Chapter Fifty-six

An hour later, Coffee Lover was standing in the kitchen doorway, trying to get my attention, but I couldn’t hear him over all the screaming. “What?”

His mouth moved some more, but it didn’t help.

“Can you shut up for a minute?” I asked Marlowe, only to have him round on me.

“As soon as you start making some goddamned sense!”

“I have been. I told you—”

“That an ancient fey queen turned praetor turned . . . whatever the hell . . . is rampaging around New York wearing a war mage’s skin! Do you have any idea how that sounds?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“No, it means you’re crazy!” Marlowe snapped his fingers at his vamps. “We’re leaving.”

And found his arm caught by a pissed-off senator with flour in his hair.

Louis-Cesare had shown up just before the chief spy, and he hadn’t been baking. But Marlowe had been doing a lot of fist pounding on the kitchen table and, as a result, we were all a little starchy. Louis-Cesare just made it look good.

“You’re going to listen to her.”

“I have listened! And been fed the biggest pile of horse—”

“Then you can listen again. Perhaps with your mouth closed this time.”

Well, shit, I thought, as Marlowe turned puce. In fairness, he’d already been pretty close, since he didn’t seem to like my Alfhild-as-the-villain theory. And while I normally wouldn’t have cared what Marlowe liked, in this instance, we needed his help.

Which is why I didn’t respond in kind when he grabbed me. Even though it left me, him, and Louis-Cesare facing off on three sides of the kitchen table, and me bent halfway across it because I was too short for this. Like the room was too small for a conference.

“Release me!” Marlowe barked, ignoring the fact that he had me in the same grip.

Louis-Cesare did not release him. The tension ratcheted up a few more notches, and it had already been pretty high. Because some of the guys Marlowe had dragged along looked vaguely familiar.

Like I-might-have-recently-shot-a-few familiar.

I sighed, and wondered if I could make it to the door without anybody returning the favor. But before I could try, Louis-Cesare squeezed my other arm, completing the awkward triangle. “Tell him.”

“I already did. He doesn’t want to hear—”

“Tell him anyway. Then we’ll have Mircea tell him. Perhaps something will get through that thick skull!”

“While the only thing going through your skull,” Marlowe snapped, “will be my fist if you don’t let go!”

Louis-Cesare let go, but only so he could grab the spy’s lapels and drag him over the table.

“Damn it, man, think! If she’s right, the creature who attacked the consul is still at large, and you’re responsible for her safety! If there’s any chance—”

Marlowe broke his hold with a savage upward gesture, and I thought we were about to have round number two, electric boogaloo, only with no holds barred this time. And since that would involve masters’ powers, which in Marlowe’s case included the aforementioned ability to crack skulls, I wasn’t on board.

But then he made an annoyed-cat sound and flung out a hand in my direction. “Fine. Tell me!”

I looked at Louis-Cesare, who raised an eyebrow. And then around the room, at the sea of glowering faces. And sighed again.

Always nice to have an appreciative audience.

“Caedmon told me about Alfhild, the ancient fey princess with a rep for boiling people alive, but I didn’t think much about it,” I said. “But that’s where our current problem started, all those years ago in Faerie, when she was betrayed and murdered—as she saw it. She was furious and vowed revenge, and that kind of anger carries over. Some of the guards told me that fey who claim to remember substantial bits of their past lives are usually either very powerful or very troubled, and Alfhild was both.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Louis-Cesare murmured. Thanks to Marlowe’s theatrics, he’d heard only bits and pieces of this himself.

“Anyway, she was exiled from Faerie and executed on Earth, which should have been the end of it. Except she was fey, and they reincarnate. But since she was on Earth now, she came back as a human, because that seems to be the way it works. The fey soul latches on to the energy of the planet to help it form its next body, and this is a human world. But she was still fey underneath, and kept being tormented with weird flashes of memory she didn’t understand.”

And with that, at least, I could sympathize.

“That’s why she sought out a vampire,” one of Marlowe’s guys piped up. “To give her time to figure things . . . uh . . . out.”

He trailed off when his master glared at him.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “Or maybe she just got bit randomly. Either way, a longer life allowed her to put the pieces together. Enough to find her grave and that damned book, which told her the rest.”

“Why would the fey leave such a thing?” Louis-Cesare asked. “If they knew there was even a chance she’d remember—”

“The guards said that’s probably why it was left: as a warning, in case she recalled anything substantial, and as a reason for her exile. It was supposed to promote repentance, by reminding her of her crimes—”

“Yes, that works so well with homicidal maniacs!” Marlowe snarled. “They may as well have given her a primer! Like leaving young Hitler Mein Kampf!”

I didn’t point out that he had no reason to be angry, since he wasn’t supposed to be buying any of this, because I was just glad that he actually seemed to be listening this time. And because I agreed with him. “They should have destroyed her when they had the chance.”

“Did anyone say why they didn’t?” Louis-Cesare asked.

“No. None of Claire’s guards were alive then. But they said it probably had something to do with the old religion. That her judges would have felt like they were killing off part of the soul of Faerie if they completely obliterated her. And that maybe they thought she’d get it right, the next time.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he murmured.

Marlowe didn’t seem any happier. His brows had lowered and his eyes had darkened. Several of the vamps around me fidgeted, feeling their master’s growing displeasure in their own bodies. This close, they functioned almost like a single organism, to the point that, when Marlowe made another of those angry little noises, several of his boys did, too.

Sounded like a bunch of asthmatic cats in here, I thought.

But he wasn’t ready to officially board the crazy train yet.

“None of this proves that she’s still around today,” he pointed out. “Even if she did become a vampire, and eventually the praetor, as you claim, the consul killed her five hundred years ago!”

“The consul killed her physically,” I corrected. “In fury after Mircea explained who had been murdering all those vampires. What she didn’t know was that she was dealing with the reincarnated soul of an ancient fey princess in a vampire body—”

“Understandable,” Louis-Cesare murmured dryly.

“—and so didn’t realize that her nemesis remained, just in an altered form. Because Alfhild was a vargr—”

“Based on?” Marlowe cut in.

I looked at him incredulously. “Did you hear anything I said about what happened here the other night? The manlikans might have been Efridis, trying to get Aiden out of the house, but the vargr attack definitely wasn’t. The person doing that didn’t know she already had a potential avatar in the room, and couldn’t have cared less about Aiden. She went straight for the troll kid, the only living witness to what Alfhild has been doing—”

“That doesn’t prove anything. There are other vargrs—”

“The plural is vargar, and I wasn’t finished yet! In Faerie, she was known as Alfhild Ambhǫfði: Alfhild the Two-Headed. It’s a common nickname for vargar. It’s probably how she escaped from that tower the fey imprisoned her in, and it’s definitely how she got away from the consul. Her body died, but she threw her consciousness into her secretary—”

“Who just let her ride him around for the last five hundred years?” Marlowe scoffed.

“He didn’t have a choice! Something happened to him that night, when Mircea and the witch stole the shield. I called Mircea while we were waiting for you, and he filled me in on some of the things they figured out afterward.

“He thinks Alfhild intended to put all the power she was stealing from those vampires into a single receptacle, knowing that the consul would call up a sandstorm during their duel. As soon as the view of the fight was obscured, the praetor would hit her with all that power, all at once, crippling her. Then finish her off on her own, making it look like she’d won the duel fair and square.

“It was a good plan—if she’d been faster. But she knew how powerful the consul was, and wanted to make sure she overpowered her, so she was still collecting bones when Mircea and the witch discovered her plans and made their escape. She hadn’t even had the receptacle made yet, but suddenly she was hours, perhaps only minutes away from an enraged consul if she couldn’t find them—”

“She put the power in the shield, didn’t she?” Louis-Cesare asked. He hadn’t heard this part before—I hadn’t gotten this far last time—but no one’s ever accused him of being slow.

I nodded. “It was the only thing she had on hand strong enough to hold that much energy, because it was designed for traveling through the ley lines. So she had one of her mages spell it to absorb the power in the bones. I don’t know if she planned to stay and fight, or run and try her luck later, but either way, she wanted her stolen power with her.”

“But Mircea stole it first.” Marlowe suddenly grinned, showing fang. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen him smile before, but it was . . . disturbing.

I decided I liked him angry better.

“Uh, yeah. But not before the shield almost killed her avatar. Mircea said he thought she must have been using her secretary to oversee the operation in Venice, based on the height of the ‘fisherman’ he’d been chasing. The praetor was paranoid, and didn’t trust anyone besides herself to manage things. So she rode her secretary around to have her cake and eat it, too, and to have plausible deniability if anyone found out what was going on.”

“That is why he received favored status among her servants,” Louis-Cesare said. “I did wonder what a non-master was doing in such an important place in her household.”

“But he paid for it that night. He tried to use the altered shield to suck the life out of Mircea, but instead the witch turned it back on him. He didn’t die, but Alfhild was left with a crippled avatar, or else we’d have heard from her before this.”

“That’s absurd,” Marlowe said, no longer smiling. “Who the hell would choose to live like that? With two consciousnesses in a single body!”

I stared at him, wondering if it had been deliberate. But I guess not. Because he flushed suddenly, as realization hit. And, for once, Marlowe actually looked flustered.

“I . . . didn’t mean—”

“Someone who wanted revenge badly enough,” I cut him off, because we didn’t have time for this. “Reincarnation ran the risk of her not remembering who she was next time. We don’t know how many human lifetimes she lived before one was long enough to jog her memory. What if it never happened again? As for the secretary, he was weak, but any other body she chose would have fought her, whereas he probably didn’t have the strength. Or maybe he didn’t want to. Alfhild knew how the vampire world worked, and could protect him. In his weakened state, who else would have bothered?”

“So he was the albino we saw at the fights,” Louis-Cesare said. “With Alfhild in control.”

I nodded. “And back to her old tricks. The parallels between the praetor and our current problem were everywhere: preying on the same type of vulnerable communities, using the same method with the bones, even having the same target. But they were separated by five hundred years, so whenever I noticed anything, I put it down to coincidence—”

“Which it probably is!” Marlowe said, resuming asshole mode and pissing me off.

“Damn it, Marlowe!” I slapped my hands down, sending flour billowing. “Do you think I like this? I’d prefer for you to be right—then the villain is in custody and all’s right with the world. Instead, I have to deal with the fact that I left a friend to be used by that . . . thing, and ignored every hint he gave me!”

“Friend?” Marlowe’s guy said, his forehead wrinkling. “I thought we were talking about some albino?”

I put a hand to my head, and contemplated having an aneurysm. “Okay,” I said. “One more time. Alfhild is a disembodied consciousness. She needs a body in order to get around and execute her revenge. At first, she took over her secretary, because he was loyal and didn’t fight her. But after he died at the burnt-out-building fight, she needed a replacement, and she needed one fast.”

“Because vargar can’t hold free flight,” Louis-Cesare said.

At least somebody had been paying attention, I thought gratefully.

“Yes. After her former avatar ended up under a burning truck, she had to find another, and she only had minutes before her consciousness scattered. And for an on-the-fly choice, James was a damned good one.”

Louis-Cesare agreed. “A Circle member tasked with combating the smuggling trade was the perfect way to find out how close we were getting to . . . whatever she is doing.”

Yeah, like ruining a good man’s life.

He must have seen something change on my face. “Your friend is a war mage,” he told me quietly. “He knew the risks.”

“He has two little girls,” I told him back. “And a father who relies on him more every year. He’s been talking about transferring to training duty, because he wants to watch his kids grow up. He—”

I cut off, because if I didn’t my voice was going to change, and I didn’t need my voice to change. I needed to kill something. Not someone, something. A thing that should have died millennia ago, but which instead was riding James around town like a sports car and doing God knew what kind of damage in the process!

Even if I got him back, I wasn’t sure I’d get him back.

“You were unconscious,” Louis-Cesare reminded me. “You didn’t even see your friend that night.”

“But I did a couple nights later at the warehouse, and I knew he was acting strange. James doesn’t know who Fra Filippo Lippi was, or swan around like Darth Vader, or threaten to send innocent people back to a war zone to die! And he was there that night, when that bitch lost her previous avatar. He told me so himself. Probably deliberately, like all those theatrics, because she didn’t know his mannerisms, but I did. He was trying to get my attention, hoping I’d start asking questions, but instead—”

Instead, I just left him there.

With her.

There was a brief silence, which of course was broken by Marlowe. “So, according to you, Alfhild is back and looking for revenge?”

“Not just according to me. Dorina recognized the albino as the praetor’s old secretary. Not at first—they were in the middle of a chase, and it had been five hundred years—but soon—”

“And started sending you memories because she thinks history is about to repeat itself?”

I nodded.

“How the hell does that work?” he demanded. “If Alfhild had won that fight in Venice, she’d have ruled the vampire world, or a sizeable portion of it. But now? If she exists at all, she’s a shadow, a phantom, an echo of what she once was. What can a shadow do?”

“Almost kill the consul?” Louis-Cesare said dryly.

“That was a one-off! Those damned weapons use life energy, not conventional magic. It led our wards to recognize them as people instead of arms—”

“People?” I asked.

Marlowe grimaced. “That’s the problem with wards. They only know to look for what they’ve been told is a threat, and nobody uses life energy for weapons—it’s too hard to come by! But while we figure out how to recalibrate, the consul is being well guarded.”

Louis-Cesare didn’t look reassured. “You may have tightened security, but you’ve highlighted another problem. We’re in New York City, one of the most densely populated areas in the country. If the weapons register as life energy, how are we supposed to find them?”

“Because we’ve been doing so great so far,” one of Marlowe’s guys muttered. It was the same one as before, with an impressive ’fro and a problem keeping his mouth shut.

But he wasn’t wrong.

He was talking about the great weapons hunt, which had started when the albino died and his fellow slavers lost no time raiding his warehouse. Literally no time—they were at it before the flames died down on the truck. They’d robbed him blind knowing that the Circle was busy at the burnt-out building, and that his people were trying to hunt down escaped slaves.

As a result, the overpowered weapons ended up in the hands of smugglers all over the city, which was where the “underworld war” came in. It was actually Alfhild raiding the raiders, trying to get her stuff back. And to do it before anybody figured out what they had.

That was why she’d been so pissed at Blue. Here she was, trying to keep things nice and quiet, when along comes a homicidal battle troll, drawing everybody’s attention. She’d managed to keep a lid on that through James, who had pulled rank to take control of the crime scenes and any weapons they contained, but she couldn’t watch everyone. So she’d tried to recruit me to pimp on the Senate’s investigation for her.

It was also why she’d showed me those weapons. So that, if I ran across any more, I wouldn’t think anything of them, just assume they were the same crap she’d already given me an explanation for. And meanwhile, maybe I’d hunt down Blue for her in exchange for Fin, because she had too many balls in the air and needed some help.

But she was already too late.

Because the Senate clashed with some of her guys that same night, when they both decided to raid the same smuggler. And found the mother lode of weapons he’d taken from the albino’s stock, without any idea what they actually were. He didn’t have time to find out before the Senate took them to Radu’s, where Alfhild’s people took them from us.

And now where were they?

“Call the mage,” Marlowe snapped. “Get a location.”

“She already did,” Louis-Cesare said. “His phone is off.”

“Ping him, then! We have contacts—”

“Which we’ve used. It’s not that simple.”

And no, it wasn’t. Cell phone tower records weren’t that reliable, despite what TV cop shows liked everyone to believe. In a rural setting, a single tower might service several hundred square miles, and even in New York City, where they clustered close together, you were still talking two or more. Not exactly a small area in a place as crowded as this one.

And that was assuming your call was routed to the closest tower. Which it often wasn’t. So all we really knew for sure was that James was still in the city.

Well, and one other thing.

“James was frothing at the mouth to get his hands on Blue,” I told Marlowe. “Probably because he kept drawing attention to the people who had those weapons—”

“So?”

“—so he gave me a two-day window to track him down, and it’s up tonight. Why two days? And, if he was expecting to hear from me, why not take the call?”

Marlowe frowned.

“Perhaps he retrieved all the weapons,” Mouthy said, “and no longer cares what the troll attacks.”

“Maybe. Or maybe whatever is happening, is happening tonight.”

“What do you mean, happening tonight?” Marlowe demanded. “The consul was already attacked!”

“Using only a small portion of the weapons,” Louis-Cesare pointed out. “What is Alfhild doing with the rest?”

“And nobody knows where James is,” I added. “I called war mage HQ, but they said it was his day off—”

“Check it,” Marlowe snapped, and one of his boys moved out into the hall, a phone to his ear.

“—so I called his wife, who said he hasn’t been home in five days. He told her he was working a case, but she’s worried. Being gone this long isn’t like him—”

“Map!” Another of the guys pulled one out of a pocket and laid it on the flour.

“—so I called his father, but Rufus hasn’t seen him, either—”

I cut off, because Marlowe wasn’t listening. He’d bent over the map, so Louis-Cesare could show him where the cell phone tower had pinged. I tried to concentrate on it, too, and on where James might be in all those crisscrossing streets, but I wasn’t seeing it. I was seeing him, with that crown of flowers his little girl had made for him, laughing at something his wife had said.

That’s why Alfhild needed to die, I thought. Because of James. And all those other Jameses she’d crushed under her heel through the centuries: the poor bastards back in Faerie, the hundreds or maybe thousands of baby vamps in Venice, the Dark Fey . . .

She’d destroyed countless lives, thoughtlessly, carelessly, on her climb to the top, because they didn’t matter to her.

They just didn’t matter.

Marlowe and Louis-Cesare continued the debate, but I’d had enough. There was a minuscule opening in the crowd and I went for it, elbowing my way through to Coffee Lover, who was still patiently waiting. The fey were better at that sort of thing than I was.

“Tell me some good news,” I said, before he even opened his mouth.

He arched an eyebrow at me. “You have a visitor.”

I scowled. “Who is it this time?”

He didn’t answer. Just stepped out of the way to show me another doorway filled with vampires. And, in the middle of them, Curly Abbot, looking like Porky Pig with his shirt rucked up over his fat little belly, and his blue eyes huge. And Ray, standing beside him, appearing unbelievably smug.

“Curly has something he’d like to tell you.”