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I swallowed, knowing this wasn’t going to go over well. But I had to ask. “Tell me the truth, Rafe. Did Mircea send you?”
If he really was dying, it would make sense for him to send Rafe to tell me so. Mircea had saved my life by refusing Tony his revenge. I owed him one, and I would have expected him to try to cash it in.
What didn’t make sense was why he would order Rafe to put on an elaborate pretense, to make me think he’d actually told him to stay away. But although Mircea looked to be in his early thirties, he was five hundred years old. And, like most of the older vamps, to call his thought processes Byzantine was a serious understatement. I’d discovered long ago that the easiest way to figure out what a vampire really wanted was to look for whatever would benefit him the most, and ignore everything else. And what would benefit Mircea was completing the geis.
Rafe blinked at me, and for a moment there was something lost and wide open in his expression, almost bruised. “You think I would lie to you?”
“If Mircea ordered you to, yes. You wouldn’t have a choice!”
“There are always choices,” Rafe said, offended. “Had I been ordered to tell you a lie—” He gave a small shrug. “I cannot help it if I am not so good an actor at times.”
“But you’re fond of Mircea. It might be an order you’d agree with.”
He sighed in exasperation. “Mircea has many fine qualities, Cassie. I know them well. But he has flaws, too—one in particular that I hope will not prove fatal. He is stubborn. Too stubborn to listen to the Consul’s experts when they tell him he cannot defeat this. Too stubborn to believe that even his power can fail. And too proud to admit it, even if he did believe!”
That did sound like Mircea. And I’d never really stopped to wonder how he would react to the geis’ malfunctioning. If anything, I’d assumed his only thought would be to use it to get me under his power. But while I’d almost become used to my life spinning out of control, it definitely wasn’t the norm for him. Mircea manipulated other people, used them to get what he or the Senate wanted. He wasn’t accustomed to having anyone, or anything, do the same to him.
“And consider this,” Rafe said urgently, “when you think on deception. Mage Pritkin has no reason to save Mircea. If he dies, the spell is broken. All he has to do is stall long enough for that to happen, and you are free.”
An automatic denial rose to my lips, but died before I could utter it. The Codex contained some mysterious spell that Pritkin didn’t want found. We’d agreed that once the book was located, I’d let him remove it before I searched it for the counterspell to the geis. But what if he didn’t trust me? I didn’t know enough about the magical community to know whom to ask for information. So all the experts we’d spoken with had been Pritkin’s. Had all that “you go, I’ll stay” stuff in Paris been about my welfare or an attempt to make sure I didn’t find anything? What if the real reason we kept striking out was because that was what he wanted?
“I almost forgot. I have something for you.” Rafe fumbled under the cloak for a moment, then brought out a small package wrapped in a piece of black felt. “The Fey returned them to Mircea. As your master, they assumed he could get them to you.”
I parted the felt and into my hands dropped a ratty old pack of tarot cards. They were dirty and creased, and more than a few were missing the corners. I was a little surprised to see them, since I’d lost them while on a disastrous trip to Faerie in search of Myra. I’d been happy to get out of there alive, and hadn’t worried too much about what I left behind.
A card suddenly poked up from the deck with no help from me. “The Magician Rev
ersed,” a resonant voice began, before I shoved it back inside and slipped the pack into the pocket of my shorts. It did not add to my peace of mind.
My old governess had had the deck spelled to report on the overall spiritual climate of a situation. It was supposed to be a joke, but over the years I’d noticed that its predictions were depressingly accurate. That was a problem because, no matter how I tried to twist it, the Magician Ill-Dignified was never a good thing.
You know the guys with the three beans under the shells at carnivals? The ones with the stuffed animals that are going all moldy because they never actually give any away? The Magician Ill-Dignified is a lot like that: a salesman or con man who can make you believe almost anything. You can avoid him, but you have to be on your toes, because he will not seem like a deceiver.
The card was safely tucked away, but an image of the tiny magician’s face still seemed to hover in front of me. And my imagination was giving him Pritkin’s bright green eyes. I didn’t know how far he was willing to go to ensure that the mystery spell stayed lost. And if Mircea died, my biggest reason for finding the Codex died with him. Maybe Pritkin didn’t view a single death as too high a price to pay to keep the secret.
Especially if that life was a vampire’s.
Chapter 4
Rafe watched me in silence for a moment, then cleared his throat. “There may be an alternative.”
I waited, but he just sat there, his jaw working but no sound coming out. “I’m listening.”
“I can’t tell you,” he finally said, sounding defeated. Apparently Mircea’s command hadn’t been so flawed after all.
I glanced at Billy, who sighed and shrugged. He doesn’t like possessions, but they do allow him to tiptoe through someone’s thoughts, gathering stray information here and there. And I doubted Mircea had prohibited Rafe from even thinking about whatever it was he didn’t want known.
“Drop your shields,” I told him, “and hold that thought.”
Rafe looked a little nervous, but since Billy slipped inside his skin a few seconds later, he must have done as I asked. I glanced around, wondering what the tourists would say if they knew that a ghost was currently possessing a vampire a few feet away. It made Dante’s staged shows look a little tepid by comparison. Then Billy stepped out of Rafe’s other side, looking freaked. “Oh, hell, no.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. Not a damn thing.”
“You’re lying.” I couldn’t believe it. Billy has a lot of flaws, but he doesn’t lie. Not to me.
His jaw set and his hazel eyes looked as implacable as I’d ever seen them. “If I am, it’s for your own good!”
