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She needed him, I reminded myself, at least for now.
And when she didn’t?
I forced a neutral expression onto my face and resisted the urge to chew on my bottom lip. This was why I hated intrigue. Vamps lived for this stuff, but I always felt like I had too much to watch and not enough eyes. Tami needed staff to help with the kids, but I needed a damned spymaster, like the consul had in Marlowe. I also needed to talk to Adra again—preferably when I wasn’t half-asleep and scared out of my mind.
I needed to be sure those damned guards were here.
“Not Jonathan,” Mircea repeated, unaware of the drama. “He remains on the loose, which is why we need your help to locate him. We destroyed the flowers and equipped our army with shields—”
“I would damned well hope so!” someone said.
“—but there is every chance that more of those bullets exist. Even worse, it seems that they were merely a lure to bring our senators to Hong Kong on an investigation. The idea seems to have been to destroy the city and take as many of us as possible along with it.”
Mircea made no indication that I could see, but Jonathan’s disturbing face suddenly changed into an image of a city, sleek and modern and lying above something that looked like . . . well, that had to be a ley line vortex—a massive one. Most vortexes were tiny things, small puddles of power where a couple of lines crossed. But this one was being fed by dozens, maybe hundreds, some so large that they looked like major arteries leading into a pulsing heart of power.
I’d never seen anything like it.
The resulting sea of magical energy shone like a star, or like a supernova when the city suddenly tilted, going from horizontal to vertical like a sinking ship, upending and plowing right into the middle of it. The resulting explosion flashed bright enough to cause some of the people around the table to shield their eyes, including me. And when I looked again—
The city was gone. Just gone, without even any debris to mark where it had been. And pulsing outward from the boiling center of the vortex were rivers of magical power, thrown up by the crash and flooding the ley line system like a tsunami. One that was rapidly spreading outward—
“Oh God,” someone said, loud in the silence. While we watched three of the major centers of vampire power on earth be wiped away, like sandcastles when the tide comes in. Because the Chinese, European, and the South Asian senates were situated on the ley lines, for ease of transport.
Might want to do something about that, I thought dizzily.
“As you know,” Mircea said, his voice echoing in the stunned silence, “the city of Hong Kong is really two cities in one: the human and the supernatural, the latter of which exists in a phased state slightly outside this dimension, thanks to the magnificent engineering job done during the early years of her highness’s reign.”
Ming-de graciously inclined her head, making the tassels on her elaborate headdress swing slightly.
“This allows both cities to occupy essentially the same space at the same time, creating a truly supernatural enclave that does not have to rely on subterfuges, such as wards, to hide its existence. It can do this thanks to the enormous energy of the ley line sink that lies beneath it. However, this also left it vulnerable.
“Jonathan’s plan seems to have been to knock the supernatural city out of phase, which would send it crashing into the human one with enough force to rupture the ley line sink. All that energy would then overflow its bounds and be pushed through the ley line system, destroying three of our senates and as many members of this one as he had been able to lure into his trap.
“Fortunately, he was stopped in time, by the combined efforts of two operatives, one of ours and one of the Circle’s.”
“Just in time,” Jonas muttered, looking disturbed.
No shit, I thought, staring at the pulsing map and thinking of Pritkin. No wonder he hadn’t been around! He was supposed to be resting, and this was what he got up to?
As he would say, bloody hell.
“Efforts are being made to improve security on the pillars that support the phase, along with moving the vulnerable courts,” Mircea added. “But all of this is useless if we do not find Jonathan.”
The image changed again to a much less disturbing one of three white pills.
“We first became aware of him in the nineteen eighties. A mage in New Orleans stumbled across a formula that caused the majority of the magic in a person’s body to concentrate in a single area. He was selling it to locals who wished to appear more talented than they were in a particular skill set—to cheat on a test, or to win a fight. The pills couldn’t give them more magic, but by concentrating everything they had in one area, they could make them appear much more powerful than they actually were.”
“Something that would have been nice to know,” a mage said nastily, from down the table. “We had people trying to pass the Corps’ entrance exam, only to discover later that they were far less able than they seemed!”
Mircea ignored him.
“Jonathan, however, saw more potential in the product, realizing that vampires are magical creatures, too. We do not use magic, as the mages do, but we are magic. He utilized the mage’s formula to essentially quarantine our power, locking it away from us by redirecting it to a single ability—such as hearing—thus leaving the vampire in question vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable how?” a man in a turban demanded. Most people were still looking stunned from watching a city be vaporized, but he appeared to have recovered faster. He looked South Asian, with a handsome thirtyish face and a gold tunic draped in enough jewels to rival a prince.
Of course, maybe he was one.
“Vulnerable in that a vampire’s body, without its magic, is simply . . . a corpse,” Mircea said.
