I nodded. I’d seen a flash of it once, in her brother’s mind. A fact I didn’t see the need to mention to these two. “I understand it was…pretty severe.”

“It almost annihilated us both,” she said flatly. “But a truce was finally arranged, sealed by a marriage alliance. My brother—Caedmon, as you call him—offered me to Aeslinn of the Svarestri as a bride. Aeslinn accepted, but not merely to end the war. He was hoping for a child who might one day unite all Faerie under one ruler, one throne.”

“And this didn’t worry Caedmon?”

Efridís smiled slightly. “My brother gambled on my being as infertile as he was himself. He has only ever sired the one child, and that with a human.”

“Heidar.” Claire’s fiancé.

Efridís inclined her head.

“But at his birth, my uncle began to scheme,” Æsubrand broke in angrily. “What if he used his half-breed in a liaison with another? Their human blood would render them more fertile than he had ever been himself. And if he could find one who possessed more than half fey blood, he would have a successor from his direct line. And cut me off!”

“Leaving you with only one throne. What a tragedy.”

“It may well prove a tragedy—for us all!”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Because you’re as shortsighted as the rest of them.”

“Say rather ill-informed,” Efridís said smoothly, cutting in.

“And you’re here to inform me about…?” I asked her.

“My husband,” Efridís said simply. “I discovered that he was not trying to unite all Faerie merely for dynastic reasons. He is what I believe you would call a religious…zealot?” She tipped her head charmingly. “Is that the word?”

“It’s a word. I didn’t know you had religion in Faerie.”

“We do not anymore.”

“But you did once.”

“Yes. That is why the war was fought. The old gods were banished from both Earth and Faerie thousands of your years ago, by a spell maintained by your Silver Circle of mages. My husband wishes to destroy it.”

“And thereby to bring his gods back.”

She nodded. “He was trying to invade Earth at the time of the war in order to attack your Circle, which was much more vulnerable then, but Caedmon opposed him. The two sides were almost equally matched and the battle was therefore—”

“Wait. Caedmon opposed him? Why?”

Æsubrand said that thing that might be a curse word again and glared at me. “Do you know nothing?”

“About this? Yeah. Nothing is pretty much what I know.”

Efridís sent him a let-me-handle-this glance, which surprisingly had Junior backing down. It was a little surreal, seeing the titan of the fey abruptly close his mouth when his tiny mama told him to, but that’s exactly what happened. Then she looked at me, smiled, and tried again.

“It is…complicated. Too much to go into now. All you need to understand is that a generation of fey warriors died for their faith on one side, and for the right to live free of it on the other.”

“And you’re telling me this because?”

“Because the war you are currently fighting did not start recently. It started thousands of years ago, on that battlefield.”

“It started before that, in the war between the gods them—” Æsubrand broke off at another glance from mama.

“Let us keep this simple, shall we?” she asked, with a brittle smile. She looked at me. “The two sides only ceased fighting out of utter exhaustion. Afterward, the pathways between Earth and Faerie were closed, the easy commute of the old days gone forever. And a truce was established, sealed by my marriage, between the two great houses. But truce is all it was. Peace was impossible. For both sides still believed they were in the right. And now, the war is about to be reignited.”

“Why now?” I demanded. “What’s changed?”

“The number of available warriors. It is what stymied my husband’s plans all along. As I have said, the two sides were very closely matched, and try as they might, neither could gain the upper hand. And Caedmon made it clear that if my husband wished to invade Earth in the future, he would have to do it through a Blarestri army.”

“Which he’d just proven he couldn’t do.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why my father was willing to settle the matter—temporarily—in exchange for a royal Blarestri bride,” Æsubrand put in, more calmly. “He assumed that any child that resulted from the union would be able to claim both thrones one day, thus uniting the two most powerful fey armies under Svarestri control. And giving him the numbers he needed to combat your Circle.”

“Only that hasn’t been working out so well,” I pointed out.

“That remains to be seen. But Caedmon’s successful attempt to gain an heir raised the possibility of an unbroken line of opposition. And even had it not, my father was beginning to doubt the depth of my devotion to his dogma.”

“You’re not a true believer?”

That got a flash from those strange eyes. “I am a king, or will be shortly. Not a lackey to a group of beings who could be banished by a human spell!”

Okay, that I could believe. A moral objection I’d have laughed at, since I was pretty sure Æsubrand didn’t have any morals. But being king of all Faerie didn’t mean much if he still had to bow and scrape and kiss godly butts all the time.

“Okay, say I believe you. Say you’re suddenly on our side. Then what the hell were you doing at Slava’s?”

“Trying to warn you.”

“Warn me? You almost killed me!”

“You were in the way,” he said, shrugging off my almost-death. “And I did not mean to warn you specifically, but your people. When I learned that my father was preparing an attack, my mother and I decided to alert the other side. The difficulty was in how to be believed. Due to…certain incidents…in the past, we felt some proof might be required—”

“You think?”

Pewter eyes narrowed. “—and the vampire had it.”

“And that proof was?”

“You should know. You killed him with it.”

It took me a minute, because technically, I hadn’t killed Slava at all. But I had shot him. And I guess turning into an ice cube hadn’t improved his chances any.

“You’re talking about the gun.”

“The bullets, to be precise,” Efridís said. “They are infused with a fey battle spell, giving anyone who wields them the power of a strong fey warrior—”

“Hardly,” Æsubrand said tightly. “There is more to being a warrior than a single spell.”

“Perhaps, but it is a devastating one.” She looked at me. “My husband knew he needed three things for any hope of success: superior numbers, a way around the blockade Caedmon had enacted and allies. He has obtained them all. And he is about to turn them on the Circle’s greatest supporter. Tonight, unless you warn them, the six senates will fall. Tonight, unless you stop it, the war may be lost.”

Chapter Forty-one

“This is bullshit,” Ray said, as Louis-Cesare’s chauffeur pulled into the long line of cars waiting to get up the consul’s impressive front drive.

“What is?” I asked, trying to drag on a thigh-high in the dark without running it or kicking Ray.

I managed one of them.

“Ow!” he yelped, glaring at me through the neck hole in his T-shirt, which he was in the process of stripping off.

“Don’t be a baby. I barely touched you.” I looked around. “Where are my shoes?”

“Did you leave them? Tell me you didn’t leave them!”

“I didn’t leave them.” At least, I was pretty sure. It wasn’t like I hadn’t had about a thousand other things to keep straight.

Like getting here at all. I wouldn’t have managed it if Ray hadn’t shown up half an hour after our unwelcome guests left. I’d been holding Claire’s head in one hand, while she tossed up a couple days’ worth of food, and yelling uselessly into the phone in my other when he stumbled through the portal. And bitched me out about the shield he’d had to hack his way through.

He’d come to warn me about the fat bounty that had just been offered for my capture. So he’d been less than happy to hear that I was about to walk back into the arms of the guy who had issued it. He’d been even less happy when he found out I expected him to pay for the privilege.

But there wasn’t any other choice.

Despite what Æsubrand seemed to believe, I did not have a large amount of influence over the vampire world. Or, you know, any. What I did have were contacts, including some who might actually listen to the crazy story I had to tell despite the fact that I had exactly no proof to go with it.

Or they would have if they had been conscious.

But Mircea and Louis-Cesare were still out of it, and they’d taken their masters right along with them. A senior master in extremis will pull power from family, and Mircea’s need had been dire. Louis-Cesare’s masters were wandering around in a stupor, looking like they’d been hit by a large truck, but Mircea’s weren’t even vertical.

That left Radu as the only other person I knew who might be able to force someone to listen. Luckily, he’d been emancipated from Mircea’s mastery centuries ago, so he wasn’t in a dead faint. Unluckily, where he was, along with the rest of the vampire world, was at the fights.

Why he was at the fights, I didn’t know. Yes, this was the last night and, yes, they were choosing new senators this evening. But I’d have thought he’d have had better things to do right now. But apparently not. And that put him behind the consul’s massive wards, which rendered electronic devices as dead as their owners.