I'd believed him when he assured me that he wanted the information to warn the people who were soon to be in distress. When I found out what he'd really been doing with it, I'd sworn never to be used like that again. Not by him, not by anyone.
I swallowed, knowing this wasn't going to go over well. But I had to ask. "Tell me the truth, Rafe. Did Mircea send you?"
If he really was dying, it would make sense for him to send Rafe to tell me so. Mircea had saved my life by refusing Tony his revenge. I owed him one, and I would have expected him to try to cash it in.
What didn't make sense was why he would order Rafe to put on an elaborate pretense, to make me think he'd actually told him to stay away. But although Mircea looked to be in his early thirties, he was five hundred years old. And, like most of the older vamps, to call his thought processes Byzantine was a serious understatement. I'd discovered long ago that the easiest way to figure out what a vampire really wanted was to look for whatever would benefit him the most, and ignore everything else. And what would benefit Mircea was completing the geis.
Rafe blinked at me, and for a moment there was something lost and wide open in his expression, almost bruised. "You think I would lie to you?"
"If Mircea ordered you to, yes. You wouldn't have a choice!"
"There are always choices," Rafe said, offended. "Had I been ordered to tell you a lie—" He gave a small shrug. "I cannot help it if I am not so good an actor at times."
"But you're fond of Mircea. It might be an order you'd agree with."
He sighed in exasperation. "Mircea has many fine qualities, Cassie. I know them well. But he has flaws, too—one in particular that I hope will not prove fatal. He is stubborn. Too stubborn to listen to the Consul's experts when they tell him he cannot defeat this. Too stubborn to believe that even his power can fail. And too proud to admit it, even if he did believe!"
That did sound like Mircea. And I'd never really stopped to wonder how he would react to the geis' malfunctioning. If anything, I'd assumed his only thought would be to use it to get me under his power. But while I'd almost become used to my life spinning out of control, it definitely wasn't the norm for him. Mircea manipulated other people, used them to get what he or the Senate wanted. He wasn't accustomed to having anyone, or anything, do the same to him.
"And consider this," Rafe said urgently, "when you think on deception. Mage Pritkin has no reason to save Mircea. If he dies, the spell is broken. All he has to do is stall long enough for that to happen, and you are free."
An automatic denial rose to my lips, but died before I could utter it. The Codex contained some mysterious spell that Pritkin didn't want found. We'd agreed that once the book was located, I'd let him remove it before I searched it for the counterspell to the geis. But what if he didn't trust me? I didn't know enough about the magical community to know whom to ask for information. So all the experts we'd spoken with had been Pritkin's. Had all that "you go, I'll stay" stuff in Paris been about my welfare or an attempt to make sure I didn't find anything? What if the real reason we kept striking out was because that was what he wanted?
"I almost forgot. I have something for you." Rafe fumbled under the cloak for a moment, then brought out a small package wrapped in a piece of black felt. "The Fey returned them to Mircea. As your master, they assumed he could get them to you."
I parted the felt and into my hands dropped a ratty old pack of tarot cards. They were dirty and creased, and more than a few were missing the corners. I was a little surprised to see them, since I'd lost them while on a disastrous trip to Faerie in search of Myra. I'd been happy to get out of there alive, and hadn't worried too much about what I left behind.
A card suddenly poked up from the deck with no help from me. "The Magician Reversed," a resonant voice began, before I shoved it back inside and slipped