AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Mircea did not offer me his, which was a pity, but I couldn’t have held it anyway. I finally sat back with the rest of my wine and regarded him through the golden glow of a serious food haze. He knew how to mellow me out.
The bastard.
“To what do I owe this bounty?” I finally asked, because eating had made me sleepy again, and I wanted my bed.
“It was the least we could do.”
I tried raising an eyebrow as Dorina had done, but both went up instead. I sighed. Mircea grinned; he seemed much more relaxed tonight for some reason.
“You may have saved the alliance this afternoon,” he explained. “I do not think that most of the people there realized that you were bluffing.”
“And they needed the lesson because?”
He sat back with his own wine. “It has been a struggle, getting the other senates in line,” he admitted. “There’s constant resistance, more than I anticipated—and I anticipated a good deal.”
“Why?” I looked at him in disbelief. “Don’t they get it? This isn’t a freaking drill! The senate’s been attacked—more than once—two gods have almost come back and stomped us out of existence, and now this Jonathan character nearly blew up a city! What does it take?”
“But they did not see any of that, Cassie. Well, except for the assault on this senate a month ago. An assault during which they sat by—quite literally in some cases—while we fought, not willing to risk their people in what might be a charade.”
“A charade? But the gods—Apollo, Ares—”
“You dealt with the gods,” he reminded me. “In one case, far out in the desert; and in the other, far back in time. No one saw you, at least no one whose word they would take. To many, this looks less like a war and more like a power grab on behalf of the consul.”
“They can’t honestly believe that!” I said, and then I thought of the covens. If they believed something similar, then their attack made a lot more sense. Maybe they weren’t willing to die in a worldwide conflagration just to spite the Circle. They just didn’t believe there was going to be one.
“Oh, they can,” Mircea assured me. “Some suppose this to be a made-up war—or a greatly exaggerated one—meant to put the consul in power. To create a single vampire government for the first time in history, with her at its head. That is what Parendra suspects, and he is not alone.”
“That’s why you went through all that today,” I realized. “Telling them what Jonathan has been up to. You were trying to scare them.”
Mircea sat forward suddenly. “I was trying to give them some concrete examples of the seriousness of the threat we face, something they could independently verify. They may not believe that ancient gods are trying to return, but vampire-killing bullets and crashing cities will destroy them just as easily. They must face reality.”
“And if they don’t?”
He sat back again and drank wine. “Then I am about to invade Faerie, something that has never been successfully done, with a divided army, a shaky alliance, and a consul who is possibly planning to murder me.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that it took a moment to register. “You noticed that.”
He smiled slightly, his lips redder than normal from the wine. “It is becoming less subtle by the day.”
“And I didn’t help,” I guessed. If she’d bought that little farce, then I looked powerful and like even more of a threat than before. If she didn’t—the more likely scenario, considering that she’d been there when I fell on my face—then I looked weak, which meant she might not have to worry so much about my wrath if she took out Mircea.
I honestly didn’t know what I was supposed to do!
“I never know what she thinks,” Mircea said, agreeing with me. “No one does; it’s part of the reason she’s stayed in power for so long. But you helped greatly with the alliance. The consul has had an apology from Parendra for misinterpreting the situation, and I have his men under my direct control for the first time—along with those of several other holdouts.”
I frowned around my fork. “But you just said he thinks this is a power grab.”
“Oh, he does. That was the most grudging apology I’ve ever heard.”
“Then why give it?”
Mircea looked at me, the dark eyes gleaming. “You, Cassie. The other consuls know you are on our side, and while some of them suspect me of manipulating you into supporting the consul’s power play, they aren’t sure. Pythian involvement introduces an element of doubt, and your power worries them. They had a demonstration of it the night the alliance was first signed, if you recall, and another tonight.”
I stared at him, hoping I was hearing wrong. “So I need to almost die every month to keep them in line?”
The eyebrow was back, along with a slight quirk of the lips. “Once every two months should suffice.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
