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“I am in there, am I?” Mircea slipped onyx cuff links into the French cuffs on his shirt and eyed the box skeptically.
“We can let you out,” I said dubiously, “but I don’t think…that is, I’m not sure how you’ll react. Marlowe said he couldn’t control you, there at the end…”
“Can we get on with this?” Pritkin demanded.
Mircea ignored him, but he gave me back a frown. “Has it not occurred to you that the mage has deceived you? Perhaps in an attempt to get into this very room, past security, to assassinate me in a vulnerable position?”
“Do mages frequently do that?” I asked, surprised.
“A few dark ones have tried. After what happened to the last one, I have had a reprieve for some years.” He glanced at Pritkin. “But perhaps the lesson has been forgotten, and must be taught again.”
Pritkin leapt up from his chair. “If I intended to harm you, I have had more than enough time already!”
Mircea bared his teeth in an expression that in no way resembled a smile. “Feel free to try.”
I refrained from throwing something, but it was close. I’d known bringing Pritkin was a bad idea, but after the debacle with Nick, I hadn’t dared to trust anyone else. Not to mention that he was the only one who knew the spell. It had to be him, and it had to be now.
“I honestly don’t know how much time you have left,” I told Mircea quietly. “If we do nothing, the spell will run its course and you’ll die anyway.”
“The spell was never designed to kill,” he reproved. “Not in its wildest permutation.”
“No, but it can drive someone mad! And then the Consul will do the killing for you.”
Mircea paused, his eyes sliding to the snare. He regarded it for a long moment, expressionless. I guess it would be a little weird—okay, a lot weird—to imagine yourself trapped in there when you were standing right beside it. “The Senate has many experts at its disposal. Surely they can find a solution.”
“That’s already been tried. Do you think the Consul would have had you imprisoned if there was an alternative?”
“But would not this counterspell remove the geis from me, as well as from your Mircea? And thereby change time?”
“No, we don’t think so.” It was one of the things I’d asked Pritkin before we left. “It’s being cast on the three of us, to break the bond we all share. But it can’t affect anyone who isn’t here, which includes the Cassie of this time. So your link with her should remain and, uh, run its course.”
“Leading to a great deal of trouble.”
“I’m afraid so. But there’s no other choice—not if you want the present timeline to continue.”
“The one in which you are Pythia.” I didn’t answer, but I didn’t have to. Mircea had known since the battle at Dante’s that his crazy gamble had paid off. He looked thoughtful for a moment, but then his eyes slid to Pritkin and his expression hardened. “I know you think you are acting for the best, dulceata?, but you do not know what our enemies are—”
Pritkin swore and, before I could stop him, said something in a low, guttural language that sounded awfully familiar. Before I could blink, before he even finished speaking, Mircea had pressed him against the wall, a fist in his shirt and murder in his eyes. “Mircea, no!” I grabbed his free arm. “I thought we were going to wait until he agreed!” I said to Pritkin, furious.
“He would never have agreed,” he spat, “and it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Doesn’t matter? He could kill you!” Laying a spell on a master vamp without his permission was considered so stupid that there wasn’t even a law against it. There didn’t need to be—most who tried it didn’t survive long enough for a trial.
“You don’t understand. The geis—”
“What about it?”
Pritkin looked like he’d swallowed a handful of nails. “Can’t you feel it? The spell didn’t work. The geis is still there!”
Chapter 29
“That’s impossible! You said—”
“I said your theory seemed plausible if the spell had not morphed into something new. Obviously it has. In the hundred years since you placed it on the vampire, it has had more than enough time to grow, to change, to become a new spell. As a result, the counterspell won’t work. Because the spell it was designed to offset no longer exists!”
“You’re telling me we went through all that for nothing? That we’ll just die anyway?”
“Not for nothing. In the process, we discovered—” He glanced at Mircea and hesitated. “Much of interest.”
