I was raised in a Christian children’s home. Of course I knew a little about the history of the Church. I nodded and waffled a hand back and forth. “Nothing about how it affected Mithrans and witches.”
“Torquemada lived from 1420 to 1498,” Del said, “and he used the offices of the Church and European royal politics to take the lands and possessions of those deemed heretics by the Church. He tortured and killed uncounted numbers of people, and a great many of those who died were Jews, Muslims, witches, and vampires. From the beginning, he hated them all as being children of Satan, but after a time, his interests changed, and he began to drink blood from captive Mithrans. He began to search, not only for the heretics themselves, but for their objects of power. He played the witches and the vampires against one another, and, in a matter of years, the schism between the races grew wider, turning into outright enmity.”
“If the Europeans come here,” Leo said, his black eyes piercing me, “they will not be under my control. I will be under theirs. The media footage of my Enforcer fighting and defeating a demon, and killing a witch using a magical implement, reached them some time ago.”
I froze in my chair, putting it all together, how my life intersected with the history, the danger, and the future that was headed our way. I had killed a rogue witch who had summoned a demon with the blood diamond. Directed by the witch, who had long ago lost her mind in contact with the dark spirit, the demon had been killing humans in a bid to get to Leo Pellissier, whom the witch believed responsible for the death of her daughter. Even with the power of the magical artifact at her command, I had killed her and called an angel to defeat the demon. All caught on TV. Go, me. And now I had the blood diamond in a safe place. But the Europeans probably thought I had given the evil thing to Leo.
Leo gave me a regal nod as he watched me putting two and two together in my mind. “My enemies, and yours, know that many of the objects they have long sought are here, in my domain. They believe that the artifacts are in my hands, or, less likely but still possible, in yours.”
“Holy crap on a cracker,” I muttered. I had a number of magical trinkets, and Leo knew I had some of them. For reasons I didn’t understand, he hadn’t pressured me for them. Much. But maybe a battle was about to begin for them. I had some blood-iron discs made from pieces of the iron spike of Golgotha, vamp blood, and skinwalker blood, and I’d managed to keep the making of the magical discs secret. I had some pocket watches powered by the discs, and a black-magic focal stone called the blood diamond, as well as some other trinkets in my possession. Most of them were in safe-deposit boxes, which was even better—harder to get to, harder to break into, harder to steal. Vamps and vampire witches had done some pretty terrible things with the objects over the centuries, some of those horrible things since I’d been around. No way was I giving the witchy things up to the fangheads, but I kept that off my face. I hoped.
“The Europeans’ greatest desire,” Leo went on, reading my every twitch and heartbeat, “is for the remaining iron from the spike of Golgotha.”
“I don’t have it,” I said. “I never saw it.” I knew he would smell the truth on me. The spike could still be in Natchez. Or in Baton Rouge. Or in any of a hundred small towns or cities that had been settled by the white man for hundreds of years. It was too dangerous to leave in the wrong hands, and I’d had my own tech guy running searches for it. And then it hit me. “But they don’t know that, do they? The EuroVamps think I have the spike.”
I was sure that the EVs had paid good money for research on me, which made it likely that they had used the services of Reach. Which meant that they had everything. I closed my eyes.
On some level, I had—once upon a time—stupidly thought that Reach was a friend of sorts. Even knowing that he’d sell his mother to make a buck. It was a stupidity that might cost me.
Leo let his fangs click down on the little hinges in the roof of his mouth and spoke around them. “Soon, little kitten, you will have to find the spike. Or there will be nothing I can do to protect you. Nothing at all.”
I remembered the ferocity of the fight I’d witnessed in the gym, and my mouth went dry—my shoulders wanted to tense. Beast wanted to slash Leo across his perfect, beautiful face. But none of this was actually Leo’s fault. I had drawn the attention of the most powerful fangheads to me by my own actions, and by not finding a way to cut Reach out of my life and out of Leo’s. And mostly by killing a demon-calling witch on national TV. Go, me.