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“Wasn’t that considered an insult?” I asked, frowning. “To send a baby vamp—”
“Normally, yes, but Roberto was known for his temper. ‘Kill the messenger’ wasn’t merely a euphemism with him.”
I winced.
“As a result, people had become accustomed to sending messages through . . . expendable sources. Roberto’s people therefore thought nothing of the powerless messenger, but the fact that he was so powerless made them careless. They checked him for weapons, but it never once occurred to them that he might be one himself.”
“But . . . he wasn’t, right?” I said, confused again. “To a human, a baby vamp would be a problem. But to a room full of masters—”
“Ah, but that was the point,” Mircea said, his eyes gleaming. He enjoyed telling a story, and he was good at it. “A strong master vampire would never have been allowed in that room. It was so well protected that even a squad of masters had failed at an assault. But the baby vampire was ushered right in.”
“But he couldn’t do anything!”
“That’s what everyone thought. But some time before this, one of Roberto’s enemies had found himself in a quarrel with a talented mage. He ended up Changing the man in revenge, thinking that it would be amusing to have the once haughty mage running his errands and filling his cup for the next few centuries. But instead, shortly after rising and realizing what had happened to him, the furious former mage threw a spell—with all the magic left in his body from before his death—and incinerated his foe. The same tactic was used by the conspirators to kill Roberto.”
“But the baby vamp couldn’t throw a spell!” I said, wondering what I was missing. “No vamp can! And he wasn’t a mage anymore—”
“But he wasn’t truly a vampire yet, either.” Mircea cocked his head. “Have you ever wondered why baby vampires are kept so close to home, and watched so carefully? Indeed, why they are called ‘babies’ at all?”
“They’re young. And they stumble around, running into things, and looking at you weird because their eyesight keeps telescoping in and out,” I said, thinking of some of the poor bastards at Tony’s.
“Yes. Their new vampire eyesight doesn’t work properly because it isn’t fully developed yet,” Mircea said. “And neither are they. They need time to mature.”
“But they’re dead—”
“Yes, which rather puts paid to human development. But not to our kind. Vampires continue to change over most of our lives. Becoming stronger, gaining more powers—including master powers, if the process continues long enough.”
“I guess,” I said. “But if baby vamps can throw spells, I don’t see why adult ones can’t. If it’s just a lack of magic, they could go buy some—or steal it, like the dark mages do.”
“It isn’t merely that,” Mircea replied. “They run out of leftover magic very soon, of course, but the bigger issue is that they lose their ability to channel it. The more they mature as vampires, the less they resemble their former selves, until they cannot manipulate it any more than non-magical humans can. But that process takes a little time, a fact that the vampires exploited to kill Roberto.”
“Okay.” I guessed I could see that. “But I don’t see what any of this has to do with the Lover’s Knot spell. Or what that has to do with us.”
Mircea got up to get a refill. He offered me one, but I declined. I had to shift back tonight, and I didn’t want to end up stuck somewhere out in the desert because I couldn’t see straight.
Or worse, be spliced halfway through a wall.
“You could always stay the night,” Mircea told me casually.
“You could always stop reading my mind, before I get pissed off and leave.”
He leaned against the edge of the desk, a little too close for comfort, and drank whiskey at me. “You’re a hard woman, Cassie Palmer.”
I wished. Like I wished I didn’t notice the fondness in his eyes, or the way they crinkled up at the corners when he smiled. Or the strong throat revealed by the open collar of his shirt. Or the way the muscles in his thigh bulged under the fine fabric of his trousers when he rested it against the side of the desk.
Or a hundred other things I wasn’t cataloging, because none of them had anything to do with me anymore!
“Where is he, by the way?” Mircea asked abruptly.
“What?”
“This war mage of yours. Pritkin, as he calls himself now. Shouldn’t he be here?”
“Here?”
“Or in Las Vegas, at least?”
“I—” I paused, seriously confused now, because Pritkin had just spent an evening drinking, eating, and talking with my bodyguards. Hadn’t he? For a weird, mind-altering moment, I actually wondered if I’d imagined all that, because otherwise . . . something very weird was going on.
