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“An alliance with clan Basarab.” He shivered suddenly in apparent delight. “Ooh, just the thought makes me all tingly.”
“What kind of alliance—” Louis-Cesare began, before I set down my glass—hard.
“No.”
“No?” Zheng raised an eyebrow. “You don’t even want to hear my proposal?”
“No. Not now, not today. I get my sister back, I get Ray back, then maybe—”
Zheng tilted his head. “Where’d they go?”
I told him.
Chapter Thirty-One
Dory, Hong Kong
“That’s . . . a lot to take in,” Zheng said, and I’d given him the truncated version.
I nodded. “Then you see why we need help—”
“And I need an alliance. With your old man gone, you’re head of the clan, so you can make those kinds of—”
“Wait. What?” I looked from him to Louis-Cesare and back again. “What do you mean, gone?”
It was Zheng who answered. “As in away. As in, nobody knows where he is, or they aren’t saying. I’ve been trying to get hold of him for more than a week, but—”
“You’ve been trying to get in contact with Mircea for a week?” I asked, making sure I understood.
He nodded.
“And it hasn’t worked?”
He nodded again.
“Did you know about this?” I asked Louis-Cesare.
“No, but it does not surprise me. I tried to contact him mentally the night that . . . everything happened . . . but could not reach him. I was told that he was unavailable—”
“His daughter was just kidnapped, and he’s unavailable?” I stared at him.
“That is what I was told. I then tried his phone, but could reach only his batman,” he said, speaking of the military attaché Mircea had acquired after being promoted to general of the World Senate’s combined army.
The promotion had made him more difficult to contact lately, as he was constantly in a meeting or running around, putting out fires. Or actually fighting in Faerie, where the first battle of the conflict had been an overwhelming success, although with significant losses for our side. I hadn’t seen him since he’d healed my leg, having first been recovering and then, once I was back on two feet, off on the current, diplomatic whirlwind.
But still. Louis-Cesare was family, not to mention a senator who might have picked up important intel on his travels. Getting in touch shouldn’t be this hard!
“What did Gerald have to say?” I asked, referencing the pinched faced batman.
“That ‘General Basarab is currently unavailable’.”
I frowned. That bastard. He never told anybody anything.
Of course, that was true of somebody else around here.
“And you didn’t mention this?” I said. “Why?”
Louis-Cesare didn’t even have the grace to look uncomfortable. “I was going to, but you had enough on your plate.”
