who ran progressively bigger and better cons, as well as reaping rewards from mentoring their contacts on the outer edges. Only those who overperformed in a major way were able to move up—or inward, in this case—and get closer to the center of the organization. My father had been one of them.
He’d scammed the scammers, promising to get his ghosts to spy on the Silver Circle for them, something they’d had little success with themselves. He told them that he was creating a ghost army and needed magic to feed it—a lot of magic—only to take it and run when they started getting suspicious. But few people ever got close enough to try something like that, including the Silver Circle itself, which regularly busted dark mages, but had never managed to reach the core.
“This is the dark mage currently known as Jonathan,” Mircea said. “Some of you have heard of him; others have not. To sum him up, he is a leading member of the Black Circle who has been assisting our enemies in the war. However, he has been a problem for much longer than the current conflict.”
He looked pointedly down the table, where an elderly man rose to his feet.
He was wearing a slightly old-fashioned, dark gray, three-piece suit, nothing special, and although I couldn’t see his feet, I was pretty sure he had on the same pair of scuffed brown brogues he always wore, because they were comfy and he could give a crap about fashion. The only impressive thing about him was the halo of white hair, which was the male version of the coven leader’s mane I’d seen back in the witches’ enclave. It wasn’t floor-length, but it was electric, wafting about his head as if a sea anemone had decided to perch there for a moment.
He looked like an irascible professor, or maybe a slightly loony librarian.
He wasn’t.
He was Jonas Marsden, acting head of the Silver Circle. And as leader of the largest and most powerful magical organization on earth, he got respect. It was subtle; thanks to their mental abilities, vamps didn’t need to disrupt a meeting to chat. But you could tell when they were in someone else’s head: their eyes got a little distant, and their faces tended to sag.
There weren’t any saggers in the room right now.
“As Lord Mircea has said, the necromancer goes by Jonathan,” Jonas said. “Although whether that is his true name or not is a matter of some debate, as are most other facts about him. We don’t know how old he is, where he originally came from, or what training he received. We do know that we have been hunting him for over four hundred years.”
And, okay, that got an audible reaction.
And then Marlowe made it worse.
“He’s far older than that. We have it on good authority that he was alive in the twelfth century, making him at least nine hundred—”
“That’s impossible! He’s human!” That was Ismitta again, who’d also resumed her seat at some point, but who was now leaning across the table.
“He is using magic to extend his life,” Jonas told her. “Something that occurs naturally for mages, who feed off food as ordinary humans do, but also off the magic our bodies process from the world around us. We are essentially fleshy talismans, which is why we live roughly twice as long as other humans, and some more than that, depending on how powerful they are—”
“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