I bet he wouldn’t have demanded an explanation from Agnes. And Mircea, if she’d gone to him for some crazy reason, probably wouldn’t have, either. The Senate had wanted a Pythia for so long—they’d have jumped at the chance to help her, to have her owe them a favor.
But not me.
And, abruptly, the final puzzle piece fell into place.
Because I would be expected to tell everyone why I needed it, wouldn’t I? And to have it be something they approved of to have any chance at getting it at all. And while that was infuriating with Jonas, it was worse with Mircea.
Vampires respected power and strength, and that was pretty much all they respected. I’d shown that I had power recently, by somehow managing to kill a Spartoi, one of the demigod sons of Ares, in a duel that many of the vamp leadership had happened to see. They’d liked that. They’d liked it so much that they’d signed the treaty of alliance shortly thereafter, doing what nobody had ever expected and putting themselves under the leadership of the North American consul.
That was a huge deal. That had never happened before. And it had only happened now because they
were dealing with a power they didn’t know how to counter and they needed somebody on their side who did.
I’d shown them power, power they didn’t have, and it had helped.
But I hadn’t shown them strength.
Because strength in the vamp world didn’t mean the ability to bend steel. The smallest vamp girl could do that. No, strength was something else.
Strength was the consul calmly saying to five other Senate leaders, each of them hundreds of years old and staggeringly powerful, I will lead this alliance, and making it stick. Strength was one master vamp bowing to another and giving way for him, not because he might not be just as strong, but because he wasn’t willing to find out. Strength was why Senate seats were still determined by duels, as archaic as that seemed these days. Because being a leader in the vampire world didn’t require just being powerful, it required being able to say to another first-level master, this seat is mine and I will take it.
So yes, I’d shown power, but so far, from a vamp perspective, I hadn’t shown strength. And now I was paying for it. Mircea might love me, but he didn’t respect me. He wouldn’t have pulled that stunt tonight if he respected me.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I was angry. Not because he’d asked, but because of when and how. Because of the assumption that I would just do this, without question, without thought. That he could just tell me what he wanted and that would be it.
Or point me at a problem like a gun, because guns didn’t act on their own, did they? Guns didn’t have ideas and opinions. Guns were pulled out when needed and left in the drawer the rest of the time.
Or in a hotel suite in Vegas.
Chapter Thirty-two
Something jolted me out of a dead sleep the next morning, and I rolled over to see the clock. Barely seven a.m. But I didn’t go back to sleep. Because I had a job to do and because I needed to find something to stop the pounding in my head.
Which I belatedly realized wasn’t coming from my head.
It was coming from the door.
I stared at it blearily and wondered if I cared. And then the door burst open, and a wild-eyed, dark-haired woman came in, yelling my name even after being tackled by Marco in a flying leap.
Which turned into a trip in the opposite direction when she deflected him with a gesture, sending him slamming back through the air and then through the wall.
I sat up.
I guess I cared.
It took me a second to figure out who I was looking at, because I hadn’t seen her too often. And when I had, she’d been a little more indistinct. Incubi—or succubi, I guess, in this case—don’t normally have bodies, because it takes a huge amount of power to manifest them.
But then, this particular succubus had been on earth something like four hundred years and had power to burn.
“Rian?” I said blearily, and held up a hand so that nobody decided to shoot her.
Including Marco, who had just rushed back in, weapon drawn.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “She’s . . . she used to be Casanova’s girlfriend.”
“I am still his girlfriend!” Rian looked at me wildly, dark hair everywhere. I guessed real hair was harder to handle than the spirit kind she’d had until recently. Because it was a little scary.
Then again, that might have been because she kept pulling on it.