A sly smile, the first real emotion I’d seen from him, flickered across his face for a second, before being replaced with more faux concern. “My apologies. I thought you knew.”
“Knew what, damn it!”
“Why, that he left this morning.”
I stared at him for a moment, then tore across the corridor and down to our old suite of rooms, where I found the door open and half a dozen servants cleaning up and repairing the damage. But no Louis-Cesare. And no luggage.
I stood there for a moment, vibrating.
Louis-Cesare had deserted me once, to run after Christine, despite the fact that she was a complete psycho. He’d received word that she had escaped from Alejandro, so he hadn’t really had a choice, but the fact that he’d gone without so much as a word had almost ended us before we began. The one, absolute, unbreakable rule of our relationship was that we communicated. If one or the other had to leave unexpectedly, fine, but at the very least we left a note.
I did not see a note.
I did not see anything, except for people mopping up what could be water from last night. Or what could be signs of another fight, one that I’d slept through. And that meant—
Fear clutched at my heart, sharp and dizzying, and a cold hand stopped my breathing. I whirled on Hassani as he followed me inside, as unhurried as if we were having a stroll through a garden. He didn’t so much as blink when I snatched his own knife and held it to his throat.
He did look faintly surprised, however.
“If you’ve killed him—” I growled.
“Killed him?” he blinked at me.
“Louis-Cesare! If he’s dead—”
“Oh, I sincerely hope not.” A finger pushed the knife away. “That would be . . . difficult to explain.”
I saw red. And this time, it wasn’t from Dorina, who wasn’t here to help me. But then, she hadn’t been for most of the last five hundred years. She’d intervened on some occasions, when she happened to be in residence and judged me to be out of my depth. But the rest of the time I’d been on my own, and fighting creatures far more powerful than me.
And I didn’t fight fair.
I grabbed a small tab from my jacket, slapped it to the front of his clothes, and sprang away. I didn’t want to be caught in an inverse shield, one that contracted upon contact, trapping the subject. Usually trapping the subject, I revised, as Hassani broke out of it pretty much immediately.
Okay, upgrade, I decided, and threw a golden spider instead.
My arsenal used to be limited to what I could beg, borrow or steal, unless I’d actually lucked out and gotten paid. And even then, magical weapons—particularly the unlicensed, not exactly legal variety—are expensive. I’d had to be judicious about what I used.
But while senators don’t get a salary, I’d discovered that they do get one very big perk of the job: access to the senate’s extensive arsenal. Which was not only well equipped, but also contained all the fun little toys they’d confiscated from the bad guys. And the bad guys knew how to party.
Which was why the tiny spider had babies immediately upon contact, who went scurrying all over those snowy white robes. Hassani watched them with distaste. “It doesn’t matter what you throw at me, dhampir. It isn’t going to—”
He stopped talking abruptly, probably because the big spider had just webbed up his mouth. The babies quickly did the same to his body, wrapping him in layers of fine, white silk, like the mummy he wasn’t. And then contracting the web, causing him to topple over onto his back.
He hit the floor with a thud, one of the servants screamed, and another jumped for me—and got slapped with one of my little tabs for his trouble. He didn’t seem to find it as easy to break out of as his master, who was thrashing about on the floor, having managed to halfway free himself already. But that was the beauty of Spider’s Bite, as the golden spell was called: the more you fought, the stronger it got, pulling power from its victim.
And Hassani had it to burn.
In another moment, he actually did look like a mummy. The thick, white strands, maybe a foot deep at this point, had covered his eyes and muffled the rich tones of his voice. And then cut them off altogether.