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But Rhea didn’t have an answer for that.
“Did you want to see me about something?” I asked, after a minute. And turned back to the bureau to jerk on a fresh tee.
She nodded. “The children. They’re . . . I think it would do them good to see you. That you’re all right, I mean.”
I glanced at the bloody pile of clothes on the floor. Yeah. Maybe should have thought to shift to the bedroom.
“Mage Royston was popular,” she said, following my gaze. “He used to do magic tricks for the girls.”
“A Circle member would be good at that.”
She shook her head. “He was terrible. His magic . . . It wasn’t very strong anymore, so he did the human kind.”
“You mean the fake kind.”
She nodded. “Card tricks mostly . . .”
“And the girls liked that?”
“They liked trying to figure them out.”
Too bad I didn’t know any.
I finished dressing and followed Rhea back into the living room. The door to the foyer was closed now, but the girls were still staring at it. And looking grim, anxious, shocked, and stoic by turns, depending on their natures. But none of them was looking all that great—or that well cared for.
They’d had enough to eat; I knew Marco well enough to be sure of that. But their clothes were starting to look grubby, which I guess wasn’t surprising since they’d been wearing the same things for two days now. And damn it, this was no place for children!
I had a brief moment to wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off with Jonas, before the first one noticed me. And the look of joyous relief on her face made me feel ashamed. These girls had been brought up to have their whole lives revolve around the Pythia, only to have her abruptly snatched away from them. And then to almost die when her acolytes tried to kill them. And then to get dragged off here, into the midst of a bunch of what they probably thought of as monsters, in the service of another Pythia they didn’t know and who was never here anyway.
If I were them, I’d have hated me.
But instead, they pushed past the vampires to get to me, a wave of grubby white gowns and reaching hands, touching me, pressing around me, worried about me instead of what had happened to them. And what, from their perspective, was still happening. The knot of shame in my breast grew exponentially, but so did something else. The same something that had flared when that damned acolyte grabbed Rhea. A fierce, almost frightening possessiveness.
They were mine, this ragtag group of girls, and I wasn’t turning them over to Jonas. Wasn’t seeing them broken apart, wasn’t having them sent off to those damned schools the Circle ran, wasn’t giving them into the care of people I didn’t know and sure as hell didn’t trust. I was going to take care of them; I was going to figure it out. They were my court, and . . . and that’s all there was to it.
But I couldn’t tell them that.
Suddenly, I couldn’t seem to say anything.
And then Fred came to the rescue.
“No, no, no, I got this,” he said, jogging in from the lounge, and talking to someone over his shoulder.
“Got what?” I asked warily as he turned to me and grinned. And shoved out a fistful of floppy.
It took me a second because of the color. “Balloons?”
“Picked ’em up at the grocery store,” he told me proudly. “Thought they might come in handy.”
“The grocery store?”
“Yeah, they had a sale. Practically giving them away. Don’t know why.”
Because they’re depressing, I didn’t say, since he was only trying to help. But honestly, who bought black balloons? Fred, apparently, and now he was blowing them up.
“Trust me . . . I used to do this . . . all the time,” he told me in between breaths. He soon had a cluster of long, skinny tubes, which he then proceeded to tie together using vampire speed. One second, there was a depressing bunch of cylinders, and the next . . .
It was worse.
