The vamp just looked at him.

“The kind that necromancers are able to control?”

There was an uncomfortable silence around the table, maybe because most of those present were vampires.

“And?” the prince demanded. “Necromancers have always been able to influence, even briefly control, low-­level vampires. It’s one reason we regulate the damned things—­”

“I wasn’t talking about low-­level vampires,” Mircea told him steadily. “Or even masters—­”

“I should hope not!”

“—­I was talking about us.”

“Us?” The man looked confused. “What do you mean, ‘us’?”

“I mean senate members. The pills—­”

But that was as far as he got. Mircea broke off, because there was no point even trying to finish that sentence. If I’d thought the former uproar was something, it was nothing to this.

In a matter of minutes, the most powerful vampires on earth had learned about bullets that could mow them down as easily as hot lead could do to a human; they’d seen a city almost destroyed and three of the bastions of vampire power on earth taken out with it; and now they were being told that Jonathan had discovered a way to hijack even their own bodies?

It was pandemonium.

“You’re telling us that one man is responsible for this?” the prince yelled, somehow managing to make himself heard above the din. “And that he’s still out there? What the hell have you been doing?”

“Looking for him,” was the bland reply. The small muscle in Mircea’s jaw was jumping again, but otherwise, you’d never know he was stressed. “We next came across him in Paris, this past summer—­”

“This summer? You lost him for decades?”

&

nbsp; “He does not have the recipe for the pills,” Mircea assured him. “The bokor who developed it, and who is now deceased, was savvy enough not to give it to him, afraid that he would be double-­crossed in their arrangement—­”

“And if he lied?”

“Then it would stand to reason, would it not, that Jonathan might have used it before now?”

“And how do we know he hasn’t?” the prince demanded. “He could have been controlling people for ­decades! He could be controlling one of us now!”

Annnnnd that tore it. The fizzy comets of power that were being flung around the table were more like fists now, a couple of which sent me reeling, while the pressure in the room, maybe a couple extra atmospheres’ worth, was threatening to stop my breathing. It wasn’t doing anybody else any good, either.

I saw one of the mages abruptly stand up and move a step or two away from the table, to give himself room to maneuver. I saw a door blow open and additional vamps run in, guards to various senators, judging by their clothes. I saw one of the weres spontaneously change, going from a young brunette to a dark, sleekly dangerous wolf with bright yellow eyes, snarling at a table that didn’t even notice her.

Because something bigger was going on.

“Explain yourself!” the princely guy told Mircea, causing the ever-­increasing tension in the room to ratchet up another few notches, although I wouldn’t have said that was possible a moment ago. It felt like it had at ­Tony’s when things were really getting serious, like being in a pressure cooker that was about to blow.

Until Mircea did the last thing that I—­or anyone else, apparently—­had expected.

He laughed.

Chapter Twenty-­nine

The loud, disorderly room abruptly went quiet.

Yet the laughter continued, not a chortle or a guffaw, which might have been put down to stress and would have been over in a moment. But loud, sustained, apparently genuine laughter, that came up from the belly and spilled out of Mircea’s mouth, shockingly loud in the silence. ­Until people started glancing sideways at each other, their confused faces making it clear that they had no idea what to do with this.

Neither did I.

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