“How kind of you to make an appearance,” she said, her abyss-dark eyes cold with power.
Only Warren’s warmth allowed me to answer her with anything approaching calm. “How kind of you to issue your invitations in advance, so I could be on time,” I said. Perhaps not wisely—but, hey, she already hated me. I could smell it.
She stared at me a moment. “It makes a joke,” she said.
“It is rude,” I returned, taking a step to the side. If I got her mad enough to attack me, I didn’t want Warren to take the hit.
It was only when I stepped around him that I realized I was meeting her gaze. Stupid. Even Samuel wasn’t proof against the power of her eyes. But I couldn’t look down, not with Adam’s power rising to choke me. I wasn’t just a coyote here, I was the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack’s mate—because he said so, and because I said so.
If I looked down, I was acknowledging her superiority, and I wouldn’t do that. So I met her eyes, and she chose to allow me to do so.
She lowered her eyelids, not so far as to lose our informal staring contest, but to veil her expression. “I think,” she said in a voice so soft that only Warren and I heard her, “I think that had we met at a different place and time, I could have liked you.” She smiled, her fangs showing. “Or killed you.”
“Enough games,” she said, louder. “Call him for me.”
I froze. That’s why she wanted me. She wanted Stefan back. For a moment all I could see was the blackened dead thing that she’d dropped in my living room. I remembered how long it had taken me to realize who it was.
She’d done that to him—and now she wanted him back. Not if I could help it.
Adam hadn’t moved from where he’d been standing, telling the room he trusted me to take care of myself. I wasn’t sure he really thought so—I knew I didn’t—but he needed me to stand on my own two feet. “Call whom?” he asked.
She smiled at him without looking away from me. “Didn’t you know? Your mate belongs to Stefan.”
He laughed, an oddly happy sound in this dirge-shadowed room. It was a good excuse to turn my back on Marsilia and quit playing the stare game. Turning my back meant that I didn’t lose—only that the contest was over.
I tried not to let the sick fear I felt show on my face. I tried to be what Adam—and Stefan—needed me to be.
“Like a coyote, Mercy is adaptable,” Adam told Marsilia. “She belongs to whom she decides. She belongs everywhere she wants to, for just as long as she wants to.” He made it sound like a good thing. Then he said, “I thought this was about preventing war.”
“It is,” said Marsilia. “Call Stefan.”
I lifted my chin and glanced at her over my shoulder. “Stefan is my friend,” I told her. “I won’t bring him to his execution.”
“Admirable,” she told me briskly. “But your concern is misplaced. I can promise that he won’t be hurt physically by me or by mine tonight.”
I slanted a glance at Warren, and he nodded. Vampires might be hard to read, but he was better at sensing lies than I was, and his nose agreed with mine: she was being truthful.
“Or hold him here,” I said.
The smell of her hatred had died away, and I couldn’t tell anything about how she felt. “Or hold him here,” she agreed. “Witness!”
“Witnessed,” said the vampires. All of them. All at exactly the same time. Like puppets, only creepier.
She waited. Finally, she said, “I mean him no harm.”
I thought of earlier tonight, when he’d turned down Bernard even though I was pretty sure he agreed with Bernard’s assessment of her continued rule of the seethe. In the end, he loved her more than he loved his seethe, his menagerie of sheep, or his own life.
“You harm him by your continued existence,” I told her, as quietly as I could. And she flinched.
I thought about that flinch ... and about the way she’d let him live even though he, of all her vampires, had reason to see her dead—and had the means to do so. Maybe Stefan wasn’t the only one who loved.
It hadn’t kept her from torturing him, though.
I closed my eyes, trusting Warren, trusting Adam to keep me safe. I only wished I could keep Stefan safe. But I knew what he would want me to do.
Stefan, I called, just as I had earlier—because I knew he would want me to. Surely he knew where I was calling from and would come ready to protect himself.
Nothing happened. No Stefan.
I looked toward Marsilia and shrugged. “I called,” I told her. “But he doesn’t have to come when I call.”
It didn’t seem to bother her. She just nodded—a surprisingly businesslike gesture from a woman who would have looked more at home in a Renaissance gown of silk and jewels than she did in her modern suit.
“Then I call this meeting to order,” she said, strolling to the old thronelike chair in the center of the room. “First, I would call Bernard to the chair.”
He came, reluctant and stiff. I recognized the pattern of his movement—he looked like a wolf called against his will. I knew he wasn’t of her making, but she had power over him just the same. He was still wearing the clothes I’d last seen him in. The harsh overhead fluorescent lights glinted off the small balding spot on the top of his head.
He sat unwillingly.
“Here, caro, let me help.” Marsilia took each hand and impaled it on the upthrust brass thorns. He fought. I could see it in the grimness of his face and the tenseness of his muscles. I couldn’t see that it cost Marsilia anything at all to keep him under her control.
“You’ve been naughty, no?” she asked. “Disloyal.”
“I have not been disloyal to the seethe,” he gritted out.
“Truth,” said a boy’s voice.
The Wizard himself. I hadn’t seen him—though I’d looked. His light gold hair had been trimmed close to his skull. He had a vague smile on his face as he strolled down from the top of the bleachers across from us. He used the bleacher seats as stairs.
He looked like a young high school student. He’d died before his features had had a chance to grow into maturity. He looked soft and young.
Marsilia smiled when she saw him. He hopped over the last three seats and landed lightly on the hardwood floor. She was shorter than he was, but the kiss he gave her made my stomach hurt. I knew he was hundreds of years old, but it didn’t matter—because he looked like a kid.
He stepped back and reached out a finger and ran it over Bernard’s hand and down to the chair arm. When he picked it up it dripped blood. He licked it off slowly, letting a few drops roll down the palm of his hand, over his wrist, until it stained the light green sleeves of his dress shirt.
I wondered who he was performing for. Surely the vampires wouldn’t be bothered by his licking blood—and I was sort of right but mostly wrong. Bothered might not be the word, but there was a generalized motion from the stands as vampires leaned forward and some of them even licked their lips.
Ugh.
“You have betrayed me, haven’t you, Bernard?” Marsilia was still looking at Wulfe, and he held out his hand. She took it and traced the drying blood, letting her mouth linger over his wrist while Bernard quivered, trying not to answer the question.
“I have not betrayed the seethe,” Bernard said again. And though she grilled him for ten minutes or more, that was all he would say.
Stefan appeared beside me. His eyes were on the sleeve of his white dress shirt as he casually fixed a cuff link, then he pulled the sleeve of his subtly pin-striped gray suit over it with a just-right tug. He looked at me, and Marsilia looked at him.
She waved her hand at Bernard. “Get up—Wulfe, put him somewhere obvious, would you?”