Tana just stared at him. “How come you think I—”
He took out his phone, thumbed a few buttons, and pushed it across the table toward her. She didn’t understand what she was looking at for a moment. It was a blog post with a blurry photograph that Tana recognized as the one Midnight had taken with her camera phone. She must have messed around with it in Photoshop before posting, though, because the picture was brighter. Tana’s and Gavriel’s faces were recognizable, tipped toward each other in a moment before their mouths touched. His eyes were closed.
“And before you ask why I think he’s the Thorn of Istra, it’s because the post says so. The girl claims you and your friends—including the Thorn—picked up her brother and her at some kind of crap tourist place.”
Tana stared at the phone.
“You can read it yourself if you want.” Jameson forked up some eggs. “But basically it says you survived a massacre, where you met the Thorn. He didn’t tell anyone who he was, but her brother figured it out at the gate when he saw a wanted sign. Let’s just say that lots of people were interested in her post.” Jameson’s voice was neutral, his tattooed arms resting on the table. She studied them—words in large ornate script that disappeared under a white T-shirt, roses winding on green stems, and moths of pale brown and white wings. “Particularly Lucien Moreau.”
She nearly choked on her eggs. “The guy on TV?”
Lucien Moreau. Pale gold hair and a face like a pre-Raphealite painting. Ancient and ageless, he showed up during the quarantine, waltzing into the city, taking over the biggest house he could find, and installing cameras everywhere. The parties that raged on in his house were as famous as the Eternal Ball, but more elegant and more deadly. You could watch them online and on certain late-night local channels, but no mainstream station would ever broadcast them unedited. Tana didn’t watch, but Pearl and her friends did. She’d heard them whisper about what they’d seen: the blurry outlines of velvet capes, the tangled limbs, and Lucien, charming as ever, talking to you right through the camera, promising you with the curve of his mouth and the brightness of his eyes that no matter how loudly you screamed, you’d like whatever he did, and you’d never be the same once he was done.
“I have a friend who lives in Lucien’s house. She does errands and stuff for him. She was supposed to be keeping an eye on the gate. Apparently, ever since the Thorn broke out of his prison in Paris, Lucien’s been scared he’s coming here.”
“Why?” Tana forced herself to pick up the mug, ignoring her unsteady hands. She took a sip of the coffee, the hot liquid steadying her enough to take a bite of the eggs. At the first taste, she realized she was hungrier than she’d imagined.
Jameson leaned forward in his plastic seat. “Lucien is the reason he was in a cell. Apparently, your friend Gavriel let Caspar Morales slip through his fingers. Lucien, or maybe Elisabet, or probably both of them together, told some ancient vampire called the Spider what Gavriel had done, which is how the Thorn of Istra spent the last decade being tortured somewhere under the streets of Paris.”
Tana thought about what Gavriel said in the car after they’d left the gas station. The words had seemed nonsensical at the time, but now it seemed to Tana that they were a riddle.
This is the world I remade with my terrible mercy.
An act of mercy that I regret—endlessly, I regret it.
Tana’s head was spinning again. “How do you know all that?”
“I told you,” he said. “My friend lives with Lucien. Did the Thorn say anything about what his plans were? Did he talk strategy?”
I have a friend, too. And I mean to kill him.
“There’s somebody he wants dead,” Tana scraped a pile of eggs onto a tortilla and lifted it to her mouth. After the third bite and another swig from the mug, she started to feel a lot better. “But I don’t know anything other than that. I wouldn’t have even believed that Gavriel was the Thorn of Istra if Winter hadn’t shown me this.” She took the crumpled flyer from where she’d jammed it into her purse hours and hours before, unfolding it on the table, pressing out the creases. Seeing his black curls, the silver-topped cane, and the violence in his eyes, Tana was surprised all over again at the memory of his mouth’s softness. “He didn’t act like—I mean, he was terrifying, but he was weirdly kind, too. Not how you’d think.”
Jameson peered over at the paper and whistled at the amount of the bounty. “How come you didn’t turn him in at the gate?”
Tana shook her head. “He helped me out. That would be a pretty crappy way of paying him back. But I don’t understand—why would Lucien and Gavriel even know one another?”