He took the baby back, popped the bottle in her mouth, and glared at me.
“But . . . you made an army for the Black Circle. You just said—”
He shrugged. “I’ve always been good at telling tales. And your war mage . . . well, he deserved a few bad moments. He gave me enough tonight!”
“Are you trying to tell me that wasn’t true? That you just made it all up?” I didn’t believe it for a second. The evidence to the contrary had just thrown Pritkin halfway through a wall.
He looked at me impatiently. “The theory is sound enough, but in practice—it’s like I told you. It was a failed experiment.”
“It looked pretty successful to me!”
“Well, of course. It was designed to.” He held the bottle under his chin and pulled over an ottoman, I guess so he wouldn’t drop me, and plunked down.
“Designed to do what?”
“To fool the Black Circle.” He saw my expression and made a disgusted sound. “Look, it doesn’t work, all right? But the Circle didn’t know that because no one had ever tried it. The demonologists who could create a proper binding spell couldn’t see ghosts, and you can’t bind what you can’t even tell is there! And the necromancers who specialize in ghosts can’t do a binding.”
“Daisy said otherwise,” I reminded him.
He rolled his eyes in unconscious imitation. “Do you know how zombies are made?” he demanded, putting the baby on his shoulder and patting her back. “They’re not like ghosts. They have no souls. So a necromancer must send a tiny bit of his own to animate his creation.”
“So?”
“So it’s not like you can spare that much! That’s why you don’t see zombie armies roaming about, despite what the movies would have you believe. A necromancer can only direct two, maybe three at a time with any success. Any others he tries to raise will be on autopilot—the lights are on but nobody’s home, all right? And as such, they’re sitting ducks. Useless.”
“I still don’t see—”
The baby interrupted me with an astonishingly loud burp. We both looked at her, me with shock, him with satisfaction. He wiped her chin and popped the bottle back in her mouth.
“I told you, I modified the binding spell used on golems with the spell we use for making zombies. And it worked, more or less. But you know how it is with magic—it always bites you on the ass somehow. And in this particular case, I found that the new spell was limited in the same way the zombie spell is—I could only bind two or three ‘bodies’ at a time. I couldn’t make an army if I tried!”
I scanned his face, wanting to believe him. His blue eyes looked guileless, and he sounded completely convincing. But then, he had downstairs, too.
Roger scowled, I guess because I was taking too long. “Think, girl! Why do you think nobody’s used ghosts as a weapon before? I’m not a genius and nothing’s new under the sun. Somebody probably tried at some point, then gave up in disgust and went back to zombies! They may be disgusting, but at least they’re reliable.”
“Yet you’ve done it, at least with two—”
“Yes, two. And you wouldn’t believe the merry hell they give me, either. I mean, think about the logistics of it for a minute. If you could find enough independent-minded spirits, who weren’t obsessing over revenge twenty-four-seven, and if you could somehow find enough energy to feed them, and if you could convince them to support your cause . . . well, then you might have a force to be reckoned with. But do you know what the odds are on that?”
He was right, I realized. And if I hadn’t been so busy worrying about him and Pritkin going for each other’s throats, I might have realized it on my own. Billy Joe was just one ghost and he gave me a fit. I couldn’t imagine controlling an army, or even managing to recruit it to begin with. No wonder nobody had ever done it. It would be like trying to herd cats.
“Obsessive, chattering cats,” Roger agreed, because I guess I’d spoken that last out loud.
“But Jonas—the head of the Silver Circle—told me your ghost army was watching the Circle’s every move.”
Roger laughed. “Did he, now?”
“You’re telling me that wasn’t true, either?”
“Of course it wasn’t true. I don’t like the Silver Circle, but the Black’s even worse. I wasn’t about to help them, but they kept insisting. They’d gotten the idea that I had several hundred ghosts lying about, which I suppose they thought was a waste since they were feeding them! So I made sure that rumors reached the Silver Circle to make them extra paranoid and give me an excuse for not catching much.”
I stared at him. He sounded so blasé about it, like lying to the two most powerful magical organizations on earth was no big thing. “And your army—”
“When people hear the term ‘army’ paired with anything, they tend to give it respect. Ask Tony.”
“You lied to him, too.” It wasn’t a question.
“Well, we couldn’t stay at the house,” he said peevishly, looking a bit annoyed. Like he’d expected me to ooh and aah over his accomplishments. I was impressed all right—that he’d lasted as long as he had. I was also coming around to Pritkin’s point of view—there was a damned good possibility Daddy was nuts.
“Why couldn’t you stay at the house?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
“Your mother outright refused. I told you, she prefers the woods, and anyway, she didn’t like Tony.”
Imagine that.
“And in any case, the bastard bunch of ghosts they have over there kept trying to savage Sam and Daisy! I had to get us out.”
“So you faked the demon attack so Tony would exile you to the cottage,” I said, because of course he had.
“Fire spell. You know how vamps are.”
“—and then you booby-trapped the forest—”
“Well, we had to grow it first.”
“—and built those things so nobody would come out to spy on you.”
“I’m less worried about the spying than the dying,” he said dryly. “If the damned Spartoi show up, I need something better than Tony’s lot to buy us time. Something even a god won’t expect. And I still had the specs for the homunculi from when I was with the Black Circle, so . . ” He shrugged.
I sat there. I had about a thousand questions I wanted—needed—to ask, and this might be my only chance. Because if Mom was anything like Agnes, she wasn’t going to be happy to see me. I knew that, knew I needed to seize the opportunity while it was here, but I was having a hard time with it.
“You . . . you lied about everything,” I said, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of this completely ordinary guy somehow convincing everyone—the Black and Silver Circles, Agnes, a master vampire, everyone—that he was a force to be reckoned with. When all he had were some junky robots and a couple of smart-mouthed ghosts.
“I prefer to think of it as creative problem-solving,” he told me stiffly.
“And you got away with it,” I said wonderingly. Because that was probably the most difficult part to accept.
“You sound surprised.”
“I’m flabbergasted,” I told him honestly. He smirked. “You should have been dead years ago.”
The smirk faded. “Thanks,” he said sourly, switching the baby over to the other shoulder, since that one had been sufficiently drooled on. “But maybe one day you’ll learn, people are gullible. Often they’ll just believe what you tell them, if you sound confident enough—and if it’s something they like. They want to believe, so they do half the work for you.”
“But . . . but the Black Circle,” I said, trying to impress on him the type of people he had been dealing with, since apparently he still didn’t get it.