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“I don’t know. But that’s not the point, is it?” I started running hot water in the tub.
“Then what is the point?”
“That he can ask whatever he wants. I’ll probably even do it most of the time. I’d have done it last night, if it had been a request. I’d had the day from hell; I really didn’t want to go anywhere. But it wasn’t a request; it was an order. And if I start taking orders from a senator—any senator—I may as well forget having anyone take me seriously.”
“The Consul takes Mircea seriously.”
“As a valued servant, yes. But she knows that, when she pushes, he’ll do what she wants. He owes his job to her, so he can never be truly impartial. But I have to be, or the Circle will ignore me as a vampire pawn, and the Senate will ignore me because they can order me around, and it’ll be . . . the Tony Syndrome all over again. And I won’t live like that. I just won’t!”
Marco sat down on the side of the tub, making the porcelain creak. “What’s the Tony Syndrome?”
Somebody had restocked the bath salts, and I threw half the jar into the water. “Most seers see both sides of life,” I told him. “They see the baby somebody has been hoping for, or the long-overdue promotion, or the love of their life, right around the corner. It helps balance out the bad stuff, the stuff nobody wants to see. The earthquakes and the bomb plots and the fires and the car crashes. But I never had that balance. I don’t see the good stuff. I never did.”
“That’s rough.”
“It’s . . . exhausting. It’s depressing. It keeps you from enjoying a lot of life because, even when you’re having a good day, suddenly you’ll see someone else’s pain, someone else’s grief. And the record scratches, you know?”
He nodded.
“Eventually, I learned how not to see things. But for a long time, I didn’t have that ability. The only way I could deal was by telling myself that the stuff I saw was in the future, and that maybe some of it could be averted. That maybe I could change things, at least for a few people. And Tony promised me he’d get the word out.”
“And he lied.”
“Of course he lied. But I was a kid and I believed him, maybe because I wanted to believe him. When I fina
lly figured it out and confronted him, he just shrugged and told me that there was more profit in tragedy.”
“That sounds like that fat little weasel.” Marco regarded me narrowly. “You’re saying you expect the Senate to go around averting tragedies?”
“No. But if I see something coming, something potentially disastrous for our world, I expect them to listen to me. I expect them to trust me. And right now, I don’t know that they respect me enough to do that.”
Marco sighed and looked at me, his elbows resting on massive thighs. “Look, I’m gonna tell you something, and if you repeat it, I’ll deny it. But the master shouldn’t have given that order. He ought to know you well enough by now to know what was gonna happen. But he did it anyway, because he’s scared and he’s stressed and he don’t always see so clear where you are concerned. But that don’t mean he don’t respect you.”
“Well, it sure doesn’t mean that he does!” I said, swirling the soap around, a little more forcefully than necessary.
“He talks about you a lot in the family. He’s proud of you—anybody can see that.”
“Anybody but me.”
“He may not say it to you, but that’s the truth.”
“Then why doesn’t he say it to me? Right now, I feel like . . . like one of those floozies you talked about—”
“I never used the word ‘floozy’—”
“—who is supposed to hang around, shopping and doing her nails and waiting for her lord and master to show up! That’s how he treats me, so why shouldn’t I believe that’s how he sees me?”
“Because he probably does like the thought of you shopping and doing your nails instead of the kind of shit you usually get up to! And because he’s a politician and don’t want to give up an advantage.”
“Advantage in what?”
“In the power games you two got going—”
“This isn’t about power.”
“The hell it’s not.”
“It isn’t! I don’t want to order Mircea around. I don’t want to order the Senate or the Circle around. I just want them—”
