“Yeah, but how many do you think would be willing to make him their second?” Alphonse might carve out a niche for himself sooner or later, but no way was he going to end up second in command again. Not for centuries, maybe not ever. And I didn’t think that would sit too well with the vamp I’d known.
“The Consul has forbidden anyone to help you,” Rafe reminded me.
“Alphonse isn’t so great at following orders,” I reminded him right back. “I think he’ll risk it.” If I’d been giving odds, I’d have put them at ten to one at least. I was his best chance to hold on to his current position, which made me his new best friend. No matter what the Consul said. “I need Alphonse and a team of his craziest thugs. Can you get him?”
“I can contact him,” Rafe reluctantly admitted. “But even if he agrees, I don’t know if any of this will be soon enough.”
“Soon enough for what?” I asked impatiently. “I know where the Codex is, Rafe. I just need help to get to it!”
“Yes, but Mircea…he’s getting worse. And if he loses his faculties, will the counterspell reverse the damage? Or will he be left that way permanently?” Despite our position, which was a little too close to the ovens for comfort, he shivered.
I sat back in my chair, feeling dizzy. I’d assumed that once I had the spell, everything would go back to normal. But what if it didn’t? And with the Senate in the middle of a war, what if they decided a crazed master vamp was a liability they couldn’t afford? No wonder Rafe was freaking out. If the geis didn’t kill Mircea, the Consul might.
Ironically, what I needed was more time. I had the location of the Codex; sooner or later, I was going to get that spell. But it wouldn’t do me a lot of good if Mircea went crazy while I was making plans. Somehow I had to mitigate the effects of the geis while I figured everything out. And there was only a single possibility for that: the one place where I knew from experience the geis did not operate at full force.
“What about Faerie?” I asked. “If we could get him there, it might buy enough time to—”
“The Consul thought of that,” Rafe said. His tone was even, but his agitated fingers were reducing my linen napkin to shreds. “But the Fey do not want any more vampires in their world, especially one in Mircea’s condition. They refused a visa.”
“Who did? The Light or the Dark?”
He looked surprised. “The Senate doesn’t deal with the Dark Fey. Their treaty with the Light prohibits it.”
“But I do.” The Dark Fey king expected me to find and deliver the Codex. Until that happened, he needed to keep me happy. That gave me a lever to extort a few small favors, such as room and board for an ailing vampire.
“But, even were the Fey willing to help, how would we get him there?”
“What about the portal at MAGIC?” The Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation was the supernatural community’s version of the United Nations. It wasn’t my favorite place, but we’d have to go in to get Mircea anyway, so it made sense to simply take him through MAGIC’s own link to Faerie.
But Rafe squashed that idea. “It has not yet been repaired. Your passage last time was not…conventional…and it shattered the spell. The Consul has appealed to the Fey to allow another, but they say if we cannot control who enters their lands better than that, they are not certain they wish us to have one. We are in negotiations, but there is no knowing how long they may take.”
And the Fey weren’t known for doing anything in a hurry. Not to mention that the portal, when and if it did open back up, was almost certain to be very well guarded. No help there.
“Damn it!” I hit the table with my palm, hard enough to slosh my untouched coffee everywhere. I was mopping it up with the napkin shreds when one of the mental Post-its I’d been filing at the back of my brain began waving about. “Tony has an illegal portal around here somewhere,” I said slowly. “He used it for smuggling. I just don’t know where it is.”
Rafe gripped my hands, and for the first time he looked hopeful. “How do we locate it?”
“I don’t know. But I know who to ask.”
“You don’t need a portal until you have the book,” the pixie said, fluffing her tiny shock of bright red hair. She’d found a compact somewhere, possibly in the trash because most of the powder it once held was gone. She was using it for a mirror on the dressing table she’d made out of a bunch of CD cases. “And you haven’t made any progress on that at all.”
“You need it to get back home,” I pointed out. “Unless you want to stay here?”
I looked around her makeshift apartment. It was fairly spacious from her perspective, taking up several shelves in the closet of Pritkin’s study room. She’d fixed up the top shelf as the dressing area, while the bottom was a bedroom, complete with an oven mitt for a sleeping bag and a small flashlight for a lamp. She shot me a dirty look nonetheless. “Yes, I’ve found your world to be so hospitable.”
“When I visited yours, I was almost killed!”
“And I was locked in a file cabinet,” she spat.
“It beats a dungeon!”
“Ever try it?”
I’d seen the file cabinet, which looked like a bomb had exploded from the inside. “It didn’t look like you had any trouble getting out.”
“Only because it was made of some inferior metal, instead of iron.” She shuddered. “I could have died, my magic leached away, my body slowly freezing in the cruel grip of cold—”
“Yes, but you didn’t. And if we could get back to the point?”