Reap the Wind (30 page)

It wasn’t a question because it wasn’t really news; the idea had been batted about for a while. Not to start a war, but as a commando raid. Go in, grab Tony and his bunch of assholes, who were the ringleaders in the campaign to bring back the gods, and then make a run for the border. The trick was, how?

“We cannot win a war by remaining forever on the defensive,” Mircea agreed.

“So you take the offensive through what? Your fey allies?”

He made a sound partway between humor and disgust. “The fey have nothing but contempt for humans—or for us that used to be so. Our ‘allies,’ if they deserve the name, tell us little and act as if we’re fit for servants and nothing else.”

I took a moment to absorb that. It was kind of hard. Vampires had always been the elite in my world, godlike, immortal creatures—well, until they pissed off a stronger vamp, anyway—who had abilities and knowledge and centuries’ worth of experience I lacked. It was a bit of a mental adjustment to imagine someone else viewing them as inferior. But it did explain a few things.

“That’s why you still don’t know where Tony is.”

Mircea nodded. I could feel it against my back, as he started combing his fingers through my wet hair. “He and the leaders of the coalition against us are in hiding in faerie, meaning they must have allies among the fey. But fey politics are . . . To call them Byzantine is to miss the mark considerably. There are only three main factions of light fey, but hundreds of family, clan, and alliance groups among them, none of which see any reason to discuss their affairs with humans. Nor to assist us with an invasion of their world. They are deliberately keeping us in the dark to ensure that we have no choice but to leave it in their hands.”

“And yet they’re not doing anything.”

“Not that they have bothered to communicate to us. And this cannot continue.”

“But what’s the alternative? If you can’t invade—”

“I did not say that,
dulceat¸a˘.
”

I leaned my head back at that, so I could see his face, but he looked serious. Which didn’t make a lot of sense. “How? The Circle—”

“Is useless. Their magic is weak in faerie; they wouldn’t make it five miles from whatever portal they used to enter. And it wouldn’t matter if they did; the fey would wipe the floor with them in any battle. The same would be true for your demons.”

“So how do you invade?”

Mircea smiled down at me, dark eyes glinting. “Well. Since you asked.”

Mircea took my hand and we threaded our way back through the rugs. But this time, we went through another door, set into the opposite wall from the one where we’d come in, and then down a tiny corridor. It had rooms branching off on both sides, including a small bedroom near the end.

Where a tousled-headed guy named Jules was sitting on a bed with his legs drawn up and a bunch of magazines spread out around him, none of which he was looking at. In fact, he didn’t appear to be looking at anything. He didn’t even raise his head when we came in, which was unprecedented in the presence of his master.

Only . . . Mircea wasn’t Jules’ master anymore, was he?

That was such a weird thought that I didn’t know quite what to do with it. Vampires didn’t simply stop being vampires. They just didn’t.

Except for Jules.

He had been one of my bodyguards until he’d blundered into a terrible spell, a war spell, by mistake. It had still been in the experimental stages but was nonetheless powerful enough to turn him into little more than a human ball of flesh. Rendering him unable to talk, or move, or even see, once his own skin finished stretching over him like a shroud.

It would have been deadly to a human, but Jules wasn’t one. And vampires are a hardy breed. But no one—including the spell’s inventor—had known how to reverse it, so I’d decided to try something a little crazy.

I’d tried to de-age him, to take him back in time to before the spell was laid, hoping that would deactivate it. It had seemed like a long shot, but nobody else had known what to do, and Jules had been . . . God. He’d begged me to help him or kill him, since I was the only one he could talk to. The spell had screwed him up so badly that even the usual vampire mental communication hadn’t worked anymore.

But seiðr had. And after Mom put the spell on me and then forgot to mention it, I’d made a couple of random connections. One to Mircea, during that little episode in the shower, and one when I sat next to Jules, horrified and speechless and not knowing how to help him.

Until he told me.

On the plus side, de-aging him had gotten rid of the malicious spell, so that was something. But on the other . . . it had gotten rid of everything else, too. All the other spells, that was. Including the one that made him a vampire.

The guy who slowly raised his head, belatedly registering our existence, was still young, blond, and attractive.

But he was also very, very human.

Which I guess is why he flushed bright red as soon as his eyes fell on me. Well, that and the seiðr link that let him see me at all. I grabbed for my towel, thinking maybe it had come loose, but no. For once, I was actually decent.

And then I looked up—

Only to be tackled by a human dynamo who literally knocked me off my feet.

“Cassie!”

“Ow,” I said, because my back had just hit the wall, and despite the fact I wasn’t actually here, it had hurt. And so did the fingers sinking into my arms. And the rapid-fire shaking that commenced immediately thereafter until Mircea pulled him off.

“Cassie!” Jules said again, staring at me out of huge eyes and a flushed face and a weird-looking mouth that, well, frankly I didn’t know what that expression was, because he could love me or hate me right now, and both would be perfectly fair.

And then he burst into tears and grabbed for me again, and, okay, maybe he wasn’t mad? I still couldn’t tell. But I went into his arms anyway, ’cause if ever anybody looked like he needed a hug . . .

“They wouldn’t tell me—I asked and asked, and they wouldn’t tell me anything!” he said, drawing back. And grinning. And then crying some more, even while still grinning, and can you blame me for being confused?

“Are . . . you okay?” I eventually said, because I still wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know!” he told me. And laughed.

I looked at Mircea.

“We’ve been keeping him sedated,” Mircea said wryly. “But that sort of thing is hard on a human’s physiology.”

“Hear that? Hard on a
human’s
,” Jules repeated, his face filled with a strange mix of things, which kept making his mouth go all weird. Wonder and fear and elation and sorrow and joy and confusion—I finally realized that I didn’t know what he felt because
he
didn’t.

Which, yeah.

“So . . . you’re all right?” I repeated. “More or less?”

“More or less!” he said, shaking his head.

I decided that he really didn’t know, and that maybe I should find another question.

A vamp appeared in the doorway, one who actually looked like the stereotype: tall and gaunt, with creepy red eyes. And then just stood there until Mircea deigned to acknowledge his existence. “Yes, Lawrence?”

“Louis-Cesare has arrived, my lord. He wishes a word.”

“Excuse me for a moment,” Mircea told me.

They went off somewhere, and I sat down on the bed. I needed to go, too, to check out those cabinets and see if they held what I hoped they did, to finagle some Tears out of Mircea if so, and to get some sleep. But it was really hard with Jules’ shining face staring at me like that.

“When are we leaving?” he asked, grabbing a duffel from the end of the bed.

“What?”

“You’re taking me back with you. That’s why you came, isn’t it?”

“Um.”

“That isn’t why you came?”

“Not . . . exactly.”

“But you will, won’t you?” He squatted down in front of me, but because Jules was over six feet tall that still left us almost on a level. “You can ask,” he told me urgently. “They’ll let me go if you ask!”

“Let you go? But you’re a human. They don’t control you anymore.”

“Tell them that!”

“You mean they’re keeping you here? Like some kind of prisoner?”

“They’re . . . I don’t know. They say I can leave eventually, but they won’t tell me when. And in the meantime I’ve been here, right here, since just after you changed me. They were afraid of people seeing me at the hotel, so they brought me here—”

“Where is ‘here’?”

“I don’t know. The consul’s place, I think. I just know I went to sleep and woke up here and haven’t been out of here since! I asked to go outside, just to see the sunrise, but they wouldn’t let me. Said somebody might see me, and—and you’ve got to get me out, Cassie. Promise me you’ll get me out!”

“I will,” I said, trying to calm him down. Because he’d finally settled on an emotion and it was panic.

And I didn’t get that. I glanced around the room, but it didn’t seem so bad to me. No windows, of course, but presumably this was a vampire residence, so no big shock there. And everything else seemed comfortable enough. There was even a small TV.

And he’d been here only a couple of days.

Of course, Jules wasn’t exactly the most stoic of guys. Jules tended to freak out over a hangnail. But still.

“What’s so terrible?” I asked, honestly puzzled.

“Everything!” He lowered his voice; why, I don’t know. It wasn’t like Mircea couldn’t have heard him half a mile away. “Nothing. I don’t know.” His eyes darted around. “It’s creepy!”

“Creepy?”

“This place is crawling with vampires!”

“Jules. You used to
be
a vampire.”

“Yes, but I’m not one
now
. And they don’t look at me the same way anymore. All of a sudden, I’m not a person. I’m . . . lunch. Or a lab rat or—I don’t know. But they’re planning something, I know they are, and I need to get out of here before they figure out what!”

“A lab rat? Why a lab rat?”

He looked at me incredulously. “Cassie. Don’t you get it? Don’t you know what you
did
?”

“Made history,” Mircea said from the door.

I looked up and oh, goody, Kit had come, too. He looked even more rumpled than before, because he’d found an overcoat that had apparently been at the bottom of a laundry hamper somewhere. Or possibly been towed behind a van. With his wrinkled clothes and messy curls and sharp, dark eyes, he looked like a slightly better-looking Columbo. Or maybe more than slightly better, if he hadn’t been standing next to a shirtless Adonis.

And frowning at me.

“Mircea . . .” I said, starting to get creeped out, because I wasn’t imagining it. Kit’s dark eyes were boring a hole into mine.

“I let him into my mind,” Mircea explained. “Not into the spell,” he added, at my look of alarm. Because the last thing I needed was the Senate’s chief spy probing around my cranium. “I don’t control that; you do.”

“My mother did,” I corrected.

But Mircea shook his head. “She may have laid the spell, but she wasn’t powering it. You were. And unless this magic runs counter to every other kind we know, the one who powers a spell controls it.”

“But I haven’t been controlling it. I don’t know how to control it.” I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and didn’t even know how to get home.

“Yet you have been placing it on other people. On me, and on Jules.”

“By accident.”

“And that matters why?” Marlowe said sharply. Because vampires didn’t get concepts like extenuating circumstances. At least, their law code didn’t. If you did something, you were responsible for it, no matter why it happened.

So, as far as Marlowe was concerned, the loss of a master vampire was one hundred percent down to me. But Jules hadn’t been his vampire, so I didn’t see what his beef was. Jules had belonged to Mircea, and he seemed to be taking it in stride.

Seemed to be taking it suspiciously in stride.

It was one of the reasons it had taken me a while to notice that he’d been avoiding me lately, because I’d kind of been doing it right back. I’d expected him to have a few things to say about Jules, along with some other stuff that had happened recently. But he was looking awfully good-humored for someone who had just been deprived of the vamp equivalent of a winning Powerball ticket.

I started to get a bad feeling about this.

“These things happen,” Mircea said easily, causing my alarm meter to tick up another few notches. “However, your new ability may be the solution we’ve been looking for.”

“What solution?” I asked, looking back and forth from him to Kit. But, strangely for a guy who prided himself on knowing everything, it didn’t look like Kit knew this. He had transferred his frown to Mircea, and it was growing.

“What were we just discussing?” Mircea asked me.

It took me a moment, because I didn’t see what the two had to do with each other. “The . . . invasion of faerie?”

Mircea smiled.

Marlowe didn’t. But his eyes narrowed. And shifted from Mircea back to me, with a new expression in them.

It wasn’t one I liked.

“What?” I asked him bluntly.

But it was Mircea who answered. “As we just discussed, the only option for ending this war is to ferret out the ones responsible for it. And we must do that soon, before they manage to bring another of the gods back to fight it for them. Yet that has seemed impossible. They are hiding in faerie, and no one goes into faerie in force. It has never been done. We have therefore been stymied, waiting for our fey allies to aid us or at least to tell us where our enemies are to be found. They have done neither.”

“And they don’t intend to,” Marlowe said. “They won’t even help us stop the damned smugglers; how can we expect them to do something that requires actual risk?”

“We can’t,” Mircea said, still looking at me. “The onus is on us. We alone among the supernatural community are unaffected by faerie. A vampire is a vampire, wherever he is. We do not acquire our magic in the same way as the other groups, and therefore do not feel the effects of a strange world as they do.”

“You do when it’s time to feed,” I pointed out, wondering where he was going with this.

“But a master does not need to feed often—”

“He does if he’s injured
.
”

“—and he can draw strength from his family in the case of injury, feeding through his connection to them. We alone have a link to this world, to our family, to our source of magic, that remains the same regardless of where we are.”

“If
you’re a master,” I pointed out, because all vamps had links to their families, but masters were the only ones who could pull the kind of power Mircea was talking about. “And most aren’t.”

“No,” he agreed. “Most aren’t.”

There was a pregnant pause.

Which stayed that way, because I still wasn’t getting this.

“I don’t get how you expect to do this alone,” I said. “Or why you want to. The vampires aren’t the only ones in danger, so why does it all fall to—”

“Think about it, Cassie,” Mircea said, sitting on the bed beside me. “The mages are all but useless in faerie; the demons likewise. The Weres might be somewhat of a help, but they are too few in number and too unreliable to be counted on. Who does that leave?”

“The covens, for one,” I said, talking about the groups of magic users who had never come under the Circle’s control. “And they use a form of fey magic—”

“But one designed for use on earth. And they have the same organizational problem as the Weres, only more so. They are leaderless, fractured, unreliable. To avoid being subsumed by the Circle, they withdrew from it. But in doing so, they ceded much of their power in the community the Circle now governs. You would be wise not to put too much faith in them. They may need you, but they cannot be an asset to you.”

Which, in vamp terms, made them irrelevant.

“But the vamps
can’t
invade on their own,” I said, feeling like I was taking crazy pills. “You barely have enough masters to run everything now.”

Masters were the backbone of the vamp world. They were the administrators, the ambassadors, the rulers, and the police. Not to mention the font of all new vamps, since no one below a master could make any, and the reason the whole vampire world hadn’t been wiped out by the mages centuries ago.

Back in the day, vampirism had been viewed like the plague, and the mages who hunted them thought of themselves as doctors trying to eradicate it. And they’d done it easily, killing the rank-and-file vamps they came across by the hundreds and then by the thousands. Until they met with a bunch of masters who had banded together to fuck some shit up.