When I arrived at Obsidian, the art gallery he owned, I went to the basement stairs. Rick was waiting at the door for me, so I didn’t even have to argue with any flunkies about letting me in. He and his Family kept a lair here, an office and apartments, though I’d never seen any part of it other than the main hallway and the office and living room in back. Just like Rick had never seen where the pack spent full moon nights. We had our separate realms. It was a wonder any of us ever worked together.
Rick politely ushered me into the wide living room, which had sofas and a coffee table on one end and a desk and shelves on the other. The place was simple, functional, livable.
“Have a seat,” he said, indicating the comfortable chair on the other side of the desk.
“What’s this about?”
I resisted looking over my shoulder for the practical joke. He opened a drawer and produced a padded shipping envelope, already opened. I didn’t see the return address or stamps, but it looked battered, as if it had traveled some great distance. Turning it upside down, he shook, and a packet fell onto his desk. Thick, heavy, made of some expensive, cream-colored paper, it looked like a wedding invitation, or a medieval deed.
His smile was cryptic. Mischievous, even. He turned it right side up, showing me the wax seal, the thick red blob imprinted with an ornate crest. Medieval deed it was, then.
The seal had already been cracked. I unfolded the thick paper to reveal writing, ornate and curling, in dark ink that seemed to glow against the rich paper. I could make out letters, put some of them together into words, but the language was Latin, which I recognized but couldn’t read.
“What’s it say?” I asked Rick.
“It’s from Nasser, who is the Master of Tripoli. He’s requesting a meeting to discuss ways in which we might oppose Dux Bellorum and…” He picked up the page again and read a phrase. “… terminamus ludum longum.”
“Which means…”
“‘We end the Long Game.’ Once and for all. End it without finishing it. He saw a video of your speech in London and wants to meet you. He didn’t know there was anyone else in the world opposing Roman, and now he does. Should I invite him to visit?”
Stunned, I turned the words over in my mind, trying to parse what they meant. Someone had heard me. A knot of hope settled in my chest. Terminamus … had a nice ring to it.
“Then it worked,” I said softly. “The speech—it wasn’t for nothing.”
“Oh, no,” Rick said, and the smile turned wide and pleased. “I think it worked very well. I think it did exactly what it was supposed to. Assuming you meant it as a call to arms.”
I leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and covered my face with my hands. It was like I’d been holding my breath since London, and the releasing sigh reached every nerve. I couldn’t even move.
“Kitty?” Rick prompted.
“I just keep telling myself it’s going to be all right.”
He cocked his head, a bemused furrow marking his brow. “I think it will. Eventually.”
“You’ve been saying that for five hundred years, haven’t you?”
He just smiled.
* * *
“GOOD EVENING, and once again you’re listening to The Midnight Hour, talk radio with teeth. We’ve been talking about conspiracy theories. Especially supernatural conspiracy theories. There are an awful lot of them out there, and I’ve got some of my own as most of you well know.”
In the end, my solution was to not really do anything at all. Run the show like I always did, speaking with the same easy tone I always used. Keep it chatty, keep it light. I didn’t have to defend myself. I didn’t need to convince anyone or change any minds. I just needed to be myself, and keep being myself, like I always had. Anyone who got belligerent or confronted me—well, I’d do the same thing I always did. I’d just talk and see what happened.
My next caller was male with a drawling, pompous voice. Determined to put li’l ol’ me in my place. “The problem with these so-called theories—every last one of them—is that they attribute vast unlikely powers of organization and influence to groups that in the real world can’t balance their own budgets.” The pointed obviously was unspoken.
He couldn’t have fed me a better line if I’d scripted it. “How about this: that apparent inability to balance a budget? It’s a front to make you believe there couldn’t really be a conspiracy.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“That’s what you’re supposed to think!” I fired back, getting into the spirit of the viewpoint I was channeling. “Therefore you’ll never even consider the Byzantine network of control and oppression hidden behind the façade of incompetence!” I made my voice calm again. “You see how this works, now?”
“You’re crazy, you know that?”
I sighed. “That might mean something if you weren’t the”—I checked the sheet of scratch paper because yes, I’d been keeping track with hatch marks—“twelfth person to say that tonight.”
I hung up on him before he could hang up on me. “There’s a paradox inherent in the very idea of a conspiracy theory. For example, if an alien civilization has the technology to travel the vast distances to bring actual craft here to Earth, don’t you think they’d also have the technology to keep out of sight if they didn’t want to be seen? And the technology to examine a person’s insides without probing? I mean, we have that technology right now! The second paradox: if it’s a truly competent, effective conspiracy, none of us will ever know about it. I humbly submit that a vampire who’s been around for two thousand years will be very good at covering his tracks. And yes, I’m fully aware that I can’t prove any of this.