I received only stony silence for an answer. Louis-Cesare’s eyes were on the road, but I could see them clearly in the mirror. They were perfect receptors, showing every reaction in those vivid irises. His expression was blank, the planes of his face like those of a statue, cold and unyielding. But when he thought about Jonathan, his eyes were haunted.
“I said, you risked your—”
“It is not your concern.”
“Really? Because that’s not how it looks to me. There was no reason for the Black Circle to hit that airplane. Yeah, it belongs to the Senate and yeah, there’s a war on. But they didn’t just attack it and leave.
They waited for us to come back. They waited.”
“We already knew we have a traitor.”
“Yes, but now we know—” I was interrupted by a gasp of agonized sound from the mage in the back. Considering his current state, I didn’t think pummeling him into silence all the way to MAGIC was a good idea, not if anyone wanted to question him later. I found a knockout dart in my backpack and ensured that he stayed unconscious for the duration of the ride.
I turned back to find Louis-Cesare’s eyes on me. “Now we know something else, too,” I continued. “We have to conclude that Drac is working with the Black Circle, unless you think we have two leaks, one informing Uncle of our whereabouts and the other giving the same information to the mages. Personally, I find that a little hard to swallow.”
“It is not impossible,” Louis-Cesare said stubbornly. “There have been cases recently where vampires, some sworn to first-level masters, have managed to break their allegiance. A few even attempted to kill their own sire.”
My beer had left a ring of condensation on the knee of my jeans. I rubbed at it and tried to digest this new bombshell. “Why haven’t I heard about this?”
“The Senate is keeping it quiet. They are afraid that to do otherwise would encourage any vampire dissatisfied with his position to attempt to break their master’s hold.” He glanced at me. “You understand the risk?”
I nodded numbly. One of the main things keeping the vamp world all nice and tidy—most of the time—is the near impossibility of any vamp breaking the control of his sire. Each master answers for his or her children, right up to the Senate level. The only exception to the rule, or so I’d thought, was vamps who reached first-level status. I wondered how many would stay loyal if they had an alternative. Why did I think it wouldn’t be a lot?
“What is the Senate doing about this?” I demanded. If the Black Circle had figured out a way to emancipate at will, we could be looking at chaos—hundreds, maybe thousands, of disaffected vamps, all making their own decisions, with no regulation other than brute force.
“Investigating. We have reason to believe that the method the dark was using is no longer available to them. However, there is no knowing how many vampires were affected before then. The number is unlikely to be high, but it is almost certain that we have not yet found them all.”
Things just kept getting better and better. “As interesting as all this is, it still doesn’t explain Jonathan.”
“Jonathan has nothing to do with our mission.”
“It looked like he was pretty involved to me!”
A parade of emotion finally flickered across Louis-Cesare’s face—pride, stubborness, bone-deep pain—but he said nothing. I’d long ago learned the same lesson—showing your sore spot only allows it to be hit more easily. And Jonathan was obviously a very sore spot for Louis-Cesare. But I had to push. Whether I liked it or not, we were in this together. And there’s nothing I hate worse than fighting enemies I know nothing about.
“That hit wasn’t meant for me,” I said bluntly. “Drac already left me a message, remember? He took out my team and thumbed his nose in my face. Why do that if he was planning to kill me barely an hour later? For some reason, he wants me alive and scared.” At least for the moment. “So he didn’t order the hit on the plane. The mages cooked that one up on their own.”
I waited, but the only response to my nice logical argument was Louis-Cesare’s hands tightening on the wheel. “I’ve had no run-ins with the Black Circle that could explain them sending a whole hit squad after me,” I continued. “So they were after someone else. And there’s only two of us.”
A long pause. “Jonathan is a… personal issue,” I was finally informed.
“There aren’t any personal issues at a time like this.”
Louis-Cesare reached over and flipped on the radio. He settled on an eighties station where Eddie Van Halen was going to town on a guitar riff. Nice, but I suspected he just wanted something loud. I scowled at my reflection in the eggplant-colored windows, wondering when my partner had decided that I’d recently been lobotomized.
The plain fact is, anyone the Senate wants dead gets dead. That holds true even for powerful dark mages. It might be more difficult in their cases and therefore take a little longer, but there’s no one they can’t reach in the end. Yet Jonathan was still alive. Meaning that Louis-Cesare hadn’t asked them for help.
Now, maybe he just wanted to take care of the mage himself—he had said it was personal—but I doubted it. I felt the same way about Claire, but if anyone had harmed her, the Senate would hold him for my tender mercies. Taking their help didn’t mean ruling out personal involvement. So there was something about Louis-Cesare’s history with the mage that he didn’t want known.
“You can’t hide it from them forever,” I told him, just to make it clear that I was keeping up.
“I am hiding nothing.” The words were calm enough, but the Mustang was all but flying down the highway.
I was left with the certainty that whatever Louis-Cesare was keeping from me, it was very personal and very disturbing. But there was exactly nothing I could do about it. “If that’s how you want it.”
His hands flexed on the wheel, their tight clench loosening slightly. “That’s how it is.”
Chapter Seven