“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.”