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He paused while we relocated to a bench safe from attacking flora. It had a chimney on one side, a small, scraggly patch of forget-me-nots on the other, and a nice view of the river. A butterfly sniffed a flower nearby, its feelers twitching excitedly.
“I wouldn’t have left,” I told him. “It’s nice here.”
Pritkin’s mouth hardened for a heartbeat before relaxing once more. “I’m considering selling. It’s too large for one person. And the reason it was acquired no longer exists.”
I looked around. So this was the house he’d bought with his wife in mind. It suddenly became more interesting.
One of the few things Pritkin had told me about himself was his early—and, as far as I knew, only—attempt at the have-a-normal-life routine. Sometime in the nineteenth century, he’d met a girl and gotten married. Only no one had bothered to mention what might happen to a half incubus who took a wife. The result was the other side of his nature coming out on their first night together and draining the poor girl of life without Pritkin having any idea how to stop it. He’d had to watch, horror-struck, as she died because of him.
I could see him picking this place out in the months before the wedding. He’d probably expected years of quiet, happy normalcy. Only that so hadn’t happened.
I could relate.
“Are you all right?” he finally asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, because it took too much energy to explain all the ways I wasn’t.
“You don’t look fine.”
“Sorry.” I tried to relax against the hedge growing behind the bench, but its branches poked me like too-sharp fingernails. I couldn’t get comfortable and sat up straight again.
“There is something you should know,” he told me.
“Not now.” My brain was already overstuffed with all the things I hadn’t had a chance to think about, to accept, to find a place for in my self-image where they might not do too much damage.
“It isn’t more bad news,” he insisted.
I looked at him warily. He seemed sincere. “Okay,” I said cautiously.
“Jonas overstated the situation regarding your father. What we know about him was gained from interrogations of minor figures in the magical underworld—the sort of people that the vampire who brought you up once employed. The Black Circle uses such people for errand runners and cannon fodder but limits considerably what they are told. And their information came years after your father’s death. Much of it was likely not garnered from personal experience but from rumor and conjecture.”
“You’ve never interrogated a single Black Circle member?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t seem possible. You guys have known about them for hundreds of years. You must have captured at least one—”
“It’s a rare occurrence, but it does happen.”
“And none of them ever talked?” I couldn’t imagine anyone who did the kind of stuff that made vampires blanch having all that much loyalty to his partners-in-crime. It sounded more like he’d sell them out the first chance he got.
“They never lived long enough.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Black Circle has a similar tattoo to ours but with a more sinister purpose. Every Black Circle mage we’ve ever caught self-destructed within minutes. It’s one reason most of them fight to the death. Capture, for them, is the same thing.”
It was gruesome to contemplate, but it made a grim sort of sense. “I guess their tattoo doesn’t come off, huh?”
“No. And as we have never captured one without it, I can only assume it is a requirement for admission.”
“Isn’t the Silver Circle’s?”
“Yes—for most people.”
“Why not for you?”
He smiled slightly. “Mixed-blood applicants need not apply. The Circle was pleased to have me around to hunt the more dangerous types of demons, but they preferred not to give me access to their power base.”
