Crimson Death
Page 49

   “Yeah, we do,” I said.
   “We are agreed,” Jean-Claude said.
   We were all agreed, and that was great, but what we needed was a plan. Edward was asking for help. He almost never asked for help. One of the scariest vampires around seemed powerless in the face of whatever was happening in her country, or maybe she just didn’t care.
   I asked Jean-Claude, “Could She-Who-Made-Damian just not give a damn?”
   “What do you mean, ma petite?”
   “Could she just not care enough to police the new vampires?”
   “Do you mean, has she given up?”
   “I mean, is she old enough that she just isn’t moving with the times? Some of them do that, right? They just refuse to accept change and sort of hide from it all.”
   “It has happened, but in the past the council did not allow it to disrupt business as usual.”
   “You mean that the Mother of All Darkness would send the Harlequin out to see what was wrong and fix it.”
   “Oui, that is what I mean.”
   “We killed the Mother of All Darkness, and most of the Harlequin work for us now.”
   “That is true, ma petite.”
   Nathaniel looked from one to the other of us. “Were they doing something that we aren’t doing now?”
   “What do you mean?” I asked.
   “Jean-Claude is in charge of the new power structure, but it’s not like the old one. It’s mostly just us here in America. The old council ran things differently, right?” Nathaniel said.
   “They were concerned with more of the world than we are,” Jean-Claude said.
   “Have we dropped a ball here, Jean-Claude? Were the Mother and the Harlequin or the old council doing things to keep Ireland moving safely along, and now that we’ve destroyed their power did we cause this somehow?” I said.
   He went very still. I knew it meant he was either thinking, or hiding what he was thinking. “I do not believe so, but if we wish to know what the council was doing to maintain the status quo in Ireland, we have people here to ask.”
   “The Harlequin,” I said.
   “Our guards now,” he said.
   “Wouldn’t the Harlequin have told you if there was something important that needed to keep being done?” Nathaniel asked.
   “All the Harlequin are older than I am, and there is something about being a certain age that gives you a longer view of things.”
   “Which means what?” I asked.
   “They might not see it as important enough to share until it became a problem.”
   “Even if it cost lives?” I asked.
   “The vampires of the Harlequin are thousands of years old, ma petite. They may not consider human life as valuable as we do.”
   “Then their attitude needs to change,” I said.
   “I would settle for their sharing any important secrets before they become an issue.”
   “We don’t know that they hid anything about Ireland,” I said.
   “No, that is true, but the old council is disbanded. Their power is destroyed and incorporated into our power base, and suddenly a country that has run seamlessly for thousands of years is in turmoil. At the very least, we should question the coincidence.”
   “If it is a coincidence,” I said.
   “Do not borrow trouble, ma petite. Not everything that goes wrong in the world is our doing.”
   “True, but if we’re only in charge of American vampires, who’s in charge of Europe now?”
   “If I try to spread our power over the rest of the world, we will have more battles on our hands. One of the reasons it has gone so smoothly is that I have not fought to rule the world, as it were.”
   “I don’t want the equivalent of a vampire world war, but someone needs to be in charge of you guys.”
   “We have been in charge of ourselves longer than humans have known there was a world to rule.”
   “But all that time the Mother of All Darkness was in charge of all of you, right?”
   “Oui.”
   “Now she’s not, because we killed her.”
   “You are wondering what the vampiric mice are doing now that the cat is dead—is that it, ma petite?”
   “Yeah, that,” I said.
   “They’re doing what the mice always do when the cat’s gone,” Nathaniel said.
   We looked at him.
   “And that would be what, our pussycat?”
   “Destroy everything they can before a new cat comes along.”
   “And we’re the new cat,” I said.
   “Perhaps, ma petite, mon minet, or perhaps we need to find another cat to rule Europe.”
   “Who?” I asked.
   “I do not know, but I know that I do not wish to rule the world. America is enough for me.”
   “Have we let the monsters loose in Ireland, Jean-Claude?”
   “Let us ask the Harlequin that we trust most. If there is a secret to Ireland’s vampire past, they will know it.”
   “Who do we ask first?”
   “Magda,” Nathaniel said.
   We looked at him.
   “She’s one of our lovers and she’s so blunt, it’s painful. If there’s something she knows, she’ll share it. If we ask her without Giacomo at her side.”
   “Are you saying she would obey her vampire master before her vampire king?” Jean-Claude asked.
   “Let’s not make her choose,” Nathaniel said. “Let’s just ask her now while she’s awake and her master is still dead to the world.”
   “You are growing craftier, mon minet.”
   “I had to get smarter sometime,” he said.
   “No, sadly, some people live for centuries and never become wiser.”
   I was pretty sure we were all thinking about the same person, but none of us said his name. Asher had been Jean-Claude’s on-again, off-again love of his afterlife for centuries. They’d loved and lost the same woman, Asher’s human servant Julianna, and neither of them had stopped mourning her. They say love heals all wounds, but if Jean-Claude and Asher were any judge, maybe not. Asher’s jealousy issues had led him to make some seriously bad political choices that had almost started a war here in St. Louis between us and the local werehyenas. That final stupidity had been enough even for Jean-Claude and all of us to dump him. Asher, our golden-haired and sadistic beauty, was now trying to be monogamous with the one lover he had left, Kane. None of us liked Kane, and he returned the sentiment. We all missed parts of Asher when he was behaving himself, but none of us missed those parts enough to forgive this last near-disastrous choice. A war among the preternatural set here in St. Louis just as Jean-Claude was being the very public face for vampires as good citizens could have lost the vampires so much, like the new voting rights that grandfathered in all vampires regardless of how long they’d been dead. Less than fifteen years ago a vampire could be killed on sight just for being a vampire, no questions asked. There were still laws in some Western states that allowed lycanthropes to be killed like varmint coyotes, or rats. You could kill someone and as long as their blood tests came back positive for lycanthropy you were justified. One of the things that the Coalition was trying to get changed was laws like that. We were so not free and clear in this country, or anywhere in the world. Asher had risked so much more than just us when he’d made his last bad decisions. In the end, that level of carelessness was what we couldn’t forgive.