Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

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 i

t 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.

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.