nine-hundred-year-old necromancer who had been using stolen magic to unnaturally prolong his life. But taking other people’s magic into your system was like taking a drug. Yes, it could give you a high, as well as extra stamina for spell casting, but it also built up a dependency. One that required more and more over time to achieve the same result.
And that went double for anybody taking enough to elongate their life more than four times the average for magical humans. Jonathan wasn’t just addicted to magic anymore, he required it to live, and had become very creative at coming up with new ways to get it. Including trapping and draining a master vampire to the brink of death day after day after day.
Louis-Cesare had eventually escaped his imprisonment, but the experience had left him deeply scarred. I wouldn’t have blamed him for taking off after Jonathan tonight. Except for one thing.
“He’s dead,” I said harshly. “We saw the body—”
“And I know him! Do you understand?” The gentle expression of a moment ago was gone, and the blue eyes blazed. “All those days at his mercy, all those nights—” he cut off abruptly, his jaw clenched.
“A glamourie, then. A good one—”
“Do you know what Hassani’s master power is?” Louis-Cesare demanded. He was speaking about the unusual abilities that some of the very oldest vamps acquired. I’d assumed that Hassani had one or more; anyone able to hold a consul’s position practically required it. But I’d never heard what it was.
“No.”
