Warning number two.
I pulled him behind me.
“I don’t have a driver’s license on me,” I began. And then stopped. Because the top of the paper had fallen over, revealing the headline. The massive headline that bisected the entire front page, in roughly the same size letters that had been used to announce the end of World War II.
DOES THE PYTHIA FIGHT ALONE?
“What is that?” I asked, taking the paper before I thought about it.
Strangely, the
vamp let me have it.
“Graphology,” Jules told me, with relish. “With a Carla Torres byline.”
“Which means?”
He blinked. “Carla Torres. Graphology. It’s . . . a major paper, okay? Like our version of the New York Times. And she’s a senior editor.”
“I remember her from this morning,” I said, thinking of frizzy hair and cute glasses. And more of what the older vamps at Tony’s had called moxie than most vamps I knew had.
“She remembers you, too,” Jules said dryly. “And she went off—on the senate, the Circle . . . Hell, she was even bitching at the Weres for a while—”
“Bitching about what?”
“Read the title.” He was staring at it over my shoulder. “I don’t know what happened this morning, but according to her, you basically fought off the entire Black Circle on your own. Except for some probably exaggerated help from a valiant group of reporters,” he added, mouth twisting.
“It wasn’t.”
“What?”
“Exaggerated.”
“You haven’t even read it yet.”
“I don’t have to read it for that. I’d have been dead without them. And without Marco and the others. Even the Circle showed up . . . eventually.”
“Well, not soon enough for her,” Jules said gleefully. “And she’s pissed. That’s the evening paper, so she must have spent all day writing it. You can read it for yourself, but her main line was that, prior to yesterday, she didn’t know what to think about you. She vacillated between some kind of nut who’d gotten into a dangerous position of power, to a stuck-up vampire protégée, to a dangerous rebel intent on upending the system. Or possibly all three. But now . . .”
“Now?” I looked back at him, because I couldn’t read it for myself. The only light in here was what spilled down the stairs, and it had been dim at the source.
He laughed. “She put an ass-kicking on everybody, and from what I hear, her fellow reporters are backing her up. And these people hate each other. They don’t agree on what direction the sun comes up, but they are universally dumping on anybody who hasn’t been helping you. There’d be a crowd of them out front right now, yelling questions, if the guys at the checkpoint weren’t keeping them out.”
I winced. “How’s it going over?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.
“Like a very large, very lead-filled balloon. You know the senate.”
Unfortunately.
“Sure you want to go in there?” he asked, nodding at the door. “’Cause you can hang out in the office with me.”
“Is Mircea in there?”
“Probably. From what I hear, the whole senate is.”
“Then I’m going in. I have to see him, and it won’t wait.”
I transferred my look to the vamp who’d given me the paper, folded it, and handed it back. “Let me in.” It came out as the deadpan delivery of a master in a bad mood, but I didn’t care. I’d given them fair warning, and I’d meant every word.