else I couldn’t think straight. Either could have been true right then.
“What bait? What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t hear me?” he frowned. “I called back to you, but then, the ballroom was deafening. I should have thought . . .”
I vaguely remembered seeing Louis-Cesare shout something, just before leaping through Hassani’s shield. I hadn’t been able to hear what it was, but it wouldn’t have mattered. There was nothing he could have said that would have kept me from following him.
“But I wasn’t thinking,” he continued, his voice ragged. “I was reacting, and stupidly so. I lost your sister, I lost Raymond, and I almost lost you.” His arms tightened, bruisingly hard.
I pushed at him until he let me go. “What are you talking about?”
“Jonathan,” he said, uttering the most hated name I knew, and one of the few that could focus even my currently jumbled thoughts.
“What? That’s impossible.”
Louis-Cesare shook his head, his jaw tight. “He was there, outside the ballroom, smirking at me. I went for him without hesitation. And in doing so, I endangered all of us.”
I stared at him, my head spinning. I was still half asleep, and what few faculties I had were stuck on horror—and that name didn’t help. It was even worse than the damned Svarestri, the silver haired bastards in jackal’s clothing that we’d fought tonight.
Jonathan was a nine-hundred-year-old necromancer who had been using stolen magic to unnaturally prolong his life. But taking other people’s magic into your system was like taking a drug. Yes, it could give you a high, as well as extra stamina for spell casting, but it also built up a dependency. One that required more and more over time to achieve the same result.
And that went double for anybody taking enough to elongate their life more than four times the average for magical humans. Jonathan wasn’t just addicted to magic anymore, he required it to live, and had become very creative at coming up with new ways to get it. Including trapping and draining a master vampire to the brink of death day after day after day.
Louis-Cesare had eventually escaped his imprisonment, but the experience had left him deeply scarred. I wouldn’t have blamed him for taking off after Jonathan tonight. Except for one thing.
“He’s dead,” I said harshly. “We saw the body—”
“And I know him! Do you understand?” The gentle expression of a moment ago was gone, and the blue eyes blazed. “All those days at his mercy, all those nights—” he cut off abruptly, his jaw clenched.
“A glamourie, then. A good one—”
“Do you know what Hassani’s master power is?” Louis-Cesare demanded. He was speaking about the unusual abilities that some of the very oldest vamps acquired. I’d assumed that Hassani had one or more; anyone able to hold a consul’s position practically required it. But I’d never heard what it was.
“No.”
“He sees through glamouries, including fey ones. They say there is nothing his eyes do not perceive truly, and many of his Children have this same gift. The fey did not want us to know that they had kidnapped Dorina. You have enemies; as does your father. If we did not see them, it would widen the field of our search considerably.”
“And slow us down.”
He nodded. “The fey could therefore not have used glamouries at this court and have expected them to work. And neither could Jonathan.”
I frowned, trying to think past the pain, and finding it hard going. “But it couldn’t have been him. We saw the body.”
“Yes, we did.” Louis-Cesare’s voice was grim. “But the Circle refused to release it.”
He was talking about the Silver Circle, the world’s leading magical authority and a frequent pain in my ass. They’d had Jonathan in one of the cells at their main headquarters in Stratford, until he had a little ‘accident.’ They’d made us travel all the way to England to see what was left.
“That’s my point,” I said now. “You thought it was him, said you were sure of it—”
“As sure as I could be. But the stench . . .”
My nose wrinkled in memory. The Circle’s HQ was underground, almost like an ancient vampire lair, with a maze of twists and turns and a thousand dark doorways. I’d stopped trying to memorize our path after I saw one suddenly fill in and another casually move itself further down a hallway. But instead of the fine furnishings and unctuous servants of a vampire abode, there had been the reek of potions, so thick that it