“But, since matters between me and the Master of Milan have been altered in the past few months, when Stefan asked me to check into Frost, I called Jacob.” Iacopo Bonarata, she meant, the Master of Milan himself.
That was a lot more action than I’d expected. I hadn’t expected Stefan to take matters to Marsilia at all.
“Jacob assured me that Frost showed up at his doorstep twenty years ago, a full-fledged vampire. He was, I am fairly sure, though it is difficult to ascertain such things over the phone, surprised to find that Frost was young enough that we had to dispose of his body. From the condition of that body, Wulfe and I estimate that Frost was no more than seventy years old—dating from his human birth, not his vampiric rebirth.”
“Who made him?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” Marsilia said. “But I have called around to seethes where I have allies. I found that there are at least three other vampires who share his bloodline.”
“I thought Frost took over all the other seethes,” I said.
“Do you think Bonarata would have allowed that?” she said. “No. But he took over most of the seethes of the western United States, all of them except for Hao’s and mine, before he died. Hao’s probably doesn’t count, since he is the only vampire in his seethe. Seattle doesn’t count because it was the werewolves who kept him away from there, not the vampires. The vampires in Seattle barely qualify as a seethe at all.”
“Okay,” I said. “But how did you discover that there were vampires made by Frost’s maker in your allies’ seethes?”
I didn’t know if she’d answer that question. Vampires are a secretive bunch. I could feel her hesitation, but Stefan made a muffled noise.
They had gagged him.
“If Stefan doesn’t come out of the seethe as soon as we deal with the witches,” I murmured softly, “then Adam and I will have to come visit.”
“Adam and I will have to come visit,” repeated Lilly’s little-girl voice. “Adam and I will have to come visit. Yummy.”
Lilly was a special vampire, extraordinarily gifted with music, but incapable of taking care of herself. See also “homicidally inclined.”
“Lilly, what did I tell you?” Marsilia said.
“Behave,” Lilly said sullenly, “or I can’t listen in.”
“That’s it,” Marsilia said. “Now, where were we?”
“How did you discover that there were other vampires made by Frost’s maker in other seethes?”
She sighed. “I did tell Stefan I would answer all of your questions, as long as they pertained to Frost or the Hardesty witches.”
“Wow,” I said involuntarily. Both that she’d agreed to it—and that she’d told me what she had agreed to.
“We are not enemies,” Marsilia told me. “Uneasy allies, perhaps, but not enemies.”
“I agree,” I told her. “I just didn’t know that you did, too.”
“I don’t like you, Mercy—though watching Bonarata run around in circles was almost enough to change my mind—but I do like Adam. More importantly, I trust him.” She sighed again. “And, I suppose, you as well.”
I didn’t trust her at all, so I didn’t say anything.
After a moment, she answered my question. “I asked my allies and my friends if they had vampires whose makers they were unsure of. In those places where that was true, I visited their seethes myself. I knew what Frost . . . smelled like, I suppose, though that isn’t quite the way it works. A Master Vampire can tell if a vampire is made by someone other than themselves. Eventually, with practice, we learn to tell which other Master made a vampire. So I went to those seethes where there were unknowns—vampires made by someone their own Master could not identify for certain. In three of those cases, the maker was the same as the vampire who made Frost.”
She paused, while I absorbed the fact that Marsilia could apparently teleport herself a lot farther than Stefan could. I was pretty sure she wasn’t talking about seethes that were nearby—and there had not been enough time for her, who could only travel at night, to go to very many places. She’d been teleporting a lot. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
I wasn’t the only one unsettled by matters, though.
“We owe you our gratitude, Mercy,” Marsilia said reluctantly. “These people were definitely sent in as spies and worse for the Hardesty witches. If you had not asked Stefan to look into it, I would not have taken up the trail. We destroyed the ones we found, and now all of the vampires