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“Then you did what you had to do, like I said.”
I shook my head. “It’s not what I did. It’s when.”
I wanted a drink, but I didn’t need another one. I wanted some Tears even more, but I only had one bottle left, and I didn’t want to waste it. Besides, Jonas was going to want to know why I needed more so soon, when he’d just delivered three bottles a week ago. I didn’t know what to tell him.
I leaned on my knees and rested my cheeks on my hands. I tried to avoid that pose because it made me look like a kid, pushing my already less-than-defined cheeks into cherub territory. But right then, I didn’t care.
“You’ve been putting it off for weeks,” Marco pointed out. “It had to be done sooner or later. Why not now?”
“Because I didn’t do it because it needed to be done. I did it . . .” I stopped, wondering if I wanted to admit it, even to Marco. He never judged me. I guess in a couple millennia you’ve seen it all, and I didn’t think I’d ever managed to truly shock him.
I wondered if I might now.
“I did it because I wanted to make a point to Mircea,” I finally said. “I wanted something he’d remember. I used her death as . . . as a kind of lesson. I needed him to understand . . . something . . . and I didn’t know how else to get the point across. I was scared and I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I knew what I was doing. Do you understand? I knew and I did it anyway!”
I looked up finally, but I couldn’t see his face. The cigar was resting on the ashtray, sending a tiny trail of smoke skyward, and without its glow, his face was only shadow. But I thought I caught a liquid gleam in the approximate place of his eyes.
He didn’t say anything, though.
“Who does that?” I blurted out, after a moment, because maybe I had shocked him. I wouldn’t blame him; I’d shocked myself.
Marco picked up his cigar again and took a long draw. But the face was the same as always: big, bluff, and calm. He didn’t look shocked—or repulsed or disgusted. He just looked like Marco.
He sounded like him, too, when he said: “Me.”
“What?”
“Or Mircea. Or Marlowe—especially Marlowe. Or the consul, or any master, for that matter. We’d have all done the same.”
“I’m not a vampire!”
“I didn’t say a vampire. I said a master. You’ve been acting like one more and more lately; it’s good to see.”
“Good?” I stared at him, and some of what I was feeling must have shown on my face, because he frowned slightly.
“You know how we are, Cassie. We push and push—it’s in the culture, but more than that, it’s in our nature. We’re constantly jockeying for position, seeing who’s top dog, and it’s not always the bigger dog. Sometimes it’s about who is willing to step up, to go toe-to-toe, to push back. To prove who’s a leader and who’s a follower. And it’s not always who you’d think.”
The big head fell back; this time, it was his turn to look at the stars. “You know, when I first met you, I gave you some bad advice.”
“What?” I frowned, because the advice I’d gotten from Marco had kept me sane, more often than not.
“Not intentionally,” he said. “I thought I was doing you a favor, telling you like it is, helping you fit in to the nice little servant’s position I assumed was to be yours. You were Mircea’s woman—that’s how you were first introduced to me, and that’s how I thought of you. This whole Pythia thing.” He shrugged. “I didn’t understand it. And when I did think about it, I just thought: good. Another weapon in the family arsenal.”
“I’m not a weapon,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself because it was cold. And because it was a thought I’d had more than once myself.
“No, you’re not,” he agreed. “A weapon is a tool somebody else uses, with a power under his control. You’re not a weapon, you’re a Pythia, and your power is your own—”
I laughed, a bitter little burst. I couldn’t help it. And then I saw Marco’s face. “I don’t have power,” I told him. “Not enough, anyway.”
“Nobody feels like they got enough these days. But there’s lots of types of power, and lots of types of strength. That advice I gave you was that everybody serves somebody—best to realize it early and get in line. But I was wrong. There are leaders in our world, and you’re ramping up to be one of them. I think a lot of people realized that today. You’ve started pushing back, and while they may not like it, they respect it.”
“And if I don’t respect myself?” I burst out. “When I hate myself because I did something tonight that was exactly what Tony would have done? Things started getting out of hand at court, and his answer was always the same: somebody has to bleed, somebody has to die—”
“That’s enough!”
It wasn’t loud, but it was sharp enough to knock my head back. I blinked at Marco in confusion. Even more so because he was sitting up again, and he looked pissed. He suddenly looked like the centurion he’d once been.
“You’re nothing like that fat piece of shit, and I don’t want to hear that from you ever again, do you understand?”
