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And just like that, I was back at Dante’s. Sprawled on the floor of my half-flooded bath, because I hadn’t turned off the sink before I was abruptly snatched away.
“—now,” I finished furiously.
Son of a bitch!
Chapter Thirty-one
I spent the next twenty minutes mopping up. I must have knocked the liquid hand soap when I toppled over, and it was the frothy kind. So I’d woken up in a sea of bubbles, with a loofah bumping me in the nose, and a sink cascading over everything like a miniature Niagara.
And an imminent flood, because I’d had my butt on the drain.
I got up, turned off the water, and started shooing the tide toward the exit. But that was only somewhat helpful, since it left me with soap scale all along the walls, like a high water mark. It took every towel I had to scrub it off and to soak up the rest of the overflow. Except for the one I appropriated for me, because my old one was as drenched as everything else in here.
The boys would have told me to leave it
for housekeeping, but we gave them enough trouble as it was. And cleaning gave me a chance to work off some energy. And right now, I had a lot of it.
Because I was pissed.
Which was both infuriating and seriously confusing, because I didn’t know why.
I mean, I knew why. The obvious why, anyway. Mircea was running scared, just like Jonas. But when master vamps were scared, they didn’t circle the wagons and go on the defensive. They ran toward whatever was scaring them, weapons out and fangs bared. They became more dangerous when afraid, not less so, their every instinct telling them to go for blood. And Mircea, being smarter than most—about some things, I thought, scrubbing fiercely—had found a nifty new way to do that.
“We’ll be careful about the selection.”
Yeah, I bet. But say they were. And say the Senate could keep all those giddy-with-their-shiny-new-power masters under control. Which was debatable because the ones they already had caused them enough trouble sometimes. But just for the sake of argument, say they could do it. That still left some big damned questions, didn’t it?
Like whose vamps would they be?
After the war was over, who would they fight for? Because there was an alliance between the vampire Senates right now, but it was shaky at best since they all pretty much hated one another. They just happened to hate the gods more. So right now, the world’s vampires were one big, unhappy, seriously dysfunctional family, but normally, there were six separate Senates. And there would be again about a nanosecond after the war ended.
So I had to wonder. When all the dust settled, assuming we won, because otherwise it didn’t really matter, did it, who would they fight for? Or, more important, who would they fight against? Other Senates? The Circle? Humans?
Because they could. With an army of master vamps, the Senate so very, very could do any damned thing they pleased. And old or not, mature or not, responsible or not, you didn’t give a vamp unlimited power like that. You just didn’t. Because they would use it. Sooner or later, somehow or other, and what would be the point of all this then? Save the world from Ares just so we could rip it apart ourselves? Yeah, that would be an improvement!
And I wasn’t stupid enough to think they’d just have me reverse the process after the war. Take all those shiny new masters and turn them back into regular old Joe vamps? Sure.
The vamps themselves wouldn’t stand for it, would run for the hills, would do whatever they had to do to avoid becoming little more than slaves again. And the senior masters over their families would probably back them, because any masters you had in your stable fed into your power base way more than a regular vamp. So you’d be cutting your own throat to let them be turned back.
And that was if I could even do it, which I doubted, because I wasn’t to be the source of the power, was I? I was just supposed to make the process more tolerable. The spoonful of sugar that helped all that power go down without burning the vamps in question to cinders.
So no. Once they were here, they’d stay here. And that so wasn’t happening!
But as fantastically bad as the whole idea was, that wasn’t what had me angry. And I was angry, I realized—not just pissed or peeved or irritated. I was hot, something it had taken me a while to realize because it wasn’t an emotion I felt very often. You couldn’t afford emotions around Tony’s. Emotions made you visible, emotions got you noticed, and getting noticed was usually a very bad thing.
I threw my toothbrush, which I’d found on an epic voyage to the tub, into the trash, wrapped up the towels in the soggy pelt of a bath mat, and tossed the whole mess in a corner. It wasn’t a perfect job, but at least we wouldn’t flood out the guys in the room underneath.
Which was just as well since they were part of my guards, too, and no way was anybody else fitting into this suite!
Then I got back in the shower, because I was soapy and sweaty, and because I needed to cool off.
And to figure out why I was pissed, because I still didn’t know.
I wasn’t angry because of what Mircea had asked, I decided. I might not know much about being Pythia, but I knew vamps. And no vamp in the world would have passed up a chance like that.
And, anyway, he might have thought of it first, because Jules was his so he’d heard about it first, but somebody else would have come up with the same idea sooner or later. Marlowe or the consul herself or somebody. Vamps didn’t overlook stuff likely to increase their power base, even by a small amount.
And this wasn’t small.
