“Then why did he want him back? Ray said Cheung wanted him to help bring in something big. But Zheng just told me that they don’t need him anymore.”
“It could be unrelated,” Marlowe said. “Unlike Lord Mircea, I am not convinced that this is part of our problem. Cheung might have been planning to bring in a shipment at one time, but is now attempting to distance himself from the smuggling issue.”
“Why? What changed?”
“What changed is that more smugglers have been turning up dead. My men have been trying to question them, but finding only houses full of corpses.”
“Someone is tidying up loose ends,” Louis-Cesare said.
“But that someone doesn’t have to be a vampire,” Marlowe pointed out.
“What’s the alternative?” Radu asked. “There’s just not that many creatures who—”
“Æsubrand,” I cut in. “He was there. At Slava’s.”
“Yes, but he’s fey,” Radu protested.
“So?”
“The fey are known for their abilities with the natural world, not with the mind.”
“Caedmon has mental abilities.”
“Yes, well. That’s Caedmon,” Radu said sardonically. “We are talking about—”
“His nephew, who could have inherited all sorts of—”
“Could have does not mean did.”
“He’s fey. It’s possible.”
“Don’t let your animosity for the creature cloud your judgment,” Mircea told me. “It’s possible that he was there for an entirely unconnected reason.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that the fey are vindictive little shits,” Marlowe said impatiently. “Slava was rumored to import fey slaves—”
“Something he’s been doing for years, and nobody has seemed to care.”
“—and then there’s the weapon you found last night, which had fey magic written all over it. Or so it appeared.”
“You didn’t examine it?”
“I might have, had you managed to bring the thing back!”
“Or you might have asked Æsubrand about it, had you caught him,” Louis-Cesare murmured blandly, handing Marlowe another cup of coffee. And getting a blistering glare in return.
“Wasn’t it at Central?” I asked.
“No,” Marlowe said shortly. “Of course, considering the amount of acid leaking about the place, it could have melted into a puddle before we got there. But we didn’t find any stray .45s inundated with a fey spell.”
I shook my head. “I think it was just a regular gun. I used standard ammo in it without a problem. It seemed to be the bullets that—”
“Yes, but since we don’t have it, we can’t know for sure, can we?” Marlowe asked sweetly.
One of these days, I swore to God…
“So you think it was some rare fey thing we’re not supposed to have?” I asked, gritting my teeth. “Because we’re talking about bullets here, not some rune or—”