Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,151

same tactic was used by the conspirators to kill Roberto.”

“But the baby vamp couldn’t throw a spell!” I said, wondering what I was missing. “No vamp can! And he wasn’t a mage anymore—”

“But he wasn’t truly a vampire yet, either.” Mircea cocked his head. “Have you ever wondered why baby vampires are kept so close to home, and watched so carefully? Indeed, why they are called ‘babies’ at all?”

“They’re young. And they stumble around, running into things, and looking at you weird because their eyesight keeps telescoping in and out,” I said, thinking of some of the poor bastards at Tony’s.

“Yes. Their new vampire eyesight doesn’t work properly because it isn’t fully developed yet,” Mircea said. “And neither are they. They need time to mature.”

“But they’re dead—”

“Yes, which rather puts paid to human development. But not to our kind. Vampires continue to change over most of our lives. Becoming stronger, gaining more powers—including master powers, if the process continues long enough.”

“I guess,” I said. “But if baby vamps can throw spells, I don’t see why adult ones can’t. If it’s just a lack of magic, they could go buy some—or steal it, like the dark mages do.”

“It isn’t merely that,” Mircea replied. “They run out of leftover magic very soon, of course, but the bigger issue is that they lose their ability to channel it. The more they mature as vampires, the less they resemble their former selves, until they cannot manipulate it any more than non-magical humans can. But that process takes a little time, a fact that the vampires exploited to kill Roberto.”

“Okay.” I guessed I could see that. “But I don’t see what any of this has to do with the Lover’s Knot spell. Or what that has to do with us.”

Mircea got up to get a refill. He offered me one, but I declined. I had to shift back tonight, and I didn’t want to end up stuck somewhere out in the desert because I couldn’t see straight.

Or worse, be spliced halfway through a wall.

“You could always stay the night,” Mircea told me casually.

“You could always stop reading my mind, before I get pissed off and leave.”

He leaned against the edge of the desk, a little too close for comfort, and drank whiskey at me. “You’re a hard woman, Cassie Palmer.”

I wished. Like I wished I didn’t notice the fondness in his eyes, or the way they crinkled up at the corners when he smiled. Or the strong throat revealed by the open collar of his shirt. Or the way the muscles in his thigh bulged under the fine fabric of his trousers when he rested it against the side of the desk.

Or a hundred other things I wasn’t cataloging, because none of them had anything to do with me anymore!

“Where is he, by the way?” Mircea asked abruptly.

“What?”

“This war mage of yours. Pritkin, as he calls himself now. Shouldn’t he be here?”

“Here?”

“Or in Las Vegas, at least?”

“I—” I paused, seriously confused now, because Pritkin had just spent an evening drinking, eating, and talking with my bodyguards. Hadn’t he? For a weird, mind-altering moment, I actually wondered if I’d imagined all that, because otherwise . . . something very weird was going on.

As Mircea had said earlier, my guys weren’t really my guys. He’d loaned them to me, back when the Circle had been gunning for my head, in the pre-Jonas days. I’d needed bodyguards, and Mircea had needed to off-load some of the less diplomatic members of his house. It had seemed an obvious solution for both of us.

And, of course, it had helped him to keep tabs on me—or so I assumed. Because, sure, many of the boys were actually centuries-old masters themselves, and long since emancipated, so they could basically do what they chose, but . . . Well, I’d just assumed they kept him up to speed.

Didn’t they?

I tested a theory, and made my thoughts as opaque as possible. “He’s been in London, debriefing with Jonas—”

“But Jonas was here today, wasn’t he?” Mircea lit up one of his little cigarettes. “I should have thought Mage Pritkin would be with him.”

“He’s . . . they’re probably done by now.”

“Probably? Then he hasn’t called?”

I narrowed my eyes, because that had been feigned surprise if I’d ever heard it. What was this? Some kind of test? Because I really wasn’t in the mood.

“We’re not doing this,” I told him.

“Doing what?” The innocent look was fake as shit, too. “I am merely expressing surprise that a