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“You don’t understand,” Marlowe was saying now. “I can’t simply replace him. His gift—”
“Is his own, to do with as he likes!”
“It damned well isn’t!” The dark eyes flashed. “I need—”
He was cut off, to my surprise, by the consul. She’d been looking with distaste at our latest hors d’oeuvres selection, which appeared to be Vienna sausages on a stick with a cheese cube, because I guess we’d reached back-of-the-pantry status. But at that she looked up.
“The Pythia saved your life recently, when your temper got the better of you. The vampire is hers.”
She walked off without another word, probably because Caedmon had just come in with a huge coterie of glittering fey, who looked far more interesting than us and our lousy appetizers. Leaving Marlowe behind—for a second. Until he stormed off after her.
“Thanks,” I told the real Emilio, who was still holding the tray. “We’re good.”
“I think we have some pimento cheese left,” he offered.
“Yeah, and there’s some old olive loaf in the back of the fridge. Maybe Tami could do something with that.”
He shook his head. “That went out twenty minutes ago.”
He moved off.
Leaving me alone with Mircea, and the small device he pulled out of his coat. It looked like a cellphone, discreet and easily misjudged. Like the man holding it.
Strangely colored fingers of fire leapt for the heavens, glittering overhead. Mircea and I, on the other hand, were swathed in shadow, on the edge of the forest. Or at least, this version of us was. The other was us up ahead, on the rise of ground behind the consul’s house, the burning couture turning our bodies into silhouettes against the flames.
“You could kill him,” I said, watching the dragon-coated mage climb the hill at the consul’s side.
We’d flashed back to the night Jonathan had come here in order to spy on the senate’s plans and to set me up. Because if he couldn’t drain Faerie as he’d hoped, he’d drain me instead. Only he couldn’t if somebody drained him first.
Like the master vampire at my side.
“You could do it right now,” I repeated, even though I knew he wouldn’t. And that it would disrupt the damned timeline anyway, so we couldn’t. But a girl could dream.
The bastard had hurt so many people, disrupted so many lives. And that was just by loosing Jo on us! God knew what he was planning next.
But Mircea had another idea.
“My daughter will kill him, when this is done,” he murmured. “You have my word on that. But in the meantime, he can be . . . useful.”
“And the golems he made? You’re just going to leave them there?”
“We know where they are, but our enemies do not know that we know. They will stay on patrol, day after day, waiting for an army that will never come.”
“But we could go back, destroy that book at least—”
“And prevent them from ever being made, yes. But the names are still out there, known to some in the demon lands. Harder to assemble that way, but still possible. And our enemies now have demon allies.”
I remembered the little thing in the tank in Adra’s office. Kulullû, Kulullû was all it had been able to say. But that would be enough.
We watched the foursome talk, and then the mage walk away, back toward the house. Mircea started after him, but I caught his arm. “If he notices—”
“He won’t.”
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