She cursed softly, smelling of worry and fear. While she debated on telling me the truth or an artful lie, I managed to get my knees to uncurl an inch, and touched my belly. It was still hard, and now ached. I should never do that again. Never. And certainly never in the middle of a battle.
The gesture elegant and lissome, Del dropped her arms and lifted her head, her shoulders relaxing, as if freeing herself from a prison. “They called him Yo-sace, Bar-Ioudas. Joses, son of Judas, in English. He is a Son of Darkness. A child of Ioudas Issachar.” She stood and walked to the door, looking elegant and delicate and all the things I would never be, blond and beautiful and graceful. She stopped at the door and looked back at me. “This changes so many things. The presence of Joses Bar-Judas, as a prisoner here, makes it quite likely that, rather than parley with them, we will go to war with the Europeans.”
Shock made my chest ache again. Leo. Leo had known. The Son was Leo’s prisoner. Leo had been . . . drinking from him. That was why the MOC was so strong. Why his primo could be saved—or brought back to life—and turned into an Onorio—because Leo had been made uberstrong by the blood of the Son. And why Grégoire’s twin primos, Brandon and Brian, had been turned into Onorios.
Reach had known or guessed Leo’s secrets and had given them up to Peregrinus. And this one secret had gotten humans killed.
Leo had done this. Gotten an old lady across the street from me killed. Gotten three construction workers killed. A cop killed. So many dead because of this secret. “Did you know he was down there?”
“No,” she said, her voice expressionless. “As far as I know, no one knew but Leo, his pet priestess, and his Mithran lovers.” She left the room and closed the door behind her.
The pet priestess and Leo’s Mithran lovers: Bethany, Katie, and Grégoire. “Well,” I said to the empty room. “That sucks. Too bad Leo didn’t stay dead one of the times I killed him recently.” Now I might have to kill him true-dead myself, and not stop at a simple staking.
This was Leo’s fault. All of it was Leo’s fault. Leo’s and Reach’s.
I stretched out my other leg and curled the pillow back around my middle as I thought about the thing on the wall in the basement, trying to remember what I had seen in the timeless moments while I was in the bubble, hanging in midair, and afterward when I was busy getting killed by Derek.
The thing had been male. Crucified to an old brick wall with silver stakes. The wall had been slashed repeatedly by his talons, which were more like the Wolverine’s blades than most vamp claws. The damaged wall had shown some kind of metal, tarnished in the candlelight—metal studs, maybe. Black-magic items—pocket watches—had been hanging on the Son’s body. Scraps of clothes. Body was mostly dried flesh, looking mummified. Eyes glittering and focused on me.
The black-magic watches contained pieces of the iron spike of Calvary, of Golgotha. The crosses of Golgotha had been used to make the thing that hung on the wall, in a black-magic ceremony.
Now Leo wanted the spike. So did the EuroVamps, who were really the earliest vamps created by the Sons of Darkness. Sooo . . . what did the iron from the spike do to the Sons? To the Son in the dungeon?
There were a lot of negatives and dangers to being turned by a vamp. Sunlight could burn them. Lack of blood could starve them. The devoveo—the years of insanity humans went through after being turned—had to be lived through, and if they didn’t come out of the devoveo sane, then they were put down like rabid dogs. Then there was the delore—the insane grief they went through when one of their loved ones died. The lack of stability that only emotionally stable blood-servants brought to a vamp. Blood-thirst. Lots more.
Though the Mithrans hadn’t yet found a cure for the long-chained—the scions stuck in the devoveo—the Sons of Darkness had parleyed with the Anz? to keep their progeny sane from the delore, by feeding them sips of Anz? blood. It had worked. What did Gee DiMercy—the only Anz? in Leo’s territory—know about the dungeon’s only prisoner? He clearly hadn’t known about the arcenciels being around.
Not so long ago, Leo had said that the Sons of Darkness had ordered the Mithrans of the Americas to make peace with the Cursed of Artemis—the werewolves and other were-creatures. That order would have been impossible to give with a Son of Darkness chained in the basement. So where did the order to parley with the were-community come from? Leo? The other Son? The European Council like the news media said? I hated vamp politics.
Even a future parley with the witches was now suspect. Was the order to reach rapprochement with the New Orleans witch coven because Leo needed the blackened prisoner and some witch magic to accomplish . . . what? Crap. I had no idea.