Reap the Wind (31 page)

And they had. And it led to centuries of conflict thereafter, with each side renewing the war anytime one of them got what they thought would be an advantage. I’d been taught it as a child mostly from the vampire perspective, but the vamps had caused just as much damage, viewing a world without mages as a paradise where they could live and feed and spread at will.

But that didn’t happen because the two groups mostly stayed at equilibrium with each other, and so served as a kind of unofficial checks-and-balances system. They’d signed a treaty years ago professing “friendship and cooperation,” but no way would that last if there was suddenly some big advantage to one side or the other.

Like most of the world’s masters being wiped out in faerie, for instance.

“You don’t have that many vamps to spare, or to risk,” I pointed out. “Even with all six Senates, you don’t—”

I stopped, the clue bat having just smacked me sharply between the eyes.

I looked at Jules, who was now sitting on the far side of the bed, since Mircea had taken his space. He looked back at me, blue eyes wide and oblivious. Marlowe, on the other hand, was practically vibrating.

No, I thought.

No, I’m imagining things.

But one look at Mircea’s face told me I wasn’t.

He was watching me, a small smile on his lips, the kind that said he’d already done all the math and was just waiting for me to catch up. But I wasn’t catching up, because there were diseases and then there were cures, and some of the cures were just as bad as the illness.

“What happens after the war?” I asked abruptly, and had the tiny satisfaction of seeing him blink.

Not because he hadn’t thought of it, too, but because he hadn’t thought I would.

“We have to win it first,” he pointed out.

“Yes, we do. But not this way.” I started to get up.

He caught my arm. “Then what way? What would you have us do?”

“I don’t know. But there has to be another—”

“Do you think we haven’t looked for one? Do you think we haven’t had every expert we possess working on the problem? For
months
? Where faerie is concerned, there simply aren’t many options.”

“Then look some more! This is crazy!”

“Why crazy?” Mircea asked, still sounding oh so reasonable. “If you can unmake a vampire, you can do the reverse.”

“No, I can’t! I can age him, but I can’t give him power—”

“But his master can.”

I stopped. I’d been about to point out that this whole discussion was a waste of time, since what I could do would result in nothing but an older baby vamp, like an eighty-year-old toddler, which wouldn’t help anybody. Which meant we didn’t have anything to discuss, did we?

But then Mircea’s words sank in. “Meaning what?”

“That there has long been a way to speed up the process, for the right candidate.” He glanced at Kit, who scowled ferociously.

“Now I know why I was invited into this little conversation,” he said sourly.

“Tell her.”

Kit looked like there were a few things he’d like to tell both of us, especially Mircea. But he didn’t. His expression didn’t get any happier, though.

“It’s called the Push,” he said tersely, and Jules gasped. Like the clue bat had just found another victim. Marlowe ignored him. “It’s a method used to make a master in a few days instead of a few centuries. It originated in wartime, when too many masters had been killed and replacements were needed immediately to avoid disaster. I was made this way, and almost died as a result. Most who attempt it do, which is why it is used only in extremis.”

He didn’t look like he wanted to talk about it, so I didn’t ask. Except for the obvious. “And this has what to do with me?”

“You know how vampires are made,” Mircea said.

“Of course.”

“The bite infects the body, but the strength to rise again, to live as a new creature, that comes from the master,” he said, telling me anyway. “But with the Push, the new Child is not given merely the basic energy needed to rise, but much, much more. For most, it is too much, too soon. They can’t absorb it, and never rise, dying not from the power but from having
too little time
to properly absorb it.”

“You want me to age them up while their master feeds them power,” I said. I didn’t bother to make it a question.

“Yes.”

“And risk killing them if it doesn’t work?”

“There are many who would gladly take that chance. Many who have given up hope of such a thing, of a status they were never destined to earn.”

“And there’s a reason for that, isn’t there?” I demanded. Masters were the powerhouses of the vampire world, but they were also dangerous. Extremely dangerous. And hard to control.

Mostly, it didn’t matter, because there weren’t that many masters and the Senate ruled them with an iron first. And because the hundreds of years of time it usually took to make one gave even the most crazed specimen, even someone like Jack, the Senate’s happy-go-lucky chief torturer, time to gain a measure of self-control. Jack liked his work, but he didn’t go running around making extra for himself these days, as he’d done in life. When he’d had the cute little nickname of The Ripper.

But what if he’d gotten master status early—real early? What if he’d never had that time? What if he had the same power but none of the control?

I shuddered in horror, and that was
one man
. And if they were planning an invasion . . .

“How many?”

“Cassie—”

“How many?” I said tightly, hugging myself. The towel had felt okay before, but it was suddenly clammy. Like my skin.

“I don’t have the exact figure—”

“Then ballpark it!”

“No more than necessary—”

“The fact that you don’t want to tell me is really worrying me right now.”

Mircea frowned, like he honestly hadn’t expected this to be difficult. Like, sure, I’ll make you an army of master vampires to lay waste to faerie, no problem. And then pretend it’s not my fault when they turn around and do the same thing to earth!

“We will be careful about the selection,” Mircea said, watching me.

“You won’t have to worry about that.”

“Cassie—”

But before he could reconfigure his plan of attack, the same vamp who had called him out last time came back.

“Showtime,” Marlowe said grimly.

“We’ll talk later,” Mircea promised me.

“No, damn it! We’ll talk—”

And just like that, I was back at Dante’s. Sprawled on the floor of my half-flooded bath, because I hadn’t turned off the sink before I was abruptly snatched away.

“—now,” I finished furiously.

Son of a bitch!

I spent the next twenty minutes mopping up. I must have knocked the liquid hand soap when I toppled over, and it was the frothy kind. So I’d woken up in a sea of bubbles, with a loofah bumping me in the nose, and a sink cascading over everything like a miniature Niagara.

And an imminent flood, because I’d had my butt on the drain.

I got up, turned off the water, and started shooing the tide toward the exit. But that was only somewhat helpful, since it left me with soap scale all along the walls, like a high water mark. It took every towel I had to scrub it off and to soak up the rest of the overflow. Except for the one I appropriated for me, because my old one was as drenched as everything else in here.

The boys would have told me to leave it for housekeeping, but we gave them enough trouble as it was. And cleaning gave me a chance to work off some energy. And right now, I had a lot of it.

Because I was
pissed.

Which was both infuriating and seriously confusing, because I didn’t know why.

I mean, I knew
why.
The obvious why, anyway. Mircea was running scared, just like Jonas. But when master vamps were scared, they didn’t circle the wagons and go on the defensive. They ran
toward
whatever was scaring them, weapons out and fangs bared. They became more dangerous when afraid, not less so, their every instinct telling them to go for blood. And Mircea, being smarter than most—about some things, I thought, scrubbing fiercely—had found a nifty new way to do that.

“We’ll be careful about the selection.”

Yeah, I bet. But say they were. And say the Senate could keep all those giddy-with-their-shiny-new-power masters under control. Which was debatable because the ones they already had caused them enough trouble sometimes. But just for the sake of argument, say they could do it. That still left some big damned questions, didn’t it?

Like whose vamps would they be?

After the war was over, who would they fight for? Because there was an alliance between the vampire Senates right now, but it was shaky at best since they all pretty much hated one another. They just happened to hate the gods more. So right now, the world’s vampires were one big, unhappy, seriously dysfunctional family, but normally, there were six separate Senates. And there would be again about a nanosecond after the war ended.

So I had to wonder. When all the dust settled, assuming we won, because otherwise it didn’t really matter, did it, who would they fight for? Or, more important, who would they fight against? Other Senates? The Circle?
Humans?

Because they could. With an army of master vamps, the Senate so very, very could do any damned thing they pleased. And old or not, mature or not, responsible or not, you didn’t give a vamp unlimited power like that. You just didn’t. Because they would use it. Sooner or later, somehow or other, and what would be the point of all this then? Save the world from Ares just so we could rip it apart ourselves? Yeah, that would be an improvement!

And I wasn’t stupid enough to think they’d just have me reverse the process after the war. Take all those shiny new masters and turn them back into regular old Joe vamps? Sure.

The vamps themselves wouldn’t stand for it, would run for the hills, would do whatever they had to do to avoid becoming little more than slaves again. And the senior masters over their families would probably back them, because any masters you had in your stable fed into your power base way more than a regular vamp. So you’d be cutting your own throat to let them be turned back.

And that was if I could even do it, which I doubted, because I wasn’t to be the source of the power, was I? I was just supposed to make the process more tolerable. The spoonful of sugar that helped all that power go down without burning the vamps in question to cinders.

So no. Once they were here, they’d stay here. And that so wasn’t happening!

But as fantastically bad as the whole idea was, that wasn’t what had me angry. And I
was
angry, I realized—not just pissed or peeved or irritated. I was hot, something it had taken me a while to realize because it wasn’t an emotion I felt very often. You couldn’t afford emotions around Tony’s. Emotions made you visible, emotions got you noticed, and getting noticed was usually a very bad thing.

I threw my toothbrush, which I’d found on an epic voyage to the tub, into the trash, wrapped up the towels in the soggy pelt of a bath mat, and tossed the whole mess in a corner. It wasn’t a perfect job, but at least we wouldn’t flood out the guys in the room underneath.

Which was just as well since they were part of my guards, too, and no way was anybody else fitting into this suite!

Then I got back in the shower, because I was soapy and sweaty, and because I needed to cool off.

And to figure out why I was pissed, because I still didn’t know.

I wasn’t angry because of what Mircea had asked, I decided. I might not know much about being Pythia, but I knew vamps. And no vamp in the world would have passed up a chance like that.

And, anyway, he might have thought of it first, because Jules was his so he’d heard about it first, but somebody else would have come up with the same idea sooner or later. Marlowe or the consul herself or
somebody
. Vamps didn’t overlook stuff likely to increase their power base, even by a small amount.

And this wasn’t small.

So no, I wasn’t mad at him for trying.

But if it wasn’t about the question, what was I so livid about? Because I was. I so very, very was.

And I didn’t really know what to do with that.

Fear, I knew, and panic—we were practically best buddies. And annoyance and irritation and happiness and relief and a lot of other emotions, because all of those were ones I’d been allowed to have growing up. Encouraged to have in the case of the first, to keep me in line.

But at Tony’s, only one person had been allowed to be angry, and it hadn’t been me.

Anger was an emotion for the guy in charge. Anger was something masters felt, a vivid, red-hot emotion they used like a lash to keep their households in line. At least, they did if they were Tony. I knew all about anger from being on the receiving end of it often enough, but the reverse . . .

I used to think it must be wonderful to be able to carry on like that. To just let go of all those bottled-up emotions and yell and stomp around like he did, to slash at the air and throw things and . . . and just get it all out. I used to think, when I had to stand there in court, blank faced and careful, with everything tightly bottled up inside, how wonderful it would be, just once, to get angry.

But it wasn’t feeling so wonderful now.

Now it was making me nauseous and shaky and faintly ill.

I didn’t like being angry at Mircea.

I liked being held by Mircea.

And I really
had
missed him this last week. I hadn’t realized how much until I saw him again. And even that first glance, when I’d been seriously annoyed, had been so nice . . .

Until he had to go and spoil it.

And finally, light dawned.

I wasn’t mad at Mircea as much for
what
he said but for
when
he said it. Because we had a deal. A deal he had come up with, so that what we did as Pythia and senator stayed away from what we did as Cassie and Mircea, and didn’t trash our personal life. Work was work and personal was personal, and they were supposed to stay nice and separate.

It was a nice theory.

I’d liked the theory.

I’d even thought it might work.

But not if he kept doing stuff like this. Because tonight hadn’t been a date, hadn’t been a
Hey, I’ve missed you; let’s hang out
, or even an
I haven’t seen you for a while, so how about we get together and explore the hornier possibilities of this new power of yours?
No. If it had, then he should have left it at that and said,
Good night, Cassie
, at the end. But instead, where had I ended up? In Jules’ room, getting propositioned in a whole new way that wasn’t nearly as much fun, and—

And damn it! I’d forgotten about Jules. And the Tears, which were a little more pressing right now, because Jules wasn’t about to die. But no way was Mircea going to give them to me, assuming he had any. He might trade me, oh yes, that he might damned well do. But give? When I had something the vamps wanted and I wasn’t giving in return?

Uh-uh.

Horse trading in the vamp world didn’t work like that.

And especially not when the item in question was something like this.

Mircea hadn’t put a crap ton of vamp bodyguards on me because he wanted me running around. Mircea wanted me to stay put in my nice penthouse. Mircea wanted me to get my hair and nails done and maybe see a show once in a while—heavily guarded, of course. Mircea wanted me to act like those other women he’d had, the ones I kept hearing hints about but that no one would give me specifics on, women who were beautiful and elegant and stayed where they were damned well put.

Like that woman in the painting.

I bet she never gave him any trouble, I thought enviously. I bet she never slouched home looking like a war victim. I bet she was perfect and beautiful and sweet and gentle and—

I realized I was scrubbing until I was about to take skin off. I put the remaining loofah down, nice and slow. And started rinsing instead.

So, no, bringing up the Tears with Mircea wasn’t going to go well. I knew that without even asking. I’d have a better chance getting some out of the Circle, although Jonas would probably also want an explanation, and I doubted I’d get any until I told him something he’d like.

And that was maddening. It was
my
potion. It was brewed specifically for the Pythia, to use when needed. Since when did he get to tell her when that was?

Since the Pythia was me, apparently.

I bet he wouldn’t have demanded an explanation from Agnes. And Mircea, if she’d gone to him for some crazy reason, probably wouldn’t have, either. The Senate had wanted a Pythia for so long—they’d have jumped at the chance to help her, to have her owe them a favor.

But not me.

And, abruptly, the final puzzle piece fell into place.

Because I
would
be expected to tell everyone why I needed it, wouldn’t I? And to have it be something they approved of to have any chance at getting it at all. And while that was infuriating with Jonas, it was worse with Mircea.

Vampires respected power and strength, and that was pretty much all they respected. I’d shown that I had power recently, by somehow managing to kill a Spartoi, one of the demigod sons of Ares, in a duel that many of the vamp leadership had happened to see. They’d liked that. They’d liked it so much that they’d signed the treaty of alliance shortly thereafter, doing what nobody had ever expected and putting themselves under the leadership of the North American consul.

That was a huge deal. That had never happened before. And it had only happened now because they were dealing with a power they didn’t know how to counter and they needed somebody on their side who did.

I’d shown them power, power they didn’t have, and it had helped.

But I hadn’t shown them strength.

Because strength in the vamp world didn’t mean the ability to bend steel. The smallest vamp girl could do that. No, strength was something else.

Strength was the consul calmly saying to five other Senate leaders, each of them hundreds of years old and staggeringly powerful,
I will lead this alliance
, and making it stick. Strength was one master vamp bowing to another and giving way for him, not because he might not be just as strong, but because he wasn’t willing to find out. Strength was why Senate seats were still determined by duels, as archaic as that seemed these days. Because being a leader in the vampire world didn’t require just being powerful, it required being able to say to another first-level master,
this seat is mine and I will take it.

So yes, I’d shown power, but so far, from a vamp perspective, I hadn’t shown strength. And now I was paying for it. Mircea might love me, but he didn’t respect me. He wouldn’t have pulled that stunt tonight if he respected me.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I was angry. Not because he’d asked, but because of when and how. Because of the assumption that I would just do this, without question, without thought. That he could just tell me what he wanted and that would be it.

Or point me at a problem like a gun, because guns didn’t act on their own, did they? Guns didn’t have ideas and opinions. Guns were pulled out when needed and left in the drawer the rest of the time.

Or in a hotel suite in Vegas.