“You’re in my territory now,” I said, quirking a grin. “I can tell you all about publicity.”
“Do you advocate it?” Marid asked.
“Jury’s still out,” I said.
Antony said, “Right now the most visible public vampire is Mercedes Cook. She’s beautiful, amiable, charming, has given dozens of interviews—and she’s a follower of Dux Bellorum. We have to counter that, get one of our own in the public eye.”
“You have someone in mind to be your first public vampire?” I said. “’Cause you know, I could help out with that. It’s not too late to get in on this week’s show.”
They all looked at Ned, who rolled his eyes.
“It’s perfect,” Antony argued. “Cook was already famous before she declared herself. It endeared her to the public. Ned can do even better than that—he was famous four hundred years ago! She’s an actress, you’re an actor—who better?”
“I will have Shakespeare, Marlowe, and John Donne scholars camped on my doorstep for the rest of eternity. Do you have any idea what I’d go through?” Ned said. He leaned conspiratorially toward me. “I married Donne’s daughter, did you know that?” I hadn’t.
To get a scoop like that, to be the one to help Ned Alleyn go public as a vampire … my talk show personality was absolutely drooling. But the rest of me knew it wasn’t that simple.
“It only works if people believe you’re really Ned Alleyn,” I said. “Can you prove it? Link the person you are now with who you were then?”
“That won’t be the issue,” Ned said. “Mercedes Cook has endeared herself to the public because they don’t have to believe that she’s four hundred years old, or older. She rose to fame in current living memory. She says she’s a vampire and it makes her a novelty, but it doesn’t make her threatening. Try to tell that same public that an Elizabethan actor is still alive—it’s not merely fantastical to the average person, it’s frightening. I’m willing to listen to the argument that more of us need to become public figures. I’m not willing to agree that that person ought to be me. There are better choices.”
“You’re being stubborn, Ned,” Antony said.
“I’m also right,” he answered.
“I think I agree,” I said. “It would be like a grave opening up and the occupant climbing out. Too creepy.”
“Kitty’s made a career of public relations,” Ned said. “We would do well to listen to her.”
“You’re a coward, Edward Alleyn,” Antony said.
“I’m also over four hundred years old. There’s a correlation. Besides, I don’t see how that matters. It’s not as if Mercedes is rallying the masses to the cause of our enemy.”
“Not yet,” Antony said. “But if she already has the majority of us on her side, there’ll be damned little to oppose that when the time comes.”
“You talk like this is going to be a real war. Not a metaphor,” I said.
“It is,” Antony said, as if it was obvious.
“And you think it’s coming soon.”
“Don’t you?”
“Depends,” I said. “Soon on your scale or mine?”
“Soon on a mortal scale, Kitty,” Ned said. “Dux Bellorum has exposed himself these last few years, revealing himself to people like you, who are—or at least were—outside the Long Game. He’s gathering power. It can’t be long.”
I sat on a chair at the edge of their circle, leaning forward. Ben stayed behind me, hand on the chair’s back. I could feel his warmth radiating.
“What’s he planning, then? Everyone I’ve talked to about the Long Game says it’s leading to something, that there’s an endpoint. What are we talking about? He enslaves all the werewolves? Destroys all the vampires? Overruns nations with his hordes? Runs for president? Does anyone have any idea?”
“‘And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.’” Ned the orator intoned the words, which filled the room, and the house, echoing through the foundations.
“That’s not Shakespeare,” I said.
“No,” Marid said. “It’s the Book of Revelation.”
Oh. Well then. “Okay. So we’re talking Biblical. That still doesn’t tell me anything.”