I looked up. “You think it will be that bad?”
“The troll council does! That’s why they’re meeting now, to try to figure out how to spin it. But that’s just it—there is no way! The Dark Fey believe that these weapons are powered by the souls of their people, souls that will never again be able to reincarnate. You can’t spin that!”
She got up and started pacing.
“And the worst thing is, it’s not just some crazy superstition. Louis-Cesare said it had some truth to it.” She turned and put her hands flat on the bed. “He can’t be right, can he? Tell me he isn’t right!”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But Mircea confirmed that it was life energy. Vamps can tell the difference between that and regular magic. And there was plenty of it floating around, after the consul almost got incinerated.”
“I don’t believe it.” She abruptly sat back down on her chair. “I don’t believe it!”
She did, though. The green eyes had just gone incandescent.
“They’re killing us! And Faerie—”
She cut off, and then just sat there for a moment, trying to absorb the implications. Because, yeah. There were a lot of them.
If Caedmon was right about the symbiosis between Faerie and its people, then whoever was making these weapons wasn’t just using up the souls of individuals, but draining that of their entire world. Might explain why there were fewer vargar being born these days, I thought. And then I wondered how many more traits had been lost, how many more vital ways Faerie had been diminished.
I also wondered what had happened to all those souls that had been left behind through the years, but not used up. If the bones deteriorated enough, were they lost, too? Just dissipating into the ground of an alien world, and fading away?
I shivered, despite the warmth of the day and the residual heat of a very hot shower. How long had Faerie been bleeding out? Centuries? Millennia?
Because it had to be that long, right? Ever since our two worlds encountered each other, and people started going back and forth. And while the Light Fey seemed to have a policy of taking their dead back with them, what about the Dark?
They might have done it if left to their own devices, but they hadn’t been. Not those who had been used as slaves and killed for sport. And if what Caedmon said was true, the soul of a Dark Fey this incarnation might be that of a Light Fey the next, so every group was hurt, every group weakened.
It was kind of stunning. And appalling. Which probably explained why Claire looked sick as well as furious.
“They should string her up publicly,” said my pacifist roommate. “That bitch!”
“You mean Efridis?”
“Of course I mean Efridis! Who else?”
And there it was. The thing I’d been contemplating in the shower while my groggy brain woke up. The thing I’d been hoping to avoid, because I knew how this was going to go.
I didn’t say anything for a moment, because I am a coward. And then I sighed, and womaned the hell up. “Ermh.”
Chapter Fifty-two
Claire spun around, because she knows me, too.
“What?”
I licked my lips, and not just because there was jam on them. She had that weird elfin thing going on suddenly, with the too-translucent skin and the hair color not found in nature—not outside of a bonfire, anyway—and the too-bright eyes. I tried telling myself it was just the light streaming through my sheers, but I knew I was lying.
I had a theory about it, too. I didn’t know if I looked any different when Dorina was around, except for a weird, glowy-eye thing I’d glimpsed once and tried not to think about. But I suspected that Claire’s looks changed when her twin was awake.
Which meant that she was awake right now.
Making this not the time for this particular conversation.
But, as usual with my luck, it was already too late.
“You are not going to tell me that you still don’t think it was her!” Claire demanded.
“Yeah, well. That would certainly be easier.”