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“And we appreciate your input,” Mircea broke in smoothly. “We will discuss this in detail at a later time.”
“A later time? A later time? We’re out of time, man! We can’t move the army until we know what’s waiting on the other side of that pass, and we can’t do that until—”
“Tristram,” Caedmon said briefly.
Tristram shut up.
“As mentioned before,” Mircea continued, after a pause, “the invasion faces several hurdles, with the second no less challenging than the first.” The mountain range flickered out to be replaced by the head of a man. One with pale gray eyes, white blond hair, and a manic expression.
I suddenly sat up a little straighter in my chair.
The face wasn’t all that remarkable, except that it looked like it should be snapping at the air. There was something feral about it, inhuman, but not in the way that weres were. There were a few of them here now, clustered together at the far end of the table, around a tall, dark-haired man with a handsome face and inhumanly bright blue eyes. When he moved, there was almost a lag effect sometimes, like a double exposure, as if two people changed position at once with a tiny pause in between.
I’d seen that occasionally with his kind before, which was how I’d spotted him, but the effect had never been so pronounced. I wondered if that meant that he was stronger or weaker than the others. Either way, he was a bit uncanny, although there was nothing of the beast about him. And even in his altered state, I doubted he’d look anything like that.
I stared at the slowly rotating head and remembered the last time I’d seen it: on a dark mage trying to recruit me in a casino parking lot to what I now knew was the Black Circle.
Unless you were talking to the covens, the Silver Circle was usually viewed as the good guys. They kept order in the supernatural community, served as its police, fought its wars, and held people, including themselves, to some kind of standard. As usual with police forces, it was a thankless task, and people frequ
ently complained about this law or that restriction. But there was little doubt that there would have been chaos without them.
The Black Circle, on the other hand, was that chaos.
A group of powerful dark mages, they were the elite of the magical underworld. There were always small-time operators, planning heists or running scams, but the big jobs were almost always Black Circle ops. They probably would have been a far greater threat even than they were, but most suffered from a major addiction—to magic, which they stole to increase their abilities and to get really, really high.
And, fortunately, really, really high people don’t plan too well.
Unfortunately, the leadership seemed to be in better shape. Although how much better, nobody knew, because nobody knew much about them. On the outer edges of the Circle were groups of mages who acted almost independently, running their own criminal enterprises. They paid a percentage to their contacts on the next layer inward, who in turn provided them with tips on jobs. But they rarely knew anybody but their contact, who rarely knew anybody but his contact, and so on.
Each layer in seemed to have a better quality of mage who ran progressively bigger and better cons, as well as reaping rewards from mentoring their contacts on the outer edges. Only those who overperformed in a major way were able to move up—or inward, in this case—and get closer to the center of the organization. My father had been one of them.
He’d scammed the scammers, promising to get his ghosts to spy on the Silver Circle for them, something they’d had little success with themselves. He told them that he was creating a ghost army and needed magic to feed it—a lot of magic—only to take it and run when they started getting suspicious. But few people ever got close enough to try something like that, including the Silver Circle itself, which regularly busted dark mages, but had never managed to reach the core.
“This is the dark mage currently known as Jonathan,” Mircea said. “Some of you have heard of him; others have not. To sum him up, he is a leading member of the Black Circle who has been assisting our enemies in the war. However, he has been a problem for much longer than the current conflict.”
He looked pointedly down the table, where an elderly man rose to his feet.
He was wearing a slightly old-fashioned, dark gray, three-piece suit, nothing special, and although I couldn’t see his feet, I was pretty sure he had on the same pair of scuffed brown brogues he always wore, because they were comfy and he could give a crap about fashion. The only impressive thing about him was the halo of white hair, which was the male version of the coven leader’s mane I’d seen back in the witches’ enclave. It wasn’t floor-length, but it was electric, wafting about his head as if a sea anemone had decided to perch there for a moment.
He looked like an irascible professor, or maybe a slightly loony librarian.
He wasn’t.
He was Jonas Marsden, acting head of the Silver Circle. And as leader of the largest and most powerful magical organization on earth, he got respect. It was subtle; thanks to their mental abilities, vamps didn’t need to disrupt a meeting to chat. But you could tell when they were in someone else’s head: their eyes got a little distant, and their faces tended to sag.
There weren’t any saggers in the room right now.
“As Lord Mircea has said, the necromancer goes by Jonathan,” Jonas said. “Although whether that is his true name or not is a matter of some debate, as are most other facts about him. We don’t know how old he is, where he originally came from, or what training he received. We do know that we have been hunting him for over four hundred years.”
And, okay, that got an audible reaction.
And then Marlowe made it worse.
“He’s far older than that. We have it on good authority that he was alive in the twelfth century, making him at least nine hundred—”
“That’s impossible! He’s human!” That was Ismitta again, who’d also resumed her seat at some point, but who was now leaning across the table.
“He is using magic to extend his life,” Jonas told her. “Something that occurs naturally for mages, who feed off food as ordinary humans do, but also off the magic our bodies process from the world around us. We are essentially fleshy talismans, which is why we live roughly twice as long as other humans, and some more than that, depending on how powerful they are—”
