“And now they have a god planning their attacks for them.”
“So it would seem.” It was grim.
The last time we discussed this, Mircea hadn’t wanted to believe that Ares was back. He’d wanted to keep this as a fight between the kinds of things he might know how to kill. But it looked like this morning had convinced him.
Or convinced him that he’d been right all along, I thought, watching his face change.
“That is why we must take the war to them,” he told me earnestly. “We cannot remain on the defensive forever. They will attack again, and soon, before their advantage fades, and there is no way to tell what they will hit next. We must give them something else to think about.”
I didn’t say anything. He was right—I knew he was. But the method the senate had selected was . . . less than optimal. Way less.
They wanted me to use the Pythian power to age up a vampire, while his master fed him power—a lot of it. More than he could possibly absorb all at once without my help. It was similar to something they’d done for years called the Push, when—usually in times of war—a new master was needed pronto. But all that power all at once was a big gamble, one that usually resulted in a dead vamp.
You know, permanently.
But with the years speeding by like seconds, the hope was that the power would simply be absorbed, as if he’d actually lived and fed through all those years, gaining strength with each one. And that out of the other side of my time bubble would leap a brand-new master vamp. Who would need to quickly move aside, to get out of the way, because another would be coming through right behind him.
And then another, and another, because the senate wanted me to make them an entire army of masters. With which they intended to rip the fey, and the enemies we had hiding with them, a new one. Mircea had come to me all happy and excited, almost giddy with his new plan.
And hadn’t understood my less-than-enthusiastic response.
It wasn’t just about what it would take out of me, because aging someone like that wasn’t as easy as the senate seemed to think. Or about the fact that I’d be too exhausted afterward to do anything else, including fighting gods. But about a question that no one could answer: what was going to happen when that army came back? What were a bunch of new masters going to do, freshly back from war and with enough power to do anything they liked? Who, if anybody, was going to control them?
“We shouldn’t be talking about this now,” Mircea said, his eyes on my face. “You need to rest.”
I shook my head. “I’m all right—”
An eyebrow rose. “Is that why you collapsed in the middle of the consul’s great hall?”
“The consul’s?” For a moment, my mind blanked. And then it came back to me. Shifting into Dante’s—or being shifted, because I’d had no control over it. The wards blaring a warning about Rosier’s presence, almost deafening. Marco bursting through the door, several vamps at his back—
And me shifting out again, before they could stop me. Because I’d wanted . . . something. . . . My eyes widened. “Mircea—”
“My lord—” The tousled-haired vamp, who was clearly crazy, was back. For about a second, until he made a strangled sound and fled.
“There is something you need?” Mircea asked me.
“The Tears of Apollo.”
He frowned slightly. “But you have it. I was told you took it from your rogue, after your duel.”
Trust the senate to know everything that happened, even when nobody had told them. “I need more. It’s a long story—”
“And I want to hear it, but I have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“That’s a long story, too,” he said ruefully. “We need to talk—”
That was the understatement of the century, I thought, gripping his hand. Because I knew what came next. “Mircea—”
“—afterward.”
“Mircea—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, seeing my alarm. Because our talks never quite managed to happen, or if they did, they got off on a tangent and never got around to the point. But this one had to.
“Just tell me,” I said, hanging on to his hand. “You must have had a source, right?”