“That was an accident. And anyway, I never look at your memories.”

“I know that you do not.”

I took a second to yank Stinky back, who was still trying to scratch out the eyes of this strange creature who had offended me. “And how do you know that, if you’re not in my head?”

“You did not know about Christine,” he said, referring to the revenant who had landed him in his current mess. “You had my memories, all of them, at your fingertips. Yet you did not recognize her when you saw her.”

And for some crazy reason, he looked almost insulted by that.

“They’re your memories,” I said, like I somehow needed to point this out. “I don’t have the right—”

“You do,” he said, coming toward me.

“I do not.”

“I give it to you freely—”

“I don’t want it!” I said, and my back hit the door.

Louis-Cesare stopped. For a moment we just looked at each other. And then he frowned.

“I was surprised,” he finally said, “when I realized the truth. But I assumed it was due to your fear of intimacy—”

“I don’t have a fear of intimacy!”

“—or your lack of desire for intimacy with me. But when you demonstrated that that was not the case—”

Claire made a little sound, whether of outrage or sympathy I couldn’t tell.

“—naturally I wondered why you had not attempted to know me better. At the time, I put it down to living with humans and their secretive ways.”

“Better than the reverse,” Claire muttered, and tried to take Stinky, probably to leave my hands free in case I wanted to choke a certain vampire.

But I held on. Stinky’s less-than-perfect social skills were keeping Louis-Cesare at arm’s length. And right now, that was where I wanted him.

“But now I am forced to conclude that perhaps I was right in the beginning,” he said stiffly. “Despite not objecting to physical intimacy—”

“Shut. Up,” I begged, but of course he didn’t. Vampires didn’t have the same concept of privacy that humans did, and Louis-Cesare had obviously kept things bottled up as long as he was going to.

“—you do not wish anything more substantive than that. Or am I wrong?”

He stood there, arms crossed, blue eyes flashing. Completely oblivious to the audience, not one of whom was looking away or even pretending to mind his own business. Radu even looked like he might be taking mental notes.

“We’re not talking about this now,” I said, suppressing an impulse to grind my teeth.

“Then when?”

“Some other time! Right now we’re talking about you picking something out of my brain that you shouldn’t have been able to hear.”

“I naturally assumed it was because you had recently ingested fey wine,” Louis-Cesare said. His expression made it clear that this wasn’t over.

“She doesn’t do that anymore,” Claire said, glaring at him. Somehow she and I had ended up on one side of the room and the vampires on the other, a fact that was not lost on Louis-Cesare.

The frown tipped into a scowl. “Of course she does. Although I see no reason why it should concern you.”

“It concerns me because I’m her friend! And it’s dangerous!”

“And that has stopped Dorina when?” he demanded.

“Can we get back to the part about you reading my mind?” I asked, because this was veering into dangerous territory. “You say you can’t, but a week ago you heard me all the way from Chinatown, and you were in Brooklyn.”

I’d gotten involved in a dustup courtesy of Ray, and Louis-Cesare had come to help out. At the time, I’d been grateful. Of course, at the time I’d also been drunk off my ass, which didn’t lead to great decision making.

“Which is my point,” he said impatiently. “You had imbibed a large amount of fey wine that evening, which increased your mental abilities—”

“And that’s my point, because I hadn’t had any last night!”

“If you cannot recall last night, how do you know?”

Because I knew what the level had been in the bottle this morning. I didn’t say, not needing that kind of hell. “Like Claire said, I don’t do that anymore,” I said sweetly.

He narrowed his eyes at me, but before he could say anything, Marlowe, of all people, came to my rescue.

“I have a squad of dead agents,” he said harshly. “And a live dhampir. And I have yet to hear why.”

“It is apparent why,” Louis-Cesare said, his eyes on mine. “We have been pressing the smugglers harder of late, and they have decided to strike back. The more operatives they deprive us of, the longer it will take—”

“Then why leave her? In the right circumstances, she’s as dangerous as another master. In some even more so, as she has abilities we lack!”

And that, I thought, was likely the closest thing to a compliment I would ever get from Marlowe.

Not that I was all that flattered when the next thing out of his mouth was: “They should have spilled her guts all over the pier, right beside Lawrence’s!”

“Typical!” Claire said, looking disgusted. Louis-Cesare apparently didn’t like the comment any better, because his face flushed and he rounded on the chief spy. But then Radu intervened.

“They may not have known what she is,” he pointed out. “She scents as human, and the other telltale signs are difficult to spot. And why would they have been looking for them? There are so few dhampirs; they simply aren’t what anyone expects—”

“It makes no difference!” Marlowe said, brushing that aside. “Whether they believed her to be human or mage or some mutant type of fey—”

Oh, yeah, I thought, watching Claire. This was going well.

“—why keep someone alive who could possibly identify them?”

“We don’t know that she can identify them,” Louis-Cesare argued. “She did not even know who I was when I found her. She may know nothing—”

“Oh, she knows,” Marlowe said, turning implacable eyes on me. “And she’s going to tell us, if I have to rip it out of her brain my—”

“Kit!” That was Radu again, but this time he was too late.

Chapter Seven

And suddenly it was like the old saying: you could have heard a pin drop. Which is a lot easier with vampire hearing anyway.

“Is that was this is about?” I asked, but Marlowe had clammed up. Not that it mattered; he wasn’t the one running this show.

He never had been.

“Mind tricks don’t work on me,” I said, my eyes meeting Mircea’s.

“Some do,” he said quietly.

And yeah. Some did. Specifically, his did, because they worked on pretty much everyone.

There was one thing I hadn’t gotten around to explaining to Claire in that twenty questions on vamps we’d been doing. Mainly because she wouldn’t have believed me. No one did unless they saw it for themselves, and precious few outsiders ever did.

Every senior master, sometimes even before reaching first level, developed special abilities. It was the crazy stuff the old legends assigned to all vamps but that most never lived long enough or got powerful enough to see. Like turning into mist or morphing into an animal—the kind of things that impressed people at parties. The kind of stuff that was often less useful than spectacular or awe-inspiring or breathtaking.

Except in Mircea’s case.

Mircea’s gifts weren’t like that. Mircea’s gifts weren’t showy at all—were, in fact, completely invisible, and all the more dangerous because of it. Mircea’s talents lay with the mind.

“That’s why you came here, why you had Louis-Cesare bring me back,” I said. “You wanted me in familiar surroundings.”

“It usually works best that way.”

“You ought to know.”

“What is it?” Claire asked, picking up on the sudden change in atmosphere. “What’s going on?”

But this time Mircea didn’t answer. This was the crunch point, and he knew it. His eyes never left mine. “Will you do it?”

I didn’t say anything, because I was kind of surprised that he’d bothered to ask. Maybe whatever he was planning needed my cooperation. Maybe having me fight him would lessen the chance of getting anything useful. I actually wanted to believe that. Because believing the concern in those brown velvet eyes—fake, fake, you know damned well it’s fake—was always a bad idea.

If I had a problem dealing with the flood of emotions Louis-Cesare stirred up, it was nothing compared to the tsunami named Mircea.

It had been this way as far back as I could remember, a strange dance toward and away from each other, a suspicious, snarling, snapping dance, which I guess made sense considering that we were genetically designed to tear each other’s throat out. Lately, we’d been in one of the better cycles, circling closer, teeth still bared and claws still out because you never knew—no, you never, ever knew—but closer nonetheless. And I freely admitted that that had been mostly his doing.

I hadn’t wanted to get closer. I hadn’t needed one more ride on that merry-go-round, one more trip to that particular rodeo, when it always ended the same way. Why play when you can’t win? Why try when you know ahead of time that it isn’t going to work? When it never works? After centuries of the same old same old, I’d given up. I didn’t want to dance anymore.

Which was when Mircea had decided that he did.

And I had to admit, he’d learned a few new steps since last time. Maybe more than a few, and they hadn’t been mere variations on a theme, either. When Mircea did something, he did it full throttle, and that included turning over a new leaf.

He’d started out by killing the creature who had killed my mother, despite the fact that the bastard in question was his own brother. He’d also told me a few things—very few—about the woman she had been, a commoner he’d married despite the fact that a match like that could only harm his ambitions. He had pulled me into his orbit by attaching me to the Senate’s shiny new portal demolition squad, which he happened to head up. He had dangled Louis-Cesare—moody, unconventional, passionate Louis-Cesare—in front of me like bait in front of a starving fish.