Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,237

the ground. It created a bubble of peace, an oasis of tranquility in all the noise. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Thank you,” Mircea said. “But I have not finished this one yet. It has an . . . unusual . . . flavor.”

I checked out his glass. “It’s chocolate. Fred was experimenting.”

“About Fred,” Marlowe began, trying to look charming.

“Don’t even.”

The charm evaporated. “He’s my best man!”

“Something you should have thought about before you sent him to spy on me.”

I should have figured it out before Mircea told me, as part of his new honesty offensive. Marlowe had been bugging my rooms—and sometimes my person—practically since I got this job, but Pritkin had been finding and removing the spells. So Marlowe had gotten sneaky and sent a physical spy instead.

And he’d sent a good one.

I found Fred on the terrace, the night after Jo almost destroyed everything, smoking a cigarette. On anyone else, the red embers would have cast an ominous light over his face, making him appear a little sinister. But Fred was just Fred.

“People always expect James Bond, you know?” he said, as I joined him. “But he wouldn’t work at all.”

No, I guessed not. But the bumbling, food-obsessed, crappy dresser, who most people found immediately forgettable, would. It was why he was so good at his job—well, that and the fact that he was one of the rare vamps who could alter their auras at will, to look like they belonged to any family they chose.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” he said, and looked it. “I know it doesn’t make a difference, but I wanted you to know that.”

“You seem awfully tenderhearted for a spy,” I pointed out.

He shook his head. “Not normally. Most of the people I go after . . . but you’re not like that. And this place—” He glanced around, and in the darkness, his eyes looked liquid. “It’s funny, I can look like I fit in anywhere, but this is the first place in a long time that I actually . . .” He blinked suddenly, and looked away. “Well. I’m sorry, is all.”

“So, you’ll be going back with Santiago, then? And the others?” Because, while most of my guys were now actually my guys, some had voted otherwise. I’d be sorry to lose them, but Fred . . . Fred hurt. He hurt a lot.

He’d been looking out over the city, but now he turned to blink at me several times. “What?”

“I asked if you’d be going back with the others, or if you’d decided to stay.”

It was a simple enough question, but Fred seemed to be having trouble with it. His face kept gyrating around, like he was having some kind of stroke, and then he turned away again. Before abruptly spinning back around and throwing out his hands, sloshing most of the whiskey in his highball onto a nearby bush.

“What?”

“I asked—”

“I know what you asked! You can’t be serious! I betrayed you!”

“You did your job. I understand—”

A flurry of more gyrations, both facially and armwise, cut me off. “Don’t understand! Rant at me! Rave! I deserve it! I’ve been beating myself up over it for weeks, ever since I overheard that conversation between you and Rian. I’d been piecing things together for a while, but I wasn’t sure—not until then. Not until you mentioned Arthurian freaking Britain! Then I knew, I knew who Mage Pritkin really was, and what did I do?”

“Your job,” I repeated, because I’d had time to process this. And to realize that Fred was like the rest of us, bumbling around, just trying to figure out what was the right thing to do, and getting it wrong half the time. Like I’d gotten it wrong with Lizzie.

“I executed somebody,” I told him. “I didn’t want to, I put it off for weeks, agonized over it. But in the end, I did it, thinking it was my duty, that I didn’t have a choice. I was wrong, too.”

Fred didn’t ask any questions. He probably didn’t need to. There were plenty of people who knew the story now.

“She was better than I thought her to be,” I told him. “Better than anybody did. I thought she was stupid and venal and faithless, and sometimes she was. But she could also be smart and generous and loyal, but I didn’t see that until the end, and I got it wrong, Fred. I got it so fucking wrong!”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I could. She even told me she’d