“Do you know what caused the bad blood between them?” asked Marsilia with interest.
Adam had discussed his qualms about Libor with his people, including the secret trouble between Libor and Bran. Marsilia suggested asking Bran himself. Adam had just shaken his head and explained that Charles had told Ben that the secrecy was powered by an oath of silence. Taking their curiosity to Bran would be useless. Bran doubtless knew, Adam had told them, that Charles had told Mercy to go to Libor. If Bran had had objections, he’d had plenty of time to voice them.
Bonarata shook his head. “Libor doesn’t talk much. He especially doesn’t talk to vampires. He informed me so when I attempted to meet with him a few months ago to discuss why his city had two seethes—one of which no one can pin down, not even my . . . the Master of the city. I have a few ideas about it.” He frowned. “It was probably a mistake to put it off, since the Master is no longer communicating with me. We tried him just before dawn, because we couldn’t reach my hunter.”
“Is the Master of Prague still Strnad?” asked Marsilia.
“No,” said Guccio. “Strnad killed himself seventy or eighty years ago. Kocourek took over the city from him.”
She frowned. “I don’t remember Kocourek.”
“After your time,” said Bonarata shortly.
“Is this Kocourek a rebel type?” she asked. “Or is he in trouble? Or is he just away from the phone for a couple of hours?”
“Maybe Mercy did something to him,” offered Adam dryly. “You can never tell with Mercy. I expect there are buses in Prague, too.”
Marsilia raised her eyebrow at Adam—an admonishment to behave. Adam raised one back at her.
“It is unlikely that Kocourek is away from the phone,” said Bonarata. “That is cause for concern, certainly. But anything further than that is speculation at this point.”
He didn’t sound like it was speculation. He sounded like he was seriously angry about it. Adam suspected Kocourek was not long for the world, but that was Bonarata’s business.
“I’m sure you will understand,” Marsilia said, “that Adam is anxious to collect his wife. Especially if your vampires on the ground in Prague are not responding. Perhaps we should get on with business. You took Mercy. Why?”
Bonarata pursed his lips, took a sip of his wine as if he enjoyed it. Then he looked up at Adam.
“You have made a bold move,” he said. “It was a brilliant move, perhaps, to claim your town as your territory and vow to protect all the people in it. You’ve made your town a place for humans to come and treat with the fae and the werewolves. A place where they feel safe. Humans come to see the fae, and the fae show their true faces—at least part of their true faces there. All because you have said you can keep them all safe from each other. It is a happy thing, a thing full of infinite possibilities and hope.”
He played with the glass. It looked fragile in his big hands. Then he set it down with a sigh and said, “And when it doesn’t work, you are going to spark a war with the humans that has not been seen on this planet since the Spanish Inquisition set off the Witch Wars. When I was a boy, every village had a coven of witches. Every city of any size had a witch as strong as Elizaveta in charge of it. The humans began it, driving the witches into breaking treaties that had been in place for centuries. By the time it was finished . . . I thought for fifty years that they had succeeded in killing off every witchborn person on the planet.”
The vampire spread his hands, then set them on the table on either side of his glass. “I do not believe that you—a pup not even a century old—can do this thing you claim. Even the Marrok has pulled his support from you, though your mate is this woman you claim is the child of his heart. He waits for you to fail, because if he did not think you would fail, he would join you. You are no match for the Gray Lords. You are no match for the werewolf packs who will move in on your territory because the Marrok no longer gives you the mantle of his protection. You are no match for me.” He gave Adam a sad smile. “No matter how much I wished it to be otherwise.”
Adam waited until Bonarata seemed to be done. Then he cut into a crescent roll dusted with raspberry drizzle and ate a large bite. He made sure to chew it well and washed it down with a swallow of water.
“Point of fact,” Adam said. “The Marrok broke with us because he thought we were going to step into the middle of a war the fae were courting with the humans. He needed to keep the rest of the werewolf packs out of that because, as you well know, if the fae turned their attention to eliminating the werewolves, they’d probably be able to do it before the humans managed to destroy the fae.”
He took another bite and chewed slowly.
Marsilia said, “The question you should be asking yourself at this point, Jacob, is why didn’t the fae destroy Adam and his pack out of hand? We all here at this table know they could have done it.”
Bonarata looked at Adam and invited Adam to answer the question with a lift of his eyebrow.
Adam swallowed his food. “You are looking at this wrong. You think I hold my territory by the might of my fist. But that’s not it. I hold my territory by consent of the governed. I think it is a very American concept, which might be why you never looked for it.”
He ate another bite in virtual silence. The rest of the people in the room—and there were maybe forty people here outside of his—seemed to understand that something was going on, and they quieted to hear it.
Adam decided that he’d offered enough. If Bonarata wanted to know more, he could ask. This time it wasn’t a dominance thing, a power play. This was for keeps. If Bonarata asked the questions he needed answers to, he was more likely to believe what he heard. The sooner he understood how their safe zone worked and why, the sooner Adam could get into the plane and fly to Prague.
“Explain it to me, then,” gritted Bonarata, “who is hampered by being old and European. Explain to me how a single Alpha werewolf can dictate behavior to the Gray Lords. To Beauclaire, who has the power to level cities. To the children of Danu, who were worshipped as gods.”
“Oh, that one is simple,” Adam said. “They made me do it.”
Silence.
“He’s not lying,” Marsilia said. “I rather enjoyed the show.”
Adam tipped his water glass at her. “I’ll remember that.” Then he dropped his indolent air and sat forward, all business. “When they made their dramatic exodus, the fae expected to be able to retreat to the reservations and never deal with humans again. Three thousand years ago they could have done that, retreated to Underhill and lived happily for as long as they cared to do so. But that Underhill fell and closed her doors to the fae, forcing them to make their peace with the humans, who reproduce so very quickly and love the cold iron that is the doom of most of the fae.
“Moving to the New World was a desperate move, revealing themselves to mankind again was a desperate move, creating the reservations was an even more desperate move. The latter paid off, or so they thought. In the wilds of western North America, where cold iron doesn’t have the weight of history that it has here, they were able to reopen the ways to Underhill in the territories they controlled. Places where cold iron and Christianity had no hold. So they flipped the bird at the humans and retreated, expecting that they could run from this world.”
Arrested, Bonarata absorbed that. When Adam started to speak, the vampire held up a hand. “I had not heard . . . a moment, please.”
Adam went back to eating. Maybe if he weren’t hungry, if he hadn’t been a soldier, the tension in the room would have ruined his appetite. Maybe.
“They opened the old ways,” Bonarata said, “but they did not find what they expected.”
Adam nodded. “Exactly. Underhill wasn’t happy with them—wasn’t entirely sane—and had no intention of allowing them to return and reign in their old, arrogant fashion.”
“Leaving the fae trapped
in a cage of their own making,” the vampire said.
Adam nodded. “They had some choices. One of them was to go out fighting. Even a hundred years ago, they might have won a war with the humans, though I doubt it. They have the power, but the fae just don’t have the numbers—and a fair percentage of them would rather kill other fae first, then go kill the humans. Now? With modern weapons? I don’t think it is a fight they can win, and neither do most of them. But the fae still have the kind of power that could make it a war with no winners.” He brought his fists up together, made a quiet explosive sound, and opened his fists like fireworks. “Everybody dies. Some of the fae find this a very attractive option, death in the glory of battle.”
Bonarata snorted inelegantly. “Morons,” he said. “Where is the glory if there is no one left to tell the story?”
“Thankfully, most of the Gray Lords agree with you,” Adam said. “They had locked themselves in their fortress. But the fae are not vampires or werewolves, who can live in peace with their brethren.” His wolf laughed at that. Fae living together in peace? Werewolves maybe, if the Marrok were there to bang heads together. Vampires? Still, one must flatter one’s host, and the vampires were better, generally, at living together than the fae were.
“If they kept their people trapped in the reservations for much longer, they would die at their own hands.” Adam only voiced what was obvious to everyone here who knew the fae. “They were already starting to murder and torture their own—out of sheer boredom, I think.”
“If they are to return to the world, they have to negotiate with humans again,” Bonarata mused. “But now they have thoroughly schooled their hosts in exactly how scary, how powerful they really are. How could they reestablish communications after that?” He gave Adam a doubtful look, clearly indicating he didn’t think Adam was up to the task.
“I don’t think you understand just what Adam is to the humans,” Marsilia said. “He was a celebrity werewolf almost from the first moment the werewolves came out. He’s good to look at, and he understands how to walk in the halls of power. He was respected by the military-industrial complex of the US before it was known that he was a werewolf. He was a person trusted by high-level military and political people. So he helped to weave relationships between the werewolves and humans.” Here Marsilia paused to smile wryly. “And then Mercy took a handful of Adam’s pack and killed a troll to save the humans. They risked their lives and were hurt in a battle they could have avoided. But they put themselves between the fae bad guys and the humans and turned themselves into heroes. They are celebrities.”
“Stupid of us,” Adam said. “Because it gave the Gray Lords an idea.”
“You were set up,” Bonarata said sitting forward. In a hushed, power-filled voice, he said, “They set you up. Set you up to be a hero, pretended to be afraid of you so that the humans would believe you could make the fae behave.”
Bonarata was being surprisingly reasonable for a man who had just lost one of his pets. Elizaveta had said the collar was almost out of power, hadn’t she? And the witch who had made it was no longer working for Bonarata. Maybe Lenka’s death hadn’t been as unplanned as it had seemed.
“The fact is,” Adam said, addressing the issue at hand, “no one believes the fae are afraid of me. Not the fae. Not the humans. Certainly not me. What they believe, because we have done it, is that we will fight to the death to protect the humans in our territory. But, I can tell you that if a fae steps wrong in my city, I won’t have to lift a finger to destroy him, because the fae themselves will do it for me. We have a treaty signed in blood to that effect.”
Marsilia cleared her throat, and Adam thought back over his words.
“Destroy him or her,” he said. “The humans believe that we can protect them—and we can. They are mistaken, a little, because they don’t know about that treaty, about why we can protect them. The fae know that the Gray Lords will kill to protect that treaty. And the fae are afraid of the Gray Lords.”
“Most important,” Marsilia said, “is that the humans don’t just think Adam and his pack can protect them—they know that Adam will protect them. He is a superhero—like Wolverine or Spider-Man.”
“And it isn’t just my pack enforcing order,” Adam said. He wasn’t a superhero—but he could see Marsilia’s point. “It’s Marsilia and her seethe. It’s Larry.” He raised his water glass in Larry’s direction and, twenty feet away, Larry raised his in return. “It is Elizaveta.” He and Elizaveta exchanged the same distant toast. “It is the fae themselves. I am, for my sins, just the face of that protection to the public eye.”
Bonarata stared thoughtfully at Adam. Adam met his eyes and held his gaze. This time, Bonarata smiled, a wide, generous expression that was as honest an expression as a vampire of his age and stature was capable of.
Yes, Adam thought, Lenka’s death had been planned. Bonarata’s sorrow had been real enough. But her death at the hands of Adam and his people had been planned. Maybe Bonarata wanted to use her death to justify killing Adam. That felt like something a vampire of Bonarata’s reputation might engineer. It had been an accident that Lenka had struck the first blow—and that Honey had been entirely justified in killing her.
Bonarata glanced around the room, and people resumed talking and doing things other than paying attention to Bonarata. Sound reestablished itself comfortably.
In this semiprivacy, Bonarata said to Marsilia, “Recently, you lost several of your stronger people. If you would leave me a list of my vampires you would trust at your back, I will see who is willing to travel to you.” He paused, then said, with evident sincerity, “You may account the gift as my endorsement of this idea of your safe zone.” He paused. “Alternatively, you could return here, and I will send people to replace you so the werewolves are not left without support.”
As an “I love you and wish you to return to me” it lacked both clarity and passion, Adam judged. If he’d said something that lame and uncommitted to Mercy, she’d make sure he paid for it. He didn’t think Marsilia would be any more impressed by it than Mercy would have been.
Marsilia looked down at the table. “I loved you,” she said in a very low voice.
“You defied me,” Bonarata said in the same low voice. “You fought me. I could not let it go, no matter how much I loved you.”
She gave him a hard smile. “You destroyed Lenka and her mate because it was easier than controlling your hunger for her blood. By destroying her, a strong werewolf, you demonstrated that you were still in charge—a very big lie. It worked only because people are willing to believe lies that are big enough. Because you did not want to control your addiction, not really. You enjoyed the power boost the blood of a werewolf gave you more than you recognized the addiction as a weakness that is more than a match for any strength it gives you.”
“Yes,” said Bonarata without apology.
“You loved power more than you loved me,” she said. “You chose once as you would choose again.” She smiled, and it was tender and sad at the same time. “I know you, Iacopo. I would not change you for anything. But I cannot live here.” She waved her hand to indicate his home, his seethe, Milan. Everything. “I am useful where I am. There are people who depend upon me.” She looked at Adam, who solemnly nodded. “It is then my choice to go back to my home. I will send you a list of people I might trust, and you may do what you wish with it.”
Adam finished his food. He glanced at Guccio, who was watching the other two vampires. Guccio had managed the whole meal without saying more than a single sentence. Adam was a little, a very little, disappointed in Guccio, that the vampire was going to do nothing—leaving Adam in an awkward position. Maybe the story Guccio had told about marking Adam had been true—except that he’d bitten him and bound him instead. The marking could be overlooked as the bite never could. Should Adam let the trespass go if Guccio didn’t make a move? Adam found that answer extremely unsatis
fying, and so did his wolf.
“I regret what I had to do,” Bonarata was telling Marsilia in a soft voice.
Marsilia lifted a brow in disbelief, and Bonarata gave a half-embarrassed laugh and spread his arms. “You are right. I needed the power, Marsilia. If I had not had it, we would not have survived.”
She made a sound that might have been disagreement. “Did your werewolf blood give you more power than having Stefan and me by your side would have? More than Wulfe? You broke him, too, Iacopo. He is not . . . not safe anymore.”
Bonarata nodded. “When they saw what I was willing to do, what I could do, they quit fighting me. It allowed me to take the reins here. To keep us all safe.”
She looked at him. “Then, my once-love, what is it that you regret?”
“That I could not have just told you what I was doing and why,” he said. “That I had to hurt you.”
She shook her head. “Don’t pretend that was part of your plan. You hurt me, I hurt you back. I broke your rules, fed from Lenka, and tried to break your hold on her. I failed in that, to my regret. You punished me for breaking your rules—but my real crime was hurting you. Was daring to tell you that what you had done, what you were doing, was wrong. I know you, Iacopo. You aren’t sorry for anyone except yourself.”
She didn’t say it like she was condemning him, but she meant it.
His face lost all expression. “You don’t know me, Marsilia. You knew the person I was. And call me Jacob.”
“Fair enough,” she agreed. “But I, too, have changed. I’m not yours through thick and thin anymore, I am not your Blade. I do not feel the need to forgive you anything, Jacob. I will never pine for you again, though I think I will remember you fondly. In a few years, perhaps.” She glanced around. “And if you really wanted me back, we’d have had this conversation without an audience. Having discussed everything that needed to be said, Adam needs to leave for Prague to find his mate. Have we your leave to go?”