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“You said this couldn’t h
appen again!” he snarled. “You said another attack was impossible! You assured us—”
“And you assured me that you were going to leave the bully boys at home,” she said, her voice like a whip. “Yet here we are.” She gestured at the small army of tunic-clad men who had taken up positions around the conference room. They were facing out, not in, and had gone to one knee, probably to help stabilize themselves in the wind. But they were holding firm; the only thing moving was the tops of the glittering spears they had simultaneously slammed against the floor.
She was right; they weren’t secretaries.
“And now I know why you demanded it! To leave me open to challenge!”
“Damn it, man! That wasn’t planned,” Marlowe breathed, but those few words seemed to enrage Parendra. He turned on the chief spy, threw him off, and struck him across the face before anyone could intervene. Worse, it was a contemptuous, backhanded slap, the kind you’d give a slave—or a dog.
And the next second, Marlowe was face-to-face and toe-to-toe with a consul, only, judging from his expression, I wasn’t sure he remembered that.
I felt my stomach fall, like gravity had just given out. Because a challenge, once given and accepted, couldn’t be rescinded. And while it was at least possible that Mircea, a master mentalist, could take Parendra, I had serious doubts about Marlowe.
And it looked like Mircea agreed with me.
“Kit,” he said harshly. “Step back.”
Kit did not step back. And there was an expression in his eyes that—well, I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t rage, it wasn’t hysteria, and it sure as hell wasn’t fear. But if he’d been looking at me like that, I’d have probably passed out.
Even Parendra looked slightly taken aback, as if he hadn’t expected that response, either. Or maybe he’d suddenly remembered that he was surrounded by a consul, two senators, and a Pythia. But to give the man his due, he didn’t back down.
Unfortunately, neither did Marlowe.
“Hold,” the consul said quickly, and Marlowe held—on to the front of Parendra’s tunic, which he’d just grabbed a fistful of.
The surprise in Parendra’s eyes abruptly changed to something else.
“I see now why they call you her hound,” he told Marlowe. “Be a good dog and step back, would you? Or I may have to slap you again.”
And then something happened too fast for me to see, but Mircea was somehow hanging off one of Kit’s arms and the consul’s hand was around his other wrist—the one with a stake in it. But she wasn’t looking at her heaving Child, who was, okay, yeah, absolutely going to kill Parendra if he could. She was looking at me.
“Send him out!”
I blinked at her. The whole thing had been a little quick for me. “Send him . . . where?”
“Anywhere!”
I sent him out. It was tricky without sending her and Mircea along, too, since they were still holding on to him. But I managed, more or less. The stake—a weird thing that I guess doubled as a knife, since it had a metal tip on the wooden shaft—stayed behind, quivering out of the floor where it had landed when Marlowe disappeared, in a bit of mortar between two tiles. I watched it vibrate while the three remaining vamps stared at each other in that peculiar way that meant they were mentally talking—or yelling.
For once, I didn’t care. It usually annoyed the hell out of me when they did that, which was the same level of rudeness as people speaking a foreign language in front of someone who doesn’t understand it. But right now? Yeah, it was fine.
What wasn’t fine was this . . . whatever this was. And I didn’t just mean the storm, which, if it planned to kill us, was taking its own sweet time. But it was a good reflection of our chaotic group of “allies,” every one of which seemed to distrust the other, and none of whom were working together.
I was finally understanding why Mircea had felt it necessary to take that stand today. But it hadn’t worked, and I frankly didn’t know what the hell would. But we couldn’t go into Faerie like this!
“Liar!” Parendra said suddenly, making me jump. “It’s not enough to have the wartime senate under your control; you’ll have our thrones, too! If you think you’re going to get away with this—”
“If we were trying to get away with anything, we wouldn’t be destroying our own court!” Mircea snapped.
“Is it?” the consul demanded sharply, staying on point despite the colleague raging in her face.
“No, it’s only in here,” Mircea said, his eyes going vague, because I guessed he was taking over Marlowe’s job. “So far, there are no portals opening anywhere else.”
“If they send through a bomb, they don’t need to be anywhere else,” I pointed out.
“A bomb would be caught by our wards.”
