“What he needs,” I corrected. “You know how it goes otherwise.”
Marco frowned, but he didn’t debate it. He’d had his own struggles with the vampire affliction. In his case, it had been over his wife and daughter, who had been butchered while he was away at war. He’d come back to find their decomposing bodies in a ditch, something that he’d blamed himself for throughout his long life.
But unlike Mircea, Marco had never been powerful enough to lead a vampire family. He’d always worked for someone else, so whenever his mental issues started to cause trouble, he was just traded away to another master, making him somebody else’s problem. It had been a hard life, and a precarious one, since some masters preferred to stake their problems rather than trade them. Not to mention that nothing was done about the underlying factor.
Until, that is, he landed at the Pythian Court, with a whole gaggle of little girls who needed him desperately, and who he could save.
It had seemed finally to calm the turmoil in his mind, which is what had given me the idea about Mircea. After all, while really old vamps weren’t common, they weren’t entirely unknown, either. Marco himself was something like two thousand years old. The consul, the leader of the North American Vampire Senate, was even older. If vamps got past the bump in the road that their obsession caused them, they were virtually immortal.
If.
“What’s the plan now?” Marco asked, huge arms crossed over an equally massive chest. “You can’t bring Elena here if she didn’t die.”
“No. But Mircea seems to have fixated on her being okay. On her having had a decent life. I think he’d accept that—if I could prove it.”
“Yeah, but whatever kind of life she had, it was probably in Faerie. So how do we find out about it?”
I looked up from peeling a clump of cherry red polish off my big toe. “We?”
He looked slightly offended. “I used to be an investigator for some of my past masters. For Mircea, too. I could ask around.”
“Ask Caedmon,” I said, naming the leader of one of the three great houses of the light fey. “The soldiers who took her were wearing Svarestri armor, so he may not know anything—”
“But he’s got spies and informants. You know he does.”
I nodded, thinking of the stunning blond with the easy smile and the ancient eyes that didn’t match it. Caedmon did inscrutable almost as well as the vamps, but he always seemed to know everything. It was worth a shot.
“I don’t see what else we can do.”
There was a knock on the door.
“That’ll be your dinner,” Marco said, because he could probably smell it. He got up. “I’ll keep it quiet, and see what he can find out.”
“Thank you.”
A huge hand smoothed over my hair. “Don’t thank me. Just try to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“That being Pythia isn’t about being alone. It’s the opposite. You have people you can rely on. Stop trying to be the lone wolf and use your pack.”
“Or get eaten without them?”
A thick black eyebrow cocked. “You said it, not me.”
He left.
Rhea came in, barely having to duck under his arm, because there was something like a foot difference in their height. She sat a huge tray down on the table before I could move to help her, and whipped off the lid. And revealed what looked like a family-sized meal.
“Tami said to eat all of it, or she’ll want to know the reason why,” Rhea said breathlessly, sounding like she was quoting. Before biting her lip and looking embarrassed, because people didn’t talk to Pythias that way.
“Well, I can’t eat all this.” A linebacker couldn’t have put that tray away. “Help me out?”
She nodded, because Tami’s wrath was legendary. Fortunately, so were her cooking skills. We divvied up a wonderful saffron-y paella, a bunch of garlic toast, a hearty salad with more toppings than lettuce, and some peach sangria. It was still too much, even for two, but at least my head wasn’t swimming anymore. I finally sat back, feeling stuffed and happy and with a ridiculous fondness for all mankind.
Maybe we could end the war with Tami’s cooking.
Rhea, who had done less shoveling and more pushing shrimps around her plate, still looked troubled. I didn’t ask why; she usually took a while to come to the point, with her innate feistiness having to war with years of being seen and not heard. Feistiness usually won, but you had to give it a minute.