I stopped so suddenly that Anastasia nearly walked into my back. She caught her balance with a hiss of discomfort, and then looked up and caught her breath. “Oh, my.”
Nearly two tons of British steel and chrome sat idling in the drive. Its purring engine sounded like a sewing machine. The white Rolls limo was an old model, something right out of a pulp-fiction adventure film, and it was in gorgeous condition. Its panels shone, freshly waxed and without blemish, and the chrome of its grill gleamed sienna in the light of dusk over the Château.
I walked down to peer inside the Rolls. The passenger seating in the back was larger than my freaking apartment. Or at least it looked that way. The interior was all silver-grey and white leather and similarly colored woodwork, polished to a glowing sheen and accented with silver. The carpet on the floor of the Rolls was thicker and more luxurious than a well-kept lawn.
“Wow,” I said quietly.
Anastasia, standing beside me, breathed, “That’s a work of bloody art.”
“Wow,” I said quietly.
“Look at the filigree.”
I nodded. “Wow.”
Anastasia gave me a sidelong look. “And there’s plenty of room in back.”
I blinked and looked at her.
Her expression was innocent and bland. “All I’m saying is that it is rather crowded in your apartment right now. . . .”
“Anastasia,” I said. I felt my face getting a little warm.
The dimples reappeared. She was just teasing me, of course. In her condition it would be some time before she could engage in that kind of activity.
“What model is this?” she asked.
“Um,” I said. “Well, it’s a Rolls-Royce. It’s . . . I think it’s from before World War Two. . . .”
“It’s a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, of course,” said Lara’s voice from behind me. “At this house? What else would it be?”
I looked over my shoulder, to see Lara Raith standing in the shadowy doorway of the house.
“You have special needs, obviously,” she said. “So I provided you with an appropriate vintage. Nineteen thirty-nine.” She folded her arms, rather smugly, I thought, and said, “Bring it back with a full tank.”
I tilted my head at her in a gesture that wasn’t quite an affirmation, and muttered, as I opened the passenger-side door, “The loan officer will have to run a check on my credit first. What’s this thing get, about two gallons per mile?”
Anastasia slid into the car with a brief sound of discomfort. I winced and held out my hands in case she fell back, but she managed it without any other difficulty. I shut the door, and caught a glimpse of Lara taking a sudden step forward.
She focused sharply on Anastasia for a moment—and then upon me.
Lara’s eyes flickered several shades paler as her ripe lips parted in dawning realization. A very slow smile crept over her mouth as she stared at me.
I turned away from her rather hurriedly, got into the Rolls, and got it moving. And I didn’t look back again until the vampires’ house was five miles behind us.
Anastasia let me get most of the way back to town before she looked at me and said, “Harry?”
“Hmmm?” I asked. Driving the Rolls was like driving a tank. It had all kinds of momentum behind it, no power steering, and no power brakes. It was a vehicle that demanded that I pay my respects to the laws of physics and think a little bit further ahead than I otherwise might.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked.
“Dammit,” I muttered.
She watched me with eyes much older than the face around them. “You were hoping I didn’t hear Justine.”
“Yeah.”
“But I did.”
I drove for another minute or two before asking, “Are you sure?”
She considered that for a moment before she said, more gently, “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
“I have nothing to say to Captain Luccio,” I said. It came out harder than I had anticipated.
She reached out and put her left hand on my right, where it rested on the gearshift. “What about to Anastasia?” she asked.
I felt my jaw tighten. It took me a moment to make them relax and ask, “Do you have any family?”
“Yes,” she said. “Technically.”
“Technically?”
“The men and women I grew up with, who I knew? They’ve been dead for generations. Their descendants are living all over Italy, in Greece, and there are a few in Algeria—but it isn’t as though they invite their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandaunt to their Christmas celebrations. They’re strangers.”
I frowned, thinking that over, and looked at her. “Strangers.”
She nodded. “Most people aren’t willing to accept a radical fact like the life span of our kind, Harry. There are some families who have—Martha Liberty, for example, lives with one of her multiple-great-granddaughters and her children. But mostly, it ends badly when wizards try to stay too close to their kin.” She bowed her head, apparently studying her sling as she spoke. “I look in on them every five or six years, without them knowing. Keep an eye out for any of the children who might develop a talent.”
“But you had a real family once,” I said.
She sighed and looked out the window. “Oh, yes. It was a very long time ago.”
“I remember my father, a little. But I was raised an orphan.”
She winced. “
Dio , Harry.” Her fingers squeezed mine. “You never had anyone, did you?”
“And if I did find someone,” I said, feeling my throat constricting as I spoke, “I would do anything necessary to protect him. Anything.”
Anastasia looked out the window, letting out a hiss of what sounded like anger. “Margaret. You selfish bitch.”
I blinked and looked at her, and nearly got us both killed when a passing car cut me off and I almost couldn’t stop the monster Rolls in time. “You . . . you knew my mother?”
“All the Wardens knew her,” Anastasia said quietly.
“She was a Warden?”
Anastasia was silent for a moment before shaking her head. “She was considered a threat to the Laws of Magic.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that she made it a point to dance as close to the edge of breaking the Laws as she possibly could whenever she got the chance,” Anastasia replied. “It took her all of a year after she was admitted to the Council to start agitating for change.”
I had to focus on the road. This was more than I had ever heard from anyone in the Council about the enigmatic figure who had given me life. My hands were sweating and my heart was thudding. “What kind of change?”
“She was furious that ‘the Laws of Magic have nothing to do with right and wrong.’ She pointed out how wizards could use their abilities to bilk people out of their money, to intimidate and manipulate them, to steal wealth and property from others or destroy it outright, and that so long as the Laws were obeyed, the Council would do nothing whatsoever to stop them or discourage others from following their example. She wanted to reform the Council’s laws to embrace concepts of justice as well as limiting the specific use of magic.”
I frowned. “Wow. What a monster.”
She exhaled slowly. “Can you imagine what would happen if she’d had her way?”
“I wouldn’t have been unjustly persecuted by the Wardens for years?”
Anastasia’s lips firmed into a line. “Once a body of laws describing justice was applied to the Council, it would only be a short step to using that body to involve the Council in events happening in the outside world.”
“Gosh, yeah,” I said. “You’re right. A bunch of wizards trying to effect good in the world would be awful.”