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“Lizzie?”
“She attacked you
,” Rhea said, looking at the blond acolyte with hatred. “She drugged you and the demons attacked her and I managed to subdue—”
“You managed. What happened to the vampires?” I asked, looking at Marco again. I’d never realized how big of a presence he was, even when he wasn’t doing anything. He was the kind of guy you felt in a room.
Except for now.
Now I didn’t feel anything.
“We don’t know,” Tami said. “They just fell over, all at the same time, and we couldn’t wake them—”
“All at the same time?” I looked at Jonas.
“My people had nothing to do with this,” he told me. “I arrived to speak with you—alone—and found your so-called defenders unconscious on the floor. I called for backup, as you and your court had no protection. As I have told you before, you cannot rely—”
He kept talking, but I wasn’t listening. It was easy with the roaring in my ears now sounding like an ocean. Or maybe that was my heartbeat. I just know I could barely hear over it as I grabbed the house phone. “Casanova,” I told it.
“He’s unavailable right now; may I give him a—”
“Put him on the damned phone, David,” I said, because I recognized the voice of one of the front desk guys I used to work with, back when Casanova was making me earn my keep. “It’s Cassie.”
“Oh, sorry.” He swallowed. “I didn’t check. I’m a little flustered—”
“What happened?”
“What happened is the boss just keeled over this afternoon, along with half the damned security force! First he’s gone for two days, with no warning, and the next he—”
“Were they all vamps?”
“What?”
“The ones who fell out! Were they all vampires?”
“Yes—”
“Of Casanova’s line?”
“Um, I think so? I can go check—”
“Never mind,” I managed to get out, before I hung up.
“What is it?” Rhea asked, seeing my face.
“Mircea.”
I put through a call to his private line, but nothing. I called the number for his court in Washington. Same thing. I stood up and almost fell over, but managed to fall in the direction of the chair where the blonde was sitting, smirking at me. Smirking at me while Mircea lay dying somewhere, either dead or damned close, because that was the only way—the only way—this made sense.
A master could pull power from his family in extremis. But first-level masters almost six hundred years old didn’t need to do that anymore. First-level masters, even those considerably weaker than Mircea, could power a city. So if Mircea had needed to borrow this much power, and with no warning—
My heart twisted, and my breathing stopped. For an instant. Until I grabbed the blonde by the front of her T-shirt. “What did you do?”
The smirking intensified.
“We’ll see to her interrogation, Cassie,” Jonas told me. “But in the meantime—”
The blonde burst out laughing.
