“Yeah, but even that. No one knows how to fight that. You’re something out of legend, while the rest of us—”
She suddenly turned around and walked away.
I turned back to see Radu looking at me disapprovingly.
“What?”
“You could have been nicer.”
“Nicer? She’s been trying to kill me all week!”
Radu tutted. “She isn’t powerful enough to kill you—”
“She brought a friend!”
Radu glanced at Trevor, and rolled his eyes. “She simply thinks she has to try, that’s all. They brainwash them into believing that there’s nothing else to do with eternity than rule over everybody else. Then they finally make it, and wonder why they hate it.”
“Are you trying to tell me I won’t like being on the Senate?”
“You’re already on it. How are you finding it?”
“A pain in the ass.”
“Ah. The usual, then.”
“Is that how Geminus found it?”
Most people would have asked why I wanted to know, but not Radu. “Geminus thought he was Caesar reborn, and we were merely his court.”
“Well, he was the oldest on the Senate, except for the consul.”
“A two-thousand-year-old fool is still a fool.”
“And his family?”
“He trained them to believe that they were meant to rule over us lesser creatures. And yet, he never bothered with any sort of contingency plan for when he died. One had the impression that his plan was to live forever. When that failed”—he shrugged—“it left them scattered, leaderless, and at the mercy of us lesser creatures.”
I remembered Ray saying that at the bottom, you allied with whoever would help you survive, no matter who it was. Who had they allied with? And where the hell did they fit in?
Usually, I had to try to roust suspects out of the woodwork, but this puzzle was the opposite: too many pieces, and none of them seemed to connect. There were smugglers and slavers and smugglers who were also slavers. There were trolls battling the bad guys and trolls who might be the bad guys. There was a vargr who might or might not be a queen of the Light Fey, or possibly an operative sent by her husband to make it look like she was guilty. Or possibly someone else altogether, because who the hell knew?
After four days, I didn’t know much more than I had when I started.
I didn’t even know what the hell they were smuggling!
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Marlowe being thrown into the middle of a very nice baby grand.
“Oh, really,” Radu said in annoyance. “I was going to keep that.”
“Seriously, he didn’t do anything,” I called to Louis-Cesare, who was now pounding out a sonata courtesy of Marlowe’s head. “And we’re broken up anyway. This is childish.”
Louis-Cesare belted Marlowe, and watched him go down. “This isn’t about us!”
“Then what is it about?”
Marlowe staggered back to his feet, and Louis-Cesare hit him again. “I don’t like his face.”
“Oh, that’s mature.”
Purple Hair wandered back over with a drink in her hand, while a dozen of Marlowe’s guys jumped Louis-Cesare, I guess to give the boss a moment. “You broke up?”
“Yeah.”
We watched Louis-Cesare throw off the guards, grab Marlowe, and launch him at a marble column hard enough to crack it. He’d lost his nice blue suit coat, and his shirt was torn, showing off the kind of physique a vampire doesn’t need, but which is still . . . decorative. And his auburn hair had escaped its usual clip, falling around those broad shoulders like he was about to pose for a romance novel cover.
Fabio wished he’d looked that good.
Purple Hair must have thought so, too, because her “Why?” was tinged with disbelief.
“It’s a long story.”
“Then you wouldn’t care if I—”
“I’ll rip your throat out.”
Louis-Cesare, who had been pounding Marlowe into the parquet, looked up. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
And then Marlowe’s guys re-formed and charged, all at once.
I looked back at Radu. “Why are you dressed like that? Are you staying here now?”
He nodded. “It has everything I need. Several floors, a nice amount of space for entertaining, and a good number of servants’ rooms. Of course, it needs work.”
He frowned around at the gold and white extravagance, the gleaming parquet floor, and the glittering chandeliers, all three of them.
“You bought it?”
“Yes. I’m staying with Mircea while I get it sorted, but Kit was having a party—”
“So you came up here.”
He nodded.
“And Horatiu?”
“We followed him,” Purple Hair said. “He was serving hors d’oeuvres, but he got lost.”
That sounded about right.
“But then he started screaming his head off for no reason,” she said. Because it would never occur to her that someone like Horatiu could pick up on her intentions. But he had an echo of Mircea’s gifts, like everyone in the clan, and while he might be weak as a kitten, he was brave as a lion. My fist clenched. If they’d hurt him— “He was going to raise the whole house!” Purple Hair said.
“So you had to shut him up.”
“Trevor said if he was going to scream bloody murder, we should oblige him—”
I felt my fangs drop.
She saw and her lip curled. “I don’t make war on . . . whatever he is. He’s fine. He’s tied up with that big blond in the bedroom.”
I assumed she was talking about Gunther the Gorgeous, Radu’s “bodyguard,” a giant with the suntan and six-pack of a professional athlete—maybe a surfer, because the shag was a little long. But he was nobody’s fool. And despite the fact that Radu hadn’t hired him for that reason, he was actually good at his job.
Bet he was pissed right about now.
“I hope you did a better job on Gunther than on Radu,” I told her.
“Didn’t have to. He was already tied up when we got here.”
I looked at ’Du.
He shrugged. “It was his turn.”
I sighed.
“Why didn’t you just call for help?” Radu had Mircea’s gifts to a far greater extent than Horatiu. He could have had half the clan here in a few minutes.
“I tried. She blocked me.”
I looked at Purple Hair with new respect. “Impressive.”
Her lips twisted. “Well. Not so much now.”
And then we had to duck because a shirtless guy flew overhead, spinning like a Frisbee.
I looked after him for a moment, confused, because he was one of Marlowe’s boys, and they’d all been fully clothed when they came in. Then I spied Marlowe himself, throwing a settee at Louis-Cesare, while wearing a new white dress shirt. Louis-Cesare and the sofa went sailing backward, and Marlowe snapped his fingers at another of his guys, who was trying to get out of a pair of trousers.
He was getting dressed on the fly, I realized.
“He’s too tall,” I yelled, and saw Marlowe’s head jerk up.
“The trousers.” I pointed. “They’re gonna be too—”
The sofa came whipping back across the room, taking out Marlowe and his guy.
“Never mind.”
“It will be good to get back to normal,” Radu was saying, when I turned back around. “I’ve spent so much time going to and fro, from the consul’s to Louis-Cesare’s—you have no idea. It’s been so inconvenient.”
“The consul’s?” I felt my nose wrinkle. “Why would you want to go there?”
“It’s where my laboratory is—was, before her men dismantled it.” And, for the first time, I saw what looked like genuine anger. “I went in the other day to find my equipment in boxes, all jumbled up!”
“They just moved you out?”
“They carried in a bed while I stood there! Said it was for some ambassador or other.” He sniffed.
“Is that what all this is?” I asked, nodding at the boxes. “Lab stuff?”
“Oh, no. That arrived yesterday.” Perfectly arched brows drew together. “I wasn’t going to let the Senate’s brutes move a damned thing. Heaven only knows what shape I would have received it in!” He held out a familiar-looking orb. “This is what I’m meant to be experimenting on.”
I took it gingerly, because Radu was the Senate’s mad scientist, and had been known to work with some scary stuff.
But not this time.
I held the little orb in my hand, and decided that the universe was fucking with me.
“What do you think?” he asked, watching me with bright eyes.