“Everybody knows that!” Ismitta interrupted, her dark eyes flashing scarlet for an instant. “But that means two hundred years, maybe a bit more. Not almost a thousand!”
“It depends on how much magic you are able to acquire,” Jonas said mildly. “Jonathan wormed his way into the Dark Circle hierarchy, giving himself access to their sizable stockpiles. Considering his age, I doubt he produces any of his own magic anymore, but he has been artificially prolonging his life with huge quantities of stolen power and now lives mostly or completely off the energy it provides.”
“We think that is what allows him to find magical resources that others overlook,” Mircea added. “He specializes in locating magically creative individuals and bending their discoveries to the use of his Circle—and lately, to that of our enemies.”
But that answer didn’t seem to satisfy Ismitta—or a Russian countess I’d met once, at Mircea’s main court.
She was a good distance down the table, but impossible to miss, swathed in enough white sable to send PETA into paroxysms and an acre or so of diamonds glittering on a ball gown that some unknown designer had made to look like falling snow, with constantly changing snowflake patterns on black velvet. With her mane of bright red hair and impressive bosom, she was already striking enough, but the booming voice with the thick Russian accent ensured that she drew all eyes.
“Meercha! Are you telling us dere are hundreds of dese ancient dark mages running about?”
She made little running man motions with her fingers inside of opera-length gloves, in case anybody had missed her point. But she needn’t have worried. Another murmur ran around the table at her words, which Jonas quickly moved to dispel.
“Not hundreds. Probably not even dozens. The process of ingesting magic that is not your own is . . . dangerous.”
“Dangerous how?” Ismitta demanded.
Jonas pursed his lips, and he and another mage, almost old enough to be his contemporary, exchanged a glance. They didn’t seem to like being interrogated about their specialty, which was the main thing keeping the vamps from taking over the supernatural world. There was peace between the Circle and the senate at the moment, but as Pritkin had noted, that hadn’t always been the case, and the mages guarded their knowledge carefully.
But I guess Jonas decided that this wasn’t a state secret, because after a pause, he answered.
Or he started to.
“He sources it from us,” someone said hoarsely, from the other way down the table.
I craned my neck and recognized another vamp I knew, although I hadn’t seen him for a while. Louis-Cesare, a powerful member of the European Senate, had come over to fight a duel for the consul near the beginning of summer. And it looked like he hadn’t left yet. Or maybe he was back—everyone else seemed to be.
He looked a little different from the last time I saw him. The thick auburn hair was the same, pulled back from his face with a subtle clip, and the strong jaw, piercing blue eyes, and aristocratic features hadn’t changed. But the expression . . .
He hadn’t been having a nice time when we met, but he looked worse now. Not physically, not exactly, but the handsome face was haunted. He was speaking to the table, but his gaze never left Jonathan’s slowly revolving head.
“He took me,” he said, his voice expressionless except for a slight crackle around the edges. “Drained me of magic, of life, brought me to the brink again and again. I died every night and was reborn every morning, only for him to do it all over again. But it was never enough.”
He stopped speaking, but nobody said anything. The monotone voice, contrasted with the pain on his face, was chilling. We just sat there, for maybe thirty seconds, until he spoke again.
“My family suffered as much as I did. They became little more than a battery, struggling to source enough energy to keep me alive through the bond. But they weren’t feeding me; they were feeding him. The only satisfaction I had was knowing that the very power that sustained him was perverting him at the same time. Humans aren’t like us; they don’t feed the way we do. And when one tries it . . .”
He trailed off, and something about the distance in his eyes told me that he wouldn’t speak again.
But that wasn’t true for someone else.
A new hand hit the table, and this time the blow was hard enough to vibrate the heavy wood all the way over here. “You find him—any of you—you keep him alive for me, you understand? I want him alive.”
The speaker was a stunning short-haired brunette with liquid dark eyes and sensual red lips who would have been arresting anyway, but the passion in her face and voice took it to a whole other level. She was stunning, almost literally, to the point that it took me a second to recognize her. And then I slowly sank back against my seat.
She was Mircea’s daughter, Dorina, with vampire fangs and the family’s trademark glowing golden eyes when their power was up. But she wasn’t a vampire; she was something scarier. She was dhampir.
And completely freaking nuts.
The last time we met, she’d tried to kill me. And despite the Pythian power, despite one hell of a lot of backup, despite it being right here, in this house, where that sort of thing wasn’t tolerated—at least not without permission—she’d damned near succeeded.
I was beginning to understand why I hadn’t been invited to this meeting.
Chapter Twenty-eight
“Yes, quite,” Jonas said, in the silence that followed. And with what, under the circumstances, was an almost eerie little chuckle. “Mixing in the blood of nonhumans can cause a bit of bother.”
Everyone stared at him. Anyone else would have been in