"Wonderful," I said morosely. "All I need is another run-in with the Circle."
"Cass," Billy said, almost gently, "there's more than one."
It took me a moment to understand what he meant; then my eyes automatically slid over to Rafe. "The Black has it?" I whispered in a savage undertone.
The Black Circle was a group of dark magic users, people with no scruples about how they obtained power or what they did with it. They had recently allied with some rogue vampires against the Silver Circle and the Vampire Senate, in a war that threatened to engulf the entire supernatural world. So far, I'd mostly managed to stay out of it. I really wanted to keep it that way.
At least Rafe had the grace to look slightly abashed. "I'm trying to avoid making any more enemies," I said tightly.
"And if Mircea wants to raid a dark stronghold, he has the people to do it," Billy pointed out. "He sure as hell doesn't need us."
I nodded emphatically. For once, Billy was making a lot of sense. Rafe looked lost, unable to hear Billy when he wasn't in residence, so to speak. "Mircea has a capable stable—" I began, only to have Rafe cut me off with an agitated gesture.
"None of them will do anything," he croaked, sounding half-choked. I went around the bar to get him some water.
"Why? Do they want him to die?"
"No!" He looked around agitatedly, but his almost yell had been lost in the thrum of music and the hum of conversation. He leaned over the bar and dropped his voice to a whisper anyway, so much so that I practically had to lip-read. "There might be a few who resent their positions, who think they could do better elsewhere, but most are wise enough to see…" He trailed off.
"See what?"
Rafe took the glass I handed him, but didn't drink. He put it down and started rubbing both hands across the bar top in an unconscious, distressed motion. "That with Tony gone and Mircea dead, there will be no one to protect us. The family will be ripped apart, each of us taken by other masters to add to their power base. And they won't know us, Cassie; they won't care. We'll be commodities to them, nothing more. Things to be used and discarded when we fail to please."
I mentally cursed myself for not thinking that far ahead. Of course Mircea's death would be more than a personal tragedy—his position as family patriarch ensured that. And it would be devastating for people like Rafe.
He'd never had much respect at Tony's, where a steady trigger finger counted for more than artistic genius. But at least he'd known the rules of the household and where he fit into the hierarchy. In a new family there would be a constant struggle for position—maybe for decades. And Rafe was no warrior. He might not last long enough to carve a new place for himself.
"Then why won't the family help him?" I demanded. "It's their butts on the line as much as his!"
"Because the Consul has forbidden it!" Rafe whispered. "I am risking her wrath by even being here!"
Well, that explained the nervousness. "Why would she do that? She needs Mircea alive!" As scary as the Consul was, she couldn't hope to win the war alone. The Senate was ultimately only as strong as its members, and it had already lost more than a quarter of them to combat or treachery. She couldn't afford to lose Mircea, too.
"She says that everything that can be done is being done, and that we'll only make matters worse by interfering. But I think there is more to it than that. You're the obvious person for us to seek out, and she doesn't want us to aid you."
"But I'm trying to help!" Lifting the geis would benefit me as much as Mircea, and if there was one thing I'd have thought the Consul understood, it was self-interest.
"I know that, Cassie. But she doesn't. She believes that you are still angry with him for placing the geis, and may attempt some form of revenge. She knows you don't have to help him; that once he dies, the geis is broken—"
"She actually believes I'd do that? Stand by and watch him die?"
Rafe's hands clenched on the bar top. "I don't know what she might think under normal circumstances. But these are not normal! We are at war, and she is afraid of losing him. Even