Because, yeah. You didn’t make a master tell you something twice. He must be new.
“I have to go,” Mircea murmured against my shoulder. “But I wanted to be the one to tell you, before you heard it from someone else.”
I rolled over. “Heard what?”
“The Circle fought off a dark mage assault this afternoon, at their main headquarters in Stratford.”
“Stratford?” I sat up, a little too abruptly.
Mircea steadied me. “There was a battle, but the Circle prevailed. Attacking the creators of the most vicious spells on earth at their home base is not the act of sane men.”
“The Black Circle isn’t sane.”
“No, but they aren’t usually this reckless, either. They wanted something—badly.”
“Lizzie.” It wasn’t even a question. “That’s why they attacked Dante’s. And if she was at Stratford—”
“She was, from what I understand. But they didn’t get her,” he said, holding me as I started to get off the bed. “They didn’t get her, Cassie. I was told that most definitely.”
I swallowed and stopped struggling. “Can I use your phone? I have—I might have a friend there.”
He handed me a sleek black rectangle, but the screen was dark. “The focal wards are up,” he explained. “It may be a while before you get a signal.”
I should have expected that, after everything. And after watching the light from the next room dance off the side of his face, because it wasn’t coming from electricity. The big boys were up, the kind of wards most places only brought online in emergencies because of the power drain, and because they really messed up any modern tech they came in contact with—phones included.
“I can try to find out about your friend,” Mircea offered.
“Caleb. Caleb Carter.”
He nodded, and started to get up. “Wait.” I caught his arm. “You haven’t told me . . . what’s going on. How are they doing this?”
“Doing . . . ?”
“This! All of this.” I gestured around at an amorphous enemy, because that’s what the Black Circle and their allies were starting to feel like—something that was always around, an unseen menace crouched in the dark, ready to strike. “How do they stay one step ahead? We fight off one attack, and there’s another, almost before we can draw a breath. They’re almost constant anymore—”
“You already know that.”
“I don’t!” I shook my head, trying to clear it. I still felt half-asleep, but I didn’t need much thought for this. “The whole reason for attacking Dante’s was Lizzie being there. But she wasn’t captured until the night before they showed up—”
“Cassie.”
“—so overnight they got hundreds of men to Vegas, verified that my guards were down for the count, calculated exactly how much time they had before the Circle could react, located and brought down the wards, figured out a way to grab Rhea . . .” I looked at him in bewilderment. “It’s impossible.”
“Not if the people planning this are in Faerie.” Mircea sat back down on the bed, the firelight making his eyes gleam. “The fey timeline runs differently than ours—you know that.”
I nodded.
“But what you may not know is that the rate of the difference isn’t constant. It is often explained as if our two timelines are two rivers that generally parallel each other. But sometimes one or the other will divert, bulging out in an arc before coming back into rough synchronicity. When that happens, the difference between time here and time there can be . . . extreme. We appear to be in one of those cycles
now.”
“So time in Faerie is running differently than here?”
“Faster—much faster. It won’t last—it never does. But for a short span, they are essentially on fast forward. And they knew this was coming. The fey have the ability to chart the difference in our time streams with far more accuracy than we do. They’ve learned to predict it.”
“Yes, but—”
“Think about it, Cassie. They plan an attack on one of our strongholds. Perhaps it takes weeks from their perspective. But from ours, it has been mere days, possibly only hours. They have the leisure to debate, to decide, to rest. If something doesn’t work, such as the attack on the casino, they have time to recalibrate. While we are constantly running, on the defensive, getting hit here, there, everywhere—with, as you say, scarce time to draw a breath in between.”