“Fine. Be that way. But he’s stupid about you. And it’s not because he wants some kind of redemption for Christine.”
“You don’t get it. He thinks he killed her.”
“He did kill her, but only trying to save her. And if he hadn’t done anything, she’d have died anyway. Those damned dark mages had almost drained her dry.”
“Dark mages she’d have never met if Louis-Cesare hadn’t sent her to the guy who sold her to them.”
Ray narrowed his eyes. “Are you blaming him? ’Cause he couldn’t have known that. That mage was supposed to be legit—”
“I’m not blaming him,” I said wearily. “I’m telling you how he thinks.”
He’d tried to help Christine, a wandering, sick, clueless witch that his vampires had stumbled across, by seeing that she was nursed back to health. And by then sending her to a supposedly upstanding mage for training and integration into the magical community. She had been born into a human family who viewed mag
ic as being of the devil, and had afterward been raised in a convent, of all things. So she’d had zero help in learning to control her gifts.
He’d done all the right things, but somehow it had all gone to hell anyway. The mage had been desperate for money, and had sold her off to some nefarious types who had promptly drained her of all her magic and most of her life before Louis-Cesare tracked her down. And realized that there was only one way to save her.
But she had been too far gone, and the Change hadn’t worked. She’d become a revenant, a mad killing machine who had processed her early religious training into a seething hatred of all vampire-kind. She was completely mad and should have been killed on the spot. In any other family, she would have been.
Just like me.
A lot of vamps viewed dhampirs as basically half-human revenants, and believed the remedy for us both should be the same: a quick stake and a hasty bake in the nearest bonfire, just to be certain we never came back. But Mircea had let me live, just as Louis-Cesare had continued trying to save the unsavable. Just like he was doing now.
Well, at least now I understood his interest in me better. It had never really made sense before. Cinderella finding her prince made a good story, but it rarely happened like that in real life. In real life, we were attracted to people who were like us.
And no two people could be more different than me and Louis-Cesare.
“He’s stupid about you,” Ray said, glaring at me. “And you’re stupid about him. You’re both stupid about each other, which would be great if you weren’t also really fucking stupid—”
“Ray.”
“—and can’t see it. That’s all. That’s all I’m saying.”
And for once he actually did shut up. Maybe because we were turning into the long, curved driveway and were about to arrive. And there’s one good thing to come out of this whole lousy day, I thought as I gazed out the window at the consul’s marble wedding cake of a house. After last night, the sight of it should have been tying my stomach into knots.
And I didn’t feel a thing.
Just like I didn’t feel anything about Louis-Cesare. Nothing that I hadn’t already dealt with twice over, anyway. Nothing that I hadn’t known from the moment I met him, looking like a freaking Armani model who lived in mansions and had a personal tailor and didn’t need a low-rent problem showing up and causing him shit on a regular basis. Shit that he dealt with because of some misplaced sense of noblesse oblige that I didn’t need and sure as hell didn’t want. He was going to get himself killed still trying to make it up to Christine, when it would never be okay because she was dead and gone and it was over.
Like any crazy ideas I’d ever had.
Ray said something under his breath that sounded like “stupid,” which I ignored since the car had just glided to a halt. Leaving me with nothing left to do but get out, so I did. And walked inside without waiting for him because there was someone I needed to see.
A couple extra atmospheres hit me as soon as I passed through the front doors, but nobody else did, so I guessed I really was invited. It surprised me that there was no welcoming committee, probably armed to the teeth, but maybe they’d expected me to act like a lady and sit in the car until they arrived to open the door. Since they knew me, I couldn’t imagine why they had made this assumption, but since I was out, I decided not to waste the free time.
A servant pointed me toward a ballroom that put Slava’s to shame, a huge marble and mirror monstrosity that took up at least a third of the bottom floor of the main house. It looked like it could hold a few thousand people without anybody having to rub elbows. Only most of them were missing since it was midday and they wanted to be fresh for the fights tonight.
But not all.
There were a couple dozen vamps doing a Cirque du Soleil impression in and around the four great chandeliers that glittered a couple stories overhead. I was surprised they hadn’t removed those, despite the lack of windows, since they looked like they’d probably cost a fortune. And since they seemed to be getting in the way.
Or maybe not. Vamps bounced off walls, somersaulted, hit the floor and sprang back into the air. And shed sparks off each other’s swords as they clashed eight, ten, sometimes twelve feet off the floor. And yet somehow they managed not to so much as shiver the crystals on the consul’s precious antiques.
It was very impressive.
It was also bullshit. Which was possibly why the guy standing by the far wall had a sardonic expression on his face as he watched his boys go at it. Zheng knew as well as anyone that real fights don’t look like they were choreographed by Hollywood. Real fights are ugly, brutal and short.
But he didn’t seem too interested in demonstrating that at the moment.