“Caedmon told me about Alfhild, the ancient fey princess with a rep for boiling people alive, but I didn’t think much about it,” I said. “But that’s where our current problem started, all those years ago in Faerie, when she was betrayed and murdered—as she saw it. She was furious and vowed revenge, and that kind of anger carries over. Some of the guards told me that fey who claim to remember substantial bits of their past lives are usually either very powerful or very troubled, and Alfhild was both.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Louis-Cesare murmured. Thanks to Marlowe’s theatrics, he’d heard only bits and pieces of this himself.
“Anyway, she was exiled from Faerie and executed on Earth, which should have been the end of it. Except she was fey, and they reincarnate. But since she was on Earth now, she came back as a human, because that seems to be the way it works. The fey soul latches on to the energy of the planet to help it form its next body, and this is a human world. But she was still fey underneath, and kept being tormented with weird flashes of memory she didn’t understand.”
And with that, at least, I could sympathize.
“That’s why she sought out a vampire,” one of Marlowe’s guys piped up. “To give her time to figure things . . . uh . . . out.”
He trailed off when his master glared at him.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “Or maybe she just got bit randomly. Either way, a longer life allowed her to put the pieces together. Enough to find her grave and that damned book, which told her the rest.”
“Why would the fey leave such a thing?” Louis-Cesare asked. “If they knew there was even a chance she’d remember—”
“The guards said that’s probably why it was left: as a warning, in case she recalled anything substantial, and as a reason for her exile. It was supposed to promote repentance, by reminding her of her crimes—”
“Yes, that works so well with homicidal maniacs!” Marlowe snarled. “They may as well have given her a primer! Like leaving young Hitler Mein Kampf!”
I didn’t point out that he had no reason to be angry, since he wasn’t supposed to be buying any of this, because I was just glad that he actually seemed to be listening this time. And because I agreed with him. “They should have destroyed her when they had the chance.”
“Did anyone say why they didn’t?” Louis-Cesare asked.
“No. None of Claire’s guards were alive then. But they said it probably had something to do with the old religion. That her judges would have felt like they were killing off part of the soul of Faerie if they completely obliterated her. And that maybe they thought she’d get it right, the next time.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he murmured.
Marlowe didn’t seem any happier. His brows had lowered and his eyes had darkened. Several of the vamps around me fidgeted, feeling their master’s growing displeasure in their own bodies. This close, they functioned almost like a single organism, to the point that, when Marlowe made another of those angry little noises, several of his boys did, too.
Sounded like a bunch of asthmatic cats in here, I thought.
But he wasn’t ready to officially board the crazy train yet.
“None of this proves that she’s still around today,” he pointed out. “Even if she did become a vampire, and eventually the praetor, as you claim, the consul killed her five hundred years ago!”
“The consul killed her physically,” I corrected. “In fury after Mircea explained who had been murdering all those vampires. What she didn’t know was that she was dealing with the reincarnated soul of an ancient fey princess in a vampire body—”
“Understandable,” Louis-Cesare murmured dryly.
“—and so didn’t realize that her nemesis remained, just in an altered form. Because Alfhild was a vargr—”
“Based on?” Marlowe cut in.
I looked at him incredulously. “Did you hear anything I said about what happened here the other night? The manlikans might have been Efridis, trying to get Aiden out of the house, but the vargr attack definitely wasn’t. The person doing that didn’t know she already had a potential avatar in the room, and couldn’t have cared less about Aiden. She went straight for the troll kid, the only living witness to what Alfhild has been doing—”
“That doesn’t prove anything. There are other vargrs—”
“The plural is vargar, and I wasn’t finished yet! In Faerie, she was known as Alfhild Ambh?fei: Alfhild the Two-Headed. It’s a common nickname for vargar. It’s probably how she escaped from that tower the fey imprisoned her in, and it’s definitely how she got away from the consul. Her body died, but she threw her consciousness into her secretary—”
“Who just let her ride him around for the last five hundred years?” Marlowe scoffed.
“He didn’t have a choice! Something happened to him that night, when Mircea and the witch stole the shield. I called Mircea while we were waiting for you, and he filled me in on some of the things they figured out afterward.
“He thinks Alfhild intended to put all the power she was stealing from those vampires into a single receptacle, knowing that the consul would call up a sandstorm during their duel. As soon as the view of the fight was obscured, the praetor would hit her with all that power, all at once, crippling her. Then finish her off on her own, making it look like she’d won the duel fair and square.
“It was a good plan—if she’d been faster. But she knew how powerful the consul was, and wanted to make sure she overpowered her, so she was still collecting bones when Mircea and the witch discovered her plans and made their escape. She hadn’t even had the receptacle made yet, but suddenly she was hours, perhaps only minutes away from an enraged consul if she couldn’t find them—”
“She put the power in the shield, didn’t she?” Louis-Cesare asked. He hadn’t heard this part before—I hadn’t gotten this far last time—but no one’s ever accused him of being slow.
I nodded. “It was the only thing she had on hand strong enough to hold that much energy, because it was designed for traveling through the ley lines. So she had one of her mages spell it to absorb the power in the bones. I don’t know if she planned to stay and fight, or run and try her luck later, but either way, she wanted her stolen power with her.”
“But Mircea stole it first.” Marlowe suddenly grinned, showing fang. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen him smile before, but it was . . . disturbing.
I decided I liked him angry better.
“Uh, yeah. But not before the shield almost killed her avatar. Mircea said he thought she must have been using her secretary to oversee the operation in Venice, based on the height of the ‘fisherman’ he’d been chasing. The praetor was paranoid, and didn’t trust anyone besides herself to manage things. So she rode her secretary around to have her cake and eat it, too, and to have plausible deniability if anyone found out what was going on.”
“That is why he received favored status among her servants,” Louis-Cesare said. “I did wonder what a non-master was doing in such an important place in her household.”
“But he paid for it that night. He tried to use the altered shield to suck the life out of Mircea, but instead the witch turned it back on him. He didn’t die, but Alfhild was left with a crippled avatar, or else we’d have heard from her before this.”
“That’s absurd,” Marlowe said, no longer smiling. “Who the hell would choose to live like that? With two consciousnesses in a single body!”
I stared at him, wondering if it had been deliberate. But I guess not. Because he flushed suddenly, as realization hit. And, for once, Marlowe actually looked flustered.
“I . . . didn’t mean—”
“Someone who wanted revenge badly enough,” I cut him off, because we didn’t have time for this. “Reincarnation ran the risk of her not remembering who she was next time. We don’t know how many human lifetimes she lived before one was long enough to jog her memory. What if it never happened again? As for the secretary, he was weak, but any other body she chose would have fought her, whereas he probably didn’t have the strength. Or maybe he didn’t want to. Alfhild knew how the vampire world worked, and could protect him. In his weakened state, who else would have bothered?”