“You already know that.”
“I don’t!” I shook my head, trying to clear it. I still felt half-asleep, but I didn’t need much thought for this. “The whole reason for attacking Dante’s was Lizzie being there. But she wasn’t captured until the night before they showed up—”
“Cassie.”
“—so overnight they got hundreds of men to Vegas, verified that my guards were down for the count, calculated exactly how much time they had before the Circle could react, located and brought down the wards, figured out a way to grab Rhea . . .” I looked at him in bewilderment. “It’s impossible.”
“Not if the people planning this are in Faerie.” Mircea sat back down on the bed, the firelight making his eyes gleam. “The fey timeline runs differently than ours—you know that.”
I nodded.
“But what you may not know is that the rate of the difference isn’t constant. It is often explained as if our two timelines are two rivers that generally parallel each other. But sometimes one or the other will divert, bulging out in an arc before coming back into rough synchronicity. When that happens, the difference between time here and time there can be . . . extreme. We appear to be in one of those cycles now.”
“So time in Faerie is running differently than here?”
“Faster—much faster. It won’t last—it never does. But for a short span, they are essentially on fast forward. And they knew this was coming. The fey have the ability to chart the difference in our time streams with far more accuracy than we do. They’ve learned to predict it.”
“Yes, but—”
“Think about it, Cassie. They plan an attack on one of our strongholds. Perhaps it takes weeks from their perspective. But from ours, it has been mere days, possibly only hours. They have the leisure to debate, to decide, to rest. If something doesn’t work, such as the attack on the casino, they have time to recalibrate. While we are constantly running, on the defensive, getting hit here, there, everywhere—with, as you say, scarce time to draw a breath in between.”
“And now they have a god planning their attacks for them.”
“So it would seem.” It was grim.
The last time we discussed this, Mircea hadn’t wanted to believe that Ares was back. He’d wanted to keep this as a fight between the kinds of things he might know how to kill. But it looked like this morning had convinced him.
Or convinced him that he’d been right all along, I thought, watching his face change.
“That is why we must take the war to them,” he told me earnestly. “We cannot remain on the defensive forever. They will attack again, and soon, before their advantage fades, and there is no way to tell what they will hit next. We must give them something else to think about.”
I didn’t say anything. He was right—I knew he was. But the method the senate had selected was . . . less than optimal. Way less.
They wanted me to use the Pythian power to age up a vampire, while his master fed him power—a lot of it. More than he could possibly absorb all at once without my help. It was similar to something they’d done for years called the Push, when—usually in times of war—a new master was needed pronto. But all that power all at once was a big gamble, one that usually resulted in a dead vamp.
You know, permanently.
But with the years speeding by like seconds, the hope was that the power would simply be absorbed, as if he’d actually lived and fed through all those years, gaining strength with each one. And that out of the other side of my time bubble would leap a brand-new master vamp. Who would need to quickly move aside, to get out of the way, because another would be coming through right behind him.
And then another, and another, because the senate wanted me to make them an entire army of masters. With which they intended to rip the fey, and the enemies we had hiding with them, a new one. Mircea had come to me all happy and excited, almost giddy with his new plan.
And hadn’t understood my less-than-enthusiastic response.
It wasn’t just about what it would take out of me, because aging someone like that wasn’t as easy as the senate seemed to think. Or about the fact that I’d be too exhausted afterward to do anything else, including fighting gods. But about a question that no one could answer: what was going to happen when that army came back? What were a bunch of new masters going to do, freshly back from war and with enough power to do anything they liked? Who, if anybody, was going to control them?
“We shouldn’t be talking about this now,” Mircea said, his eyes on my face. “You need to rest.”
I shook my head. “I’m all right—”
An eyebrow rose. “Is that why you collapsed in the middle of the consul’s great hall?”
“The consul’s?” For a moment, my mind blanked. And then it came back to me. Shifting into Dante’s—or being shifted, because I’d had no control over it. The wards blaring a warning about Rosier’s presence, almost deafening. Marco bursting through the door, several vamps at his back—
And me shifting out again, before they could stop me. Because I’d wanted . . . something. . . . My eyes widened. “Mircea—”
“My lord—” The tousled-haired vamp, who was clearly crazy, was back. For about a second, until he made a strangled sound and fled.
“There is something you need?” Mircea asked me.
“The Tears of Apollo.”
He frowned slightly. “But you have it. I was told you took it from your rogue, after your duel.”
Trust the senate to know everything that happened, even when nobody had told them. “I need more. It’s a long story—”
“And I want to hear it, but I have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“That’s a long story, too,” he said ruefully. “We need to talk—”
That was the understatement of the century, I thought, gripping his hand. Because I knew what came next. “Mircea—”
“—afterward.”
“Mircea—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, seeing my alarm. Because our talks never quite managed to happen, or if they did, they got off on a tangent and never got around to the point. But this one had to.
“Just tell me,” I said, hanging on to his hand. “You must have had a source, right?”
“A source?”
“For the potion! I mean, you got it from someone—”
“Yes, we got it from someone.”
“Who? Just tell me that—”
Knowing dark eyes met mine. “If I do, will you still be here when I return?”
I bit my lip. Because we both knew the answer to that.
“I thought not.” He bent over and kissed my forehead. “This won’t take long, and then we’ll talk.”
I blinked and he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-two