a necromancer for a Pythia, after all, thanks to my father’s abilities, some of which had passed down to me. Although it was doubtful that many people knew that, since he’d specialized in ghosts, which are a lot less visible than shambling bodies.
Only I guess the secret was out now—thanks, Caedmon. I guess he’d heard rumors about some stuff that had happened on that battlefield. And now, so had everyone else.
“I—my father was,” I hedged, because everybody was looking at me.
“Lady Cassandra has many gifts,” Mircea began. “However—”
“Oh, good, it’s settled, then,” Caedmon said, looking pleased.
“Nothing is settled!”
“You are Lady Cassandra?” the military guy cut in. He looked surprised, eyeing up my pencil skirt and cute ruffly blouse.
All right, Augustine, I thought evilly. You win. I’m dumping this thing as soon as I get home.
“Yeah,” I told him, and then I got a surprise.
The old soldier limped over. He was a vamp, so he must have been injured sometime before the change. It made him strangely relatable somehow, as did the way he let out a slight grunt as he went down on one knee to look me in the eyes.
“A Pythia saved my life once, long ago,” he told me. “I’ve never forgotten.”
I blinked. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, I tended to think of Pythias as sitting around their throne rooms all day, listening to petitioners’ BS. It was nice to know that that wasn’t always the case.
“Which one?” I asked, wondering if she was somebody I knew.
“The last of the great Byzantine Pythias. I believe her given name was—”
“Berenice.” I nodded. “I heard she was formidable.”
He grinned, showing slightly yellow old man’s teeth. “That she was. Knocked me on my, er, behind with a bloody great stick she had. I was unhappy about it until I saw the knife sticking out of the thing. Would have taken me right between the eyes if she hadn’t acted. Still don’t know what that was all about.”
Someone was messing with the timeline and you got killed in the process, I didn’t say, because that sort of thing rarely went down well.
“She knew you had more to do,” I said instead.
The old knight nodded. “Was Changed barely a month later, so I suppose she was right.” He looked behind him, at the bodies on the floor, and his jaw tightened. His face turned back to me, and it was sorrowful and angry and sad, all at the same time. “Can you help me as well? Can you tell me what happened to my men?”
“You’re asking for a vision?” I said, confused.
“Nothing so difficult,” Caedmon said cheerfully. “Merely a look inside the mind.”
For a moment, I didn’t get it. And then I did, and thought about retching again. Instead, I glared at the fey king and wondered why I’d ever thought him attractive.
“I deal with ghosts, not . . . flesh,” I said curtly.
“New experiences often teach us things about ourselves we didn’t know,” was the bland reply.
I upped the oomph on my glare, but couldn’t do much else. And that included refusing, unless I wanted to look weak in front of a room full of vamps. All of whom, except for a few soldiers who’d acted as litter bearers, looked important.
And I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
The snake queen was living up to her rep today in a full-length sheath of the little monsters, bright yellow in this case, with subtle markings in black and gray. From a distance, it might look like a patterned dress, if you ignored the way the “pattern” slithered and writhed. From up close, it was frankly horrific.
It was also strange. Not that I hadn’t seen the consul wear similar things before, but usually only in a full senate meeting or when she needed to impress—aka intimidate the crap out of someone. Otherwise, she usually opted for more normal clothing, albeit with a snake or two as accessories.
But today we were getting the full treatment, including matching bright yellow nails tipped in black. I wondered if there was a reason for that. And then I wondered what was wrong with me, because of course there was a reason! A few thousand of them—vampires from all over the world, many of whom rivaled her in power—who were crawling all over this place.
Not that she was showing the strain. We were about to invade another world, while every enemy she had in this one was probably somewhere on the grounds, plotting. Yet she looked as cool