Not that it mattered; war mages weren’t big on subtlety. And anyway, the rest of the vamps were ignoring me and still had theirs out. And then Marco decided to make it worse.

“Looks like you boys found backup,” he told them, from in front of the line of vamps. “At least that’ll make this interesting.”

“It isn’t going to be interesting!” I said, coming up beside him. “It isn’t going to be anything. They’re leaving.”

The mages didn’t reply, didn’t move. Neither did the vampires. But what the Circle’s men—and Jonas, damn him—didn’t understand, was that the vamps couldn’t.

Vamps might have started out human, but they weren’t anymore. They hadn’t been for hundreds of years in some cases. And their society never was.

Okay, yes, sometimes they acted like it; sometimes they ate and drank and laughed right along with the little human they’d been ordered to guard. But they weren’t human. The war mages might act crazy by most people’s standards, might take insane risks, might even be a little touched in the head—I’d certainly thought so often enough. But given a bad enough situation, they would back down. They would wait for a better opportunity. They would live to fight another day.

The vamps wouldn’t.

Even if I was willing to go along with Jonas’ plan, they couldn’t. Because they couldn’t protect me if I was out of their sight. And that was what their master, the font of their wealth and position and strength and life, had ordered them to do. So they would stand their ground, would die to a man if they had to. Or more likely would kill every single war mage here and start a possibly irreparable breech with the Circle, and Jonas

didn’t get that.

I just hoped someone else did.

“Marco—” I said tightly.

“Tried,” he told me, without turning around. “Master’s phone don’t work.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged slightly, and it looked like massive boulders shifting under the thin cotton of his shirt. I saw one of the war mages in front, a dark-haired guy with a cleft chin, notice.

He had no idea. Marco didn’t need his size. Marco could rip the man’s blood out of him through the air, in particles too small to see, without even breaking the skin. He could drain him from across the room until the idiot turned ghost white and fell off the steps, a shriveled husk who’d never had time to realize that these were not the low-level vampires he was used to. These were senior masters, and of Mircea’s family line.

Which meant they could also do it in seconds.

But then, the mages had their tricks, too, and these weren’t the doddering old pensioners the Circle had left to guard my court. Not if the amount of power prickling over my arms was anything to go by. Jonas might have expected my cooperation, but he hadn’t been sure of Marco’s. He would have sent men he could trust.

So this . . . could be very bad.

And then Fred came up beside me. “Mircea’s probably at the consul’s,” he told me.

“The consul’s?” I looked upward briefly, in the direction of my old suite, hoping that what Mircea had wanted to talk to me about was a quick trip to Vegas.

But of course not. “No, no,” Fred said. “Her place in upstate New York. She’s got a house. . . . Anyway, they’re doing a thing out there this week, choosing some new senators.”

“What does that have to do with Mircea’s phone not working? He told me to call him—”

“That was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before they shut the place down,” Fred said, sounding way too calm. Maybe too inexperienced to read the atmosphere that had Marco’s hand flexing against his thigh. “There’s a bunch of bigwigs on hand, consuls and such, and you know how many enemies they have. So our consul ordered the main wards brought online for the duration. And phones don’t work through them.”

“Then contact him mentally!”

“We already did. But it’s hard to send complex stuff across that kind of distance. I mean, maybe not for senators, but for the rest of us—”

“Fred,” I said through gritted teeth. “Did you get through?”

“Yeah, well, sort of. I think the idea that you’re in trouble was understood okay, but some of the details might have gotten muddled.”

“Meaning?”

Tags: Karen Chance Cassandra Palmer Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net