“That’s not your call!” I told him, furious. “I got him into this—”
“And now you’ll stay out of it!”
“I don’t answer to you!”
“You are tired,” Adra said, watching me. “And your power is weak here. You have defeated one challenger, but I assure you, this one will not be so easy. Do you truly believe you can take it?”
“I know damned well Casanova can’t!”
“And you would risk yourself for him?”
“Yes!”
“He is not your kind; not your responsibility.”
“I’m making him mine!”
“Why? We were surprised that you would risk yourself to save your court, but they are yours: your power base, your coven. They give you strength as well as prestige. Allowing them to die would cut at both—”
“Is that honestly all you can see? All you can understand?”
“It is all most people understand. Why risk yourself for someone who is not yours? Why not sacrifice him and save yourself?”
“He’s a friend—”
“You lie. You don’t even like him.”
“How do you—”
“We know much. We understand much. We do not understand you.”
“What is so damn hard?” I said, looking down at Casanova—right down at him. Because he wasn’t running anymore. He wasn’t fighting. He was just standing there, below the balcony, staring up at us. Because he knew this was the only chance he had.
And it was, but I didn’t know these people, didn’t know what might work on them even if I’d been able to think straight. “Mircea—” I said, because he was the one with the golden tongue, the one who could talk his way out of anything.
Anything except this.
“The council will ransom him back from you,” Mircea told Adra tightly, his hand clenching on my shoulder, because Casanova was his, too.
“We will?” the consul asked archly.
“Then I will ransom him!” He looked at Adra. “Name your price!”
“There is no coin you have that we want,” Adra murmured, his eyes on mine. “Explain it to me,” he told me.
“I . . . don’t know what you want to hear.”
“The truth.”
“Would you believe it?”
“Try me.”
I spread my hands, desperate, terrified. Because that thing was coming this way, shaking the ground as it walked, and I didn’t have the words, not ones someone like Adra was likely to understand. How I’d had so few people in my life I could rely on for anything, so few who didn’t use me or stab me in the back or betray me. How the few I did have were so precious, so very precious: Mircea and Pritkin, Tami and Billy, Marco, and, yes, even Casanova, surprised though he’d probably be to hear it.
“He’s my friend,” I said. “He helped me. I don’t know what your criteria for ‘friend’ are, but I don’t have to always like all of mine! He stood by me—grudgingly, but he did—and saved me when he didn’t have to, and . . . and helped me. And now I’m supposed to turn my back on him? I’m supposed to stand here and let him die?”
Gray eyes scanned mine for a long moment, and then looked away. “No.”