Louis-Cesare had insisted on bringing him along, but the guy was giving me the willies. The foot growing out of the side of his neck and the fact that he now literally had eyes in the back of his head probably had something to do with that. After five minutes of hearing him scream, I’d had enough and knocked him unconscious.

“So, who’s Jonathan?” I asked, fiddling with the air vents to get them as wide open as possible. The sun was so hot I could taste it, and the road shimmered in front of us like an undulating black snake. It was the kind of heat that made newspaper headlines and started people making dire predictions about global warming. I had brought the rest of the six-pack along, but like me, the bottle in my hand was already sweating heavily.

The only answer I got was a slight increase in speed. “If we are going to work together, we should know something about each other,” I quoted piously.

“The mage is not important.”

“You risked your life to try to kill him and he’s not important?”

I received only stony silence for an answer. Louis-Cesare’s eyes were on the road, but I could see them clearly in the mirror. They were perfect receptors, showing every reaction in those vivid irises. His expression was blank, the planes of his face like those of a statue, cold and unyielding. But when he thought about Jonathan, his eyes were haunted.

“I said, you risked your—”

“It is not your concern.”

“Really? Because that’s not how it looks to me. There was no reason for the Black Circle to hit that airplane. Yeah, it belongs to the Senate and yeah, there’s a war on. But they didn’t just attack it and leave. They waited for us to come back. They waited.”

“We already knew we have a traitor.”

“Yes, but now we know—” I was interrupted by a gasp of agonized sound from the mage in the back. Considering his current state, I didn’t think pummeling him into silence all the way to MAGIC was a good idea, not if anyone wanted to question him later. I found a knockout dart in my backpack and ensured that he stayed unconscious for the duration of the ride.

I turned back to find Louis-Cesare’s eyes on me. “Now we know something else, too,” I continued. “We have to conclude that Drac is working with the Black Circle, unless you think we have two leaks, one informing Uncle of our whereabouts and the other giving the same information to the mages. Personally, I find that a little hard to swallow.”

“It is not impossible,” Louis-Cesare said stubbornly. “There have been cases recently where vampires, some sworn to first-level masters, have managed to break their allegiance. A few even attempted to kill their own sire.”

My beer had left a ring of condensation on the knee of my jeans. I rubbed at it and tried to digest this new bombshell. “Why haven’t I heard about this?”

“The Senate is keeping it quiet. They are afraid that to do otherwise would encourage any vampire dissatisfied with his position to attempt to break their master’s hold.” He glanced at me. “You understand the risk?”

I nodded numbly. One of the main things keeping the vamp world all nice and tidy—most of the time—is the near impossibility of any vamp breaking the control of his sire. Each master answers for his or her children, right up to the Senate level. The only exception to the rule, or so I’d thought, was vamps who reached first-level status. I wondered how many would stay loyal if they had an alternative. Why did I think it wouldn’t be a lot?

“What is the Senate doing about this?” I demanded. If the Black Circle had figured out a way to emancipate at will, we could be looking at chaos—hundreds, maybe thousands, of disaffected vamps, all making their own decisions, with no regulation other than brute force.

“Investigating. We have reason to believe that the method the dark was using is no longer available to them. However, there is no knowing how many vampires were affected before then. The number is unlikely to be high, but it is almost certain that we have not yet found them all.”

Things just kept getting better and better. “As interesting as all this is, it still doesn’t explain Jonathan.”

“Jonathan has nothing to do with our mission.”

“It looked like he was pretty involved to me!”

A parade of emotion finally flickered across Louis-Cesare’s face—pride, stubborness, bone-deep pain—but he said nothing. I’d long ago learned the same lesson—showing your sore spot only allows it to be hit more easily. And Jonathan was obviously a very sore spot for Louis-Cesare. But I had to push. Whether I liked it or not, we were in this together. And there’s nothing I hate worse than fighting enemies I know nothing about.

“That hit wasn’t meant for me,” I said bluntly. “Drac already left me a message, remember? He took out my team and thumbed his nose in my face. Why do that if he was planning to kill me barely an hour later? For some reason, he wants me alive and scared.” At least for the moment. “So he didn’t order the hit on the plane. The mages cooked that one up on their own.”

I waited, but the only response to my nice logical argument was Louis-Cesare’s hands tightening on the wheel. “I’ve had no run-ins with the Black Circle that could explain them sending a whole hit squad after me,” I continued. “So they were after someone else. And there’s only two of us.”

A long pause. “Jonathan is a . . . personal issue,” I was finally informed.

“There aren’t any personal issues at a time like this.”

Louis-Cesare reached over and flipped on the radio. He settled on an eighties station where Eddie Van Halen was going to town on a guitar riff. Nice, but I suspected he just wanted something loud. I scowled at my reflection in the eggplant-colored windows, wondering when my partner had decided that I’d recently been lobotomized.

The plain fact is, anyone the Senate wants dead gets dead. That holds true even for powerful dark mages. It might be more difficult in their cases and therefore take a little longer, but there’s no one they can’t reach in the end. Yet Jonathan was still alive. Meaning that Louis-Cesare hadn’t asked them for help.

Now, maybe he just wanted to take care of the mage himself—he had said it was personal—but I doubted it. I felt the same way about Claire, but if anyone had harmed her, the Senate would hold him for my tender mercies. Taking their help didn’t mean ruling out personal involvement. So there was something about Louis-Cesare’s history with the mage that he didn’t want known.

“You can’t hide it from them forever,” I told him, just to make it clear that I was keeping up.

“I am hiding nothing.” The words were calm enough, but the Mustang was all but flying down the highway.

I was left with the certainty that whatever Louis-Cesare was keeping from me, it was very personal and very disturbing. But there was exactly nothing I could do about it. “If that’s how you want it.”

His hands flexed on the wheel, their tight clench loosening slightly. “That’s how it is.”

Chapter Seven

“Hey, Marlowe. You ever consider staking your decorator?” I glanced around the once-immaculate suite of rooms that now, like much of MAGIC, resembled a rummage sale in an inner-city neighborhood. A scorch mark in the shape of a human body marred one wall of the laboratory, next to the hall door that was half-torn off its hinges. And if there was a whole test tube or beaker in the place, I didn’t see it.

“Ah.” The handsome brunet vamp spun on his lab stool to face us. He smelled of Cuban cigars, cinnamon and some funky ointment with too many ingredients to list. The latter was emanating from the bandages wrapped around his head. His curls escaped from under them in dispirited clumps, but I didn’t have the urge to laugh. Any wound that a vamp couldn’t heal without resorting to gross-smelling concoctions was enough to have killed a man. It looked like the war had caught up with him recently. “That explains the stench,” he said, with a smile that never came close to his icy brown eyes. “I thought something had died in here. But no, that would be in about ten seconds.”

“Not unless you want Daddy on your ass,” I told him insolently. The few times I’d been to MAGIC had been with Mircea, who tends to make other vamps sweat, crawl and genuflect. I didn’t have that advantage now, but figured I could take a half-dead vamp, even Marlowe, if necessary. “I’m here on family business.”

“You’re a lousy liar.”

“Actually, I’m a great liar, not that I’d bother in your case. It’s much more fun to tell you the truth.” I placed a bloody piece of burnt-out metal on the table in front of him. “Speaking of which, the jet got torched. I think this was from the left wing, but I’m not sure.” He stared with no expression at the piece I’d pried out of the steward’s head. I parked myself on the neighboring stool and tried to look commiserating. “They just don’t make ’em like they used to, do they?”

“I most emphatically do not need this,” Marlowe said, turning a nearby clipboard over so I couldn’t read it. It probably contained nothing more interesting than the estimated repair costs, but he gives a whole new definition to the word “paranoid.” He makes even me look laid-back.

“I may have something you do need,” Louis-Cesare told him, dumping the still-unconscious mage onto the debris-covered floor. “This one was among those who attacked us.”

Marlowe looked the mage over in disgust, while I watched Louis-Cesare. His eyes were perfectly clear, like the sky on a bright June day. He wasn’t worried, which meant that the mess on the floor knew squat about him and Jonathan. Those summer eyes met mine over Marlowe’s head with a question and I shrugged. I had no vested interest in helping the Senate, and plenty of reasons to enjoy watching them squirm. His secret was safe with me.

“Dislocator,” Marlowe sneered after getting a good look at our captive. He glanced at me. “Do you know the penalty for being caught with one of those?”