“So he was the albino we saw at the fights,” Louis-Cesare said. “With Alfhild in control.”
I nodded. “And back to her old tricks. The parallels between the praetor and our current problem were everywhere: preying on the same type of vulnerable communities, using the same method with the bones, even having the same target. But they were separated by five hundred years, so whenever I noticed anything, I put it down to coincidence—”
“Which it probably is!” Marlowe said, resuming asshole mode and pissing me off.
“Damn it, Marlowe!” I slapped my hands down, sending flour billowing. “Do you think I like this? I’d prefer for you to be right—then the villain is in custody and all’s right with the world. Instead, I have to deal with the fact that I left a friend to be used by that . . . thing, and ignored every hint he gave me!”
“Friend?” Marlowe’s guy said, his forehead wrinkling. “I thought we were talking about some albino?”
I put a hand to my head, and contemplated having an aneurysm. “Okay,” I said. “One more time. Alfhild is a disembodied consciousness. She needs a body in order to get around and execute her revenge. At first, she took over her secretary, because he was loyal and didn’t fight her. But after he died at the burnt-out-building fight, she needed a replacement, and she needed one fast.”
“Because vargar can’t hold free flight,” Louis-Cesare said.
At least somebody had been paying attention, I thought gratefully.
“Yes. After her former avatar ended up under a burning truck, she had to find another, and she only had minutes before her consciousness scattered. And for an on-the-fly choice, James was a damned good one.”
Louis-Cesare agreed. “A Circle member tasked with combating the smuggling trade was the perfect way to find out how close we were getting to . . . whatever she is doing.”
Yeah, like ruining a good man’s life.
He must have seen something change on my face. “Your friend is a war mage,” he told me quietly. “He knew the risks.”
“He has two little girls,” I told him back. “And a father who relies on him more every year. He’s been talking about transferring to training duty, because he wants to watch his kids grow up. He—”
I cut off, because if I didn’t my voice was going to change, and I didn’t need my voice to change. I needed to kill something. Not someone, something. A thing that should have died millennia ago, but which instead was riding James around town like a sports car and doing God knew what kind of damage in the process!
Even if I got him back, I wasn’t sure I’d get him back.
“You were unconscious,” Louis-Cesare reminded me. “You didn’t even see your friend that night.”
“But I did a couple nights later at the warehouse, and I knew he was acting strange. James doesn’t know who Fra Filippo Lippi was, or swan around like Darth Vader, or threaten to send innocent people back to a war zone to die! And he was there that night, when that bitch lost her previous avatar. He told me so himself. Probably deliberately, like all those theatrics, because she didn’t know his mannerisms, but I did. He was trying to get my attention, hoping I’d start asking questions, but instead—”
Instead, I just left him there.
With her.
There was a brief silence, which of course was broken by Marlowe. “So, according to you, Alfhild is back and looking for revenge?”
“Not just according to me. Dorina recognized the albino as the praetor’s old secretary. Not at first—they were in the middle of a chase, and it had been five hundred years—but soon—”
“And started sending you memories because she thinks history is about to repeat itself?”
I nodded.
“How the hell does that work?” he demanded. “If Alfhild had won that fight in Venice, she’d have ruled the vampire world, or a sizeable portion of it. But now? If she exists at all, she’s a shadow, a phantom, an echo of what she once was. What can a shadow do?”
“Almost kill the consul?” Louis-Cesare said dryly.
“That was a one-off! Those damned weapons use life energy, not conventional magic. It led our wards to recognize them as people instead of arms—”
“People?” I asked.
Marlowe grimaced. “That’s the problem with wards. They only know to look for what they’ve been told is a threat, and nobody uses life energy for weapons—it’s too hard to come by! But while we figure out how to recalibrate, the consul is being well guarded.”
Louis-Cesare didn’t look reassured. “You may have tightened security, but you’ve highlighted another problem. We’re in New York City, one of the most densely populated areas in the country. If the weapons register as life energy, how are we supposed to find them?”
“Because we’ve been doing so great so far,” one of Marlowe’s guys muttered. It was the same one as before, with an impressive ’fro and a problem keeping his mouth shut.
But he wasn’t wrong.
He was talking about the great weapons hunt, which had started when the albino died and his fellow slavers lost no time raiding his warehouse. Literally no time—they were at it before the flames died down on the truck. They’d robbed him blind knowing that the Circle was busy at the burnt-out building, and that his people were trying to hunt down escaped slaves.
As a result, the overpowered weapons ended up in the hands of smugglers all over the city, which was where the “underworld war” came in. It was actually Alfhild raiding the raiders, trying to get her stuff back. And to do it before anybody figured out what they had.
That was why she’d been so pissed at Blue. Here she was, trying to keep things nice and quiet, when along comes a homicidal battle troll, drawing everybody’s attention. She’d managed to keep a lid on that through James, who had pulled rank to take control of the crime scenes and any weapons they contained, but she couldn’t watch everyone. So she’d tried to recruit me to pimp on the Senate’s investigation for her.
It was also why she’d showed me those weapons. So that, if I ran across any more, I wouldn’t think anything of them, just assume they were the same crap she’d already given me an explanation for. And meanwhile, maybe I’d hunt down Blue for her in exchange for Fin, because she had too many balls in the air and needed some help.
But she was already too late.
Because the Senate clashed with some of her guys that same night, when they both decided to raid the same smuggler. And found the mother lode of weapons he’d taken from the albino’s stock, without any idea what they actually were. He didn’t have time to find out before the Senate took them to Radu’s, where Alfhild’s people took them from us.
And now where were they?
“Call the mage,” Marlowe snapped. “Get a location.”
“She already did,” Louis-Cesare said. “His phone is off.”
“Ping him, then! We have contacts—”
“Which we’ve used. It’s not that simple.”
And no, it wasn’t. Cell phone tower records weren’t that reliable, despite what TV cop shows liked everyone to believe. In a rural setting, a single tower might service several hundred square miles, and even in New York City, where they clustered close together, you were still talking two or more. Not exactly a small area in a place as crowded as this one.
And that was assuming your call was routed to the closest tower. Which it often wasn’t. So all we really knew for sure was that James was still in the city.
Well, and one other thing.
“James was frothing at the mouth to get his hands on Blue,” I told Marlowe. “Probably because he kept drawing attention to the people who had those weapons—”
“So?”
“—so he gave me a two-day window to track him down, and it’s up tonight. Why two days? And, if he was expecting to hear from me, why not take the call?”
Marlowe frowned.
“Perhaps he retrieved all the weapons,” Mouthy said, “and no longer cares what the troll attacks.”
“Maybe. Or maybe whatever is happening, is happening tonight.”