Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,125

does not have to rely on subterfuges, such as wards, to hide its existence. It can do this thanks to the enormous energy of the ley line sink that lies beneath it. However, this also left it vulnerable.

“Jonathan’s plan seems to have been to knock the supernatural city out of phase, which would send it crashing into the human one with enough force to rupture the ley line sink. All that energy would then overflow its bounds and be pushed through the ley line system, destroying three of our senates and as many members of this one as he had been able to lure into his trap.

“Fortunately, he was stopped in time, by the combined efforts of two operatives, one of ours and one of the Circle’s.”

“Just in time,” Jonas muttered, looking disturbed.

No shit, I thought, staring at the pulsing map and thinking of Pritkin. No wonder he hadn’t been around! He was supposed to be resting, and this was what he got up to?

As he would say, bloody hell.

“Efforts are being made to improve security on the pillars that support the phase, along with moving the vulnerable courts,” Mircea added. “But all of this is useless if we do not find Jonathan.”

The image changed again to a much less disturbing one of three white pills.

“We first became aware of him in the nineteen eighties. A mage in New Orleans stumbled across a formula that caused the majority of the magic in a person’s body to concentrate in a single area. He was selling it to locals who wished to appear more talented than they were in a particular skill set—to cheat on a test, or to win a fight. The pills couldn’t give them more magic, but by concentrating everything they had in one area, they could make them appear much more powerful than they actually were.”

“Something that would have been nice to know,” a mage said nastily, from down the table. “We had people trying to pass the Corps’ entrance exam, only to discover later that they were far less able than they seemed!”

Mircea ignored him.

“Jonathan, however, saw more potential in the product, realizing that vampires are magical creatures, too. We do not use magic, as the mages do, but we are magic. He utilized the mage’s formula to essentially quarantine our power, locking it away from us by redirecting it to a single ability—such as hearing—thus leaving the vampire in question vulnerable.”

“Vulnerable how?” a man in a turban demanded. Most people were still looking stunned from watching a city be vaporized, but he appeared to have recovered faster. He looked South Asian, with a handsome thirtyish face and a gold tunic draped in enough jewels to rival a prince.

Of course, maybe he was one.

“Vulnerable in that a vampire’s body, without its magic, is simply . . . a corpse,” Mircea said.

The vamp just looked at him.

“The kind that necromancers are able to control?”

There was an uncomfortable silence around the table, maybe because most of those present were vampires.

“And?” the prince demanded. “Necromancers have always been able to influence, even briefly control, low-level vampires. It’s one reason we regulate the damned things—”

“I wasn’t talking about low-level vampires,” Mircea told him steadily. “Or even masters—”

“I should hope not!”

“—I was talking about us.”

“Us?” The man looked confused. “What do you mean, ‘us’?”

“I mean senate members. The pills—”

But that was as far as he got. Mircea broke off, because there was no point even trying to finish that sentence. If I’d thought the former uproar was something, it was nothing to this.

In a matter of minutes, the most powerful vampires on earth had learned about bullets that could mow them down as easily as hot lead could do to a human; they’d seen a city almost destroyed and three of the bastions of vampire power on earth taken out with it; and now they were being told that Jonathan had discovered a way to hijack even their own bodies?

It was pandemonium.

“You’re telling us that one man is responsible for this?” the prince yelled, somehow managing to make himself heard above the din. “And that he’s still out there? What the hell have you been doing?”

“Looking for him,” was the bland reply. The small muscle in Mircea’s jaw was jumping again, but otherwise, you’d never know he was stressed. “We next came across him in Paris, this past summer—”

“This summer? You lost him for decades?”

“He does not have the recipe for the pills,” Mircea assured him. “The bokor who developed it, and