AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I had never felt any kind of threat from him as a child. He had been serene, kind Mircea with laughing brown eyes that crinkled a bit at the corners. It was hard to reconcile that person with what I saw now. Was that terrifying aspect always there, simmering below the surface, and I had simply been too blind to see it? I saw it now, and it created a problem. As much as I disliked Pritkin, I didn’t want him dead. He might be—make that probably was—crazy, but I needed him to explain what was happening to me, or to contact someone who could. It wasn’t like I knew anyone else to ask. “Don’t kill him, Mircea.”
“We have no intention of killing him, mademoiselle,” Louis-César answered, although he kept a wary eye on his colleague. Tomas had finished stripping off the mage’s weapons, at least the ones we could see. I had a feeling that a lot were still available to him, and my bracelet seemed to agree. It glowed warm against my wrist, feeling heavier than it had a few minutes ago. I would have liked to get it off—it was starting to creep me out—but this wasn’t a good time. “As of this night, we are already at war with the Dark Circle; we have no wish to also fight the Light.”
“Be careful,” Rafe said from beside me. “Make sure he’s completely unarmed.”
“He’s a war mage,” Mircea said flatly. “He’s never unarmed.”
“Until he’s dead,” Tomas added, and I noticed that he still gripped a struggling knife in his good hand. He moved like lightning—I guess he liked the irony of killing Pritkin with his own weapon—but Louis-César was a fraction faster. His hand caught Tomas’ wrist a hairsbreadth from Pritkin’s chest.
“Tomas! I will not have you start a war!”
“If you harbor that thing”—Pritkin all but spat at me—“you’ll be at war with us whether you will it or not. I was sent here to find out what she was and to deal with her if she posed a threat. I expected to find merely a cassandra, a fallen sybil, but this is far worse than I anticipated. And what I know, the Circle knows. If I fail to kill her, expect a dozen, a hundred others, to come in my place.” He looked at me, and if looks could kill, he’d have just saved his Circle the trouble. “I’ve fought one of these things before. I know what they can do and I won’t leave it alive.”
He lunged for me aga
in, but all it accomplished was to almost choke him, since Mircea’s invisible grip had all the give of a steel glove. It was weird, because Mircea’s face was back to its usual placid expression. The eyes were no more than vaguely interested, the cheeks were their normal color and a slight smile curved his lips. The incandescent anger was nowhere to be seen. I shivered. Acting skills like those worried me. I turned my attention back to the mage, and it dawned on me that the only person who I was sure wasn’t deceiving me was the man who’d just tried to kill me. Nice.
“I’m not an it,” I told him, staying well out of reach. “I don’t know what you think is happening here, but I’m not a threat to you.”
He laughed, a rather strangled sound under the circumstances. “Of course not. I’m too old for a lamia to take an interest. I tracked the one I killed over the bodies of twenty children it used to sustain its abomination of a life. I won’t let that happen again.”
I fought down anger and turned to the window, parting the blackout curtain to see a flat, reddish-tan landscape and pale blue sky. Quite a group had gathered around the hole left by the grenade, but no one bothered us. I guess they figured we could take care of ourselves. I turned back to that hate-filled face. “What if you’re wrong and I’m not some evil thing? Wouldn’t you rather know for sure before killing me?”
“I already know. No human can do what you did. It isn’t possible.”
“A few days ago, I would have agreed with you. Now I know different.” I found it hard to meet his eyes. I’d never had anyone look at me with that level of hatred. Tony wanted to kill me, but I was willing to bet that if he ever caught up with me his eyes wouldn’t look like that. He viewed me as a royal pain and a way to seal a bargain, not as the incarnation of evil. Even though I knew Pritkin was wrong, I felt guilty, and that made me mad in a way his physical attack hadn’t. I wasn’t the homicidal lunatic here.
“You said you’ve hunted these things before. Isn’t there some kind of test you use, to make sure you’re right? Or do you kill anyone you suspect on sight?”
“There are tests,” Pritkin said through clenched teeth, as if even talking to me was torture. “But your vampire allies wouldn’t like them. They involve holy water and crosses.”
I looked at Mircea in astonishment, and he rolled his eyes. What the hell kind of stuff was Pritkin reading? Bram freaking Stoker? Demons might be afraid of holy items, but vamps certainly weren’t. Mircea’s family crest showed a dragon, the symbol of courage, embracing a cross, a sign of the family’s Catholicism. It decorated the wall behind his seat in the Senate, but I guess Pritkin had been too busy glaring at me to notice. I thought about giving him the lecture on vampirism being sort of like lycanthropy, in that it was a metaphysical disease. But I doubted he’d believe that the legends claiming that a demon came to roost in every new vampire had been caused by the hysteria of the Middle Ages. Pritkin seemed to see demons everywhere, whether any were there or not. In fact, the only ones of Hollywood’s arsenal of weapons that actually worked on vamps were sunlight—for the younger ones, anyway—stakes and garlic, and the latter only if employed as part of a protection ward. Simply hanging the stuff over a door would have no effect at all—hell, Tony loved it on bruschetta with a little olive oil.
Mircea was no help; he only grinned at me. “And to think, I always believed that my least favorite things were bad wine and poor fashion.” He smiled tolerantly at my expression. “Very well, dulceat?. I think we can find a few crosses somewhere. And unless I mistake it, Rafe is keeping several vials of holy water imprisoned as we speak.”
Rafe came forward with his box. It sounded like a bunch of Mexican jumping beans were inside, urgently trying to get out, and all of us looked at it doubtfully. “I don’t agree with this,” Tomas spoke up. “I was charged by the Consul to keep Cassie safe. What if he lies, and those things contain acid or explosives? You know we cannot trust him.”
“Never trust a mage,” Rafe agreed, as if quoting something.
“I will test them,” Louis-César said and extracted a vial so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to stop him. He didn’t pour it over his own flesh as I’d half feared, but held the stoppered vial under Pritkin’s nose. “I am about to spill this over your arm. If it is not safe to do so, it would be well if you told me now.”
Pritkin ignored him, his glare still on me, as if he was more worried about what I might do than a roomful of master vamps. He obviously hadn’t been around them long enough to understand nuances. Louis-César had said only that they wouldn’t kill him—that still left a lot of possibilities wide open. I’d have been worried, but Pritkin was so busy giving me the glower of death that he barely noticed when a few drops of colorless liquid were drizzled over his skin. We all watched as if expecting his arm to start to melt, but nothing happened. Louis-César reached for me, but Tomas grabbed his wrist.
The Frenchman’s eyes flashed silver. “Be careful, Tomas,” he said softly. “You are not possessed this time.”
Tomas ignored the warning. “That could be poison—he could have taken the antidote, or be willing to die with her. I will not have her harmed.”
“I will take responsibility before the Consul if anything occurs.”
“I don’t care about the Consul.”
“Then you had best care about me.”
Two tides of shimmering energy began to build, enough to raise goose bumps on my arms and to set my bracelet dancing against my skin. “Enough!” Mircea waved a hand and the power in the room faded considerably. He plucked the vial from the Frenchman’s hand and sniffed it delicately. “Water, Tomas—it is only water and nothing more.” He handed it to me and I took it before Tomas could argue.
I trusted Mircea, and besides, neither the bracelet nor my ward reacted to it. “It’s okay.”
“No!” Tomas reached for the bottle, but Louis-César knocked his hand away.
