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“The whole trying-to-kill-you thing? If it helps, it wasn’t me.”
“I’m . . . pretty sure it was you.”
The grin was back, just a flash this time. “The other me. There’s two of us in here. It gets crowded sometimes.”
“Uh-huh.” Mircea had said something of the kind, although I hadn’t understood it any better then. It sounded like she had a split personality, with the split being between a mad dog killer and a raging psychopath.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Hold him for me. He’ll come for you, and likely soon. He’s getting desperate. He used to pop up every two or three decades, but lately, it’s like he’s everywhere. He was in New York a month ago, masterminding an attack on the senate’s HQ, then in Paris a couple weeks after that, then in Hong Kong just a few days ago. He’s probably working on another plan right now, desperate to get the gods back and gain the immortality or whatever the fuck they’ve offered him. But he’s also running out of gas.”
“And I’m the gas station.”
She nodded. “Now you’re getting it. He thought he hit the lottery when he took Louis-Caesar, but the power of a god is even better. The Pythian power would sustain him for, well, maybe ever. With it to draw from, he might not even need the gods.”
“Then why hasn’t he been after it before?” I demanded, before remembering—he had been. Before I became Pythia in full, when I was just in the running, Jonathan had found me in that parking lot.
Thankfully, so had a lot of other people. A lot of very scary people. He’d been forced to flee, and I hadn’t seen him since, maybe because, once I became Pythia, I was a much less easy target. But in the street that night . . .
What had been the plan? I wondered. Kidnap me like Louis-Cesare? Wait to see if the power came to me, then drain me every day, almost to death, sucking down as much of it as possible until my body couldn’t channel any more?
A shudder went through me, and Dorina saw it.
“I get it,” she said, and her voice this time was softer, sweeter. And the face was just a face—lovely still, but with none of the uncanniness of a minute ago. I couldn’t even see her fangs. Just dark eyes full of sympathy for another human being.
I wasn’t the only one with good camouflage.
“What do you get?” I asked harshly.
“Jonathan legitimately scares even me, and I don’t scare easy.”
“Then why do you want him? Is the kill so important to you?”
“It’s not about me. I’d gut him and be done with it, or watch you dust him
to powder—nice, by the way. As long as he’s dead, I wouldn’t care.”
“Then what—” I began, and then I got it, too. I remembered her passion after Louis-Cesare’s impromptu confession, and understood.
“Yeah, we are,” she said, answering my unasked question, because she was as quick as her father. She held out a hand. “He got me this. I told him I can’t wear it most of the time. In battle, a ring can catch the edge of a knife, and then there goes a finger. But I wear it when I can.” She shrugged. “It makes him happy.”
I took a look at her ring, and then whistled. I couldn’t help it. “Dear God.”
She dimpled at me. The feared creature of legend dimpled. “Nice, huh?”
“It’s gorgeous,” I said honestly. Because it was. It had two stones, a huge diamond and a gorgeous cabochon sapphire that looked like it should be the eye in a pagan statue.
A really big pagan statue.
“It’s called a toi et moi ring,” she told me happily. “You and me, because of the two stones, you know?”
I nodded.
She grinned. “He was worried that I’d be disappointed that it wasn’t a bigger diamond, but I like colored stones—”
Any bigger, I thought, and how would you lift your hand?
“—and diamonds are only a recent thing for weddings anyway.”
