“You were in the way,” he said, shrugging off my almost-death. “And I did not mean to warn you specifically, but your people. When I learned that my father was preparing an attack, my mother and I decided to alert the other side. The difficulty was in how to be believed. Due to…certain incidents…in the past, we felt some proof might be required—”
“You think?”
Pewter eyes narrowed. “—and the vampire had it.”
“And that proof was?”
>
“You should know. You killed him with it.”
It took me a minute, because technically, I hadn’t killed Slava at all. But I had shot him. And I guess turning into an ice cube hadn’t improved his chances any.
“You’re talking about the gun.”
“The bullets, to be precise,” Efridís said. “They are infused with a fey battle spell, giving anyone who wields them the power of a strong fey warrior—”
“Hardly,” Æsubrand said tightly. “There is more to being a warrior than a single spell.”
“Perhaps, but it is a devastating one.” She looked at me. “My husband knew he needed three things for any hope of success: superior numbers, a way around the blockade Caedmon had enacted and allies. He has obtained them all. And he is about to turn them on the Circle’s greatest supporter. Tonight, unless you warn them, the six senates will fall. Tonight, unless you stop it, the war may be lost.”
Chapter Forty-one
“This is bullshit,” Ray said, as Louis-Cesare’s chauffeur pulled into the long line of cars waiting to get up the consul’s impressive front drive.
“What is?” I asked, trying to drag on a thigh-high in the dark without running it or kicking Ray.
I managed one of them.
“Ow!” he yelped, glaring at me through the neck hole in his T-shirt, which he was in the process of stripping off.
“Don’t be a baby. I barely touched you.” I looked around. “Where are my shoes?”
“Did you leave them? Tell me you didn’t leave them!”
“I didn’t leave them.” At least, I was pretty sure. It wasn’t like I hadn’t had about a thousand other things to keep straight.
Like getting here at all. I wouldn’t have managed it if Ray hadn’t shown up half an hour after our unwelcome guests left. I’d been holding Claire’s head in one hand, while she tossed up a couple days’ worth of food, and yelling uselessly into the phone in my other when he stumbled through the portal. And bitched me out about the shield he’d had to hack his way through.
He’d come to warn me about the fat bounty that had just been offered for my capture. So he’d been less than happy to hear that I was about to walk back into the arms of the guy who had issued it. He’d been even less happy when he found out I expected him to pay for the privilege.
But there wasn’t any other choice.
Despite what Æsubrand seemed to believe, I did not have a large amount of influence over the vampire world. Or, you know, any. What I did have were contacts, including some who might actually listen to the crazy story I had to tell despite the fact that I had exactly no proof to go with it.
Or they would have if they had been conscious.
But Mircea and Louis-Cesare were still out of it, and they’d taken their masters right along with them. A senior master in extremis will pull power from family, and Mircea’s need had been dire. Louis-Cesare’s masters were wandering around in a stupor, looking like they’d been hit by a large truck, but Mircea’s weren’t even vertical.
That left Radu as the only other person I knew who might be able to force someone to listen. Luckily, he’d been emancipated from Mircea’s mastery centuries ago, so he wasn’t in a dead faint. Unluckily, where he was, along with the rest of the vampire world, was at the fights.
Why he was at the fights, I didn’t know. Yes, this was the last night and, yes, they were choosing new senators this evening. But I’d have thought he’d have had better things to do right now. But apparently not. And that put him behind the consul’s massive wards, which rendered electronic devices as dead as their owners.
So, if I wanted to get his attention, I was going to have to go to him. And that meant walking straight through the consul’s front door. With no one to pull my ass out of the fire if she objected.
Sometimes I really thought I needed my head examined, only that hadn’t been going so well lately.
Like this shoe hunt. Where the— There.