“You are sure?” Mircea pressed. “You saw him clearly?”
“He was about an inch from my face while he was trying to kill me,” I said sarcastically. “So, yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“He tried to—” Mircea broke off, his jaw tightening.
“Why did you say nothing of this?” That was Louis-Cesare.
I shrugged. “It didn’t come up.”
“It did not come up?”
“What happened?” Mircea demanded.
“I already told you: he tried to kill me; he failed. The point is that he’s here and he has a definite interest in the rune. His mother was the one who stole it in the first—”
“Stole it from whom?”
That was Marlowe, and if I hadn’t been so tired, I’d have really rubbed it in. The guy thought he knew everything. “The Blarestri royal house.”
“The what?” Marlowe was the only guy I knew who could bellow in an undertone.
I glanced at him impatiently. “Well, where the hell did you think they got it, Marlowe? Or didn’t you and Daddy bother to ask?”
He flushed. “You’re telling me that the rune up for sale was a royal fey relic?”
“Yeah. And they want it back.”
“And how do you come to know this?”
“I’m acting for the family.”
“Another fact you failed to mention before now,” Mircea said pointedly.
I smiled. “Like you failed to mention what you really wanted with Ray?”
“That is hardly the same thing.”
“It is exactly the same thing! You sent me after him under false pretenses.”
“There were no false pretenses.”
“You let me believe he was a smuggler.”
“Which he is.”
“And which had nothing to do with why you wanted him. If we’re going to keep working together, you have to—”
“You do not work with Lord Mircea,” Marlowe informed me. “You work for him. It is not your place to question his commands.”
“Is that how you think, too?” I asked Mircea.
Before he could answer, the door opened, and several vamps walked in like they owned the place. Which one of them did, I realized, as Muttonchops’s head jerked up. “Master!”
He obviously wasn’t talking to Elyas, so that cry could mean only one thing. Elyas’s servants hadn’t been the only ones to feel his passing. His master had done so, too.
“Anthony,” Mircea said, straightening, as Muttonchops almost fell over himself trying to get around the table. “I thought we were meeting in an hour.”
“Yes, I received your message,” the dark-haired vamp said carelessly. He wasn’t tall, maybe five nine, and his features were handsome but not outstanding. His nose looked like it had been broken at some point, and his skin was a little weather-beaten. It meant he wasn’t exerting power to alter his appearance, which was strange, considering how much he had to spare. It felt like it seared my skin, even from this far away.
“Anthony?” I asked Louis-Cesare, who was looking a little ill suddenly.
“My consul.”
Oh. That Anthony.
The vamp circled the desk, taking his time, getting a look at the body. “Oh, don’t mind me,” he said, looking up with a smile. “Continue with what you were doing.”
“We’ve already examined the body,” Mircea told him. “You are, of course, welcome to do so yourself—”
“How kind of you,” Anthony murmured.
“But we will be reporting the findings shortly.”
“Really? To whom?”
“To the Senate.”
“And which Senate would that be, Mircea?” Anthony asked, whiskey eyes gleaming as they looked up from examining the gory throat.
I felt Marlowe tense beside me, but Mircea showed no outward change. “This happened on North American soil.”
“But Elyas belonged to the European Senate.” He smiled. “As does Louis-Cesare.”
“That is under discussion,” Mircea said sharply, which was news to me.
“Yes. But you have not stolen him away from me yet.” The smile didn’t slip, but the tension in the room suddenly ratcheted up about a hundred notches. “Therefore he will be judged by his peers—not his family.”
“And defended by whom?” Mircea demanded.
“Whomever he likes.” Anthony waved over his companion—a young vamp with long, dark hair spilling over the shoulders of a tailored gray suit. “As Elyas’s master, Jér?me will, of course, be prosecuting.”
Not so young, then, I thought, staring at the vamp. I wouldn’t have guessed. Big eyes that matched his suit almost exactly in color, pretty, almost feminine features, delicate white hands—and a power signature no greater than that of the vamp I’d nailed to the bathroom wall at Ray’s. It was hardly even discernible next to the inferno of Anthony’s, like a single candle next to a bonfire.
But if he was prosecuting, he had to be a Senate member. So the signature was a lie. He had to be one of those rare vamps who could hide his true strength. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have mistaken him for a baby, something that would have gotten me killed very fast—if I was lucky.