I sobbed; I couldn’t help it. My heart hurt—God, it hurt. I’d loved him, I loved him still, and he’d never cared about me. It had been an act, to get back some woman who’d been dead five centuries, while I was here, right now, and—
A phone rang. It took me a moment to realize that it was coming from me, since the ring tone was wrong. Because it wasn’t mine.
It was Mircea’s.
The one he’d lent me to call Caleb, but I couldn’t call Caleb, and then I couldn’t call anyone, because it was shattering in a million pieces on the opposite wall. I looked at it for a moment, broken into shards, and then I crawled over and gathered up the pieces, cradling them to me, I didn’t know why. I couldn’t put them back together, any more than I could fix this. Any more than I could fix anything.
“Cassie.”
I looked up, and only saw a blur. But it was a blur with a woman’s voice—a familiar one. Rian.
For a moment, I couldn’t understand what she was doing in New York. And then I realized: she wasn’t. She was where she’d been for the last few days, ever since Caleb had had to go back to work: guarding Pritkin’s body. I’d shifted back to Dante’s but hadn’t realized it because the corridor was so dark.
Trust Casanova to save on lighting, I thought, and laughed harshly.
“Are you all right?” Rian, who was in bodily form, crouched awkwardly beside me. She moved so gracefully in spirit, but she hadn’t had a body for that long, and she wasn’t so good with it yet. It was like a teenager trying to learn to drive and bumping into a curb, or in her case, the floor, when she abruptly sat down, taking the last foot or so all at once. And looking surprised.
But her soft, dark eyes and expressive face were the same as ever as she gazed at me.
I didn’t have an answer. There wasn’t one she wanted to hear.
She took the phone from my hand. There was a text frozen on the screen. I didn’t know what it said, but I guessed it was enough.
“Oh, Cassie,” she whispered.
“He intended to ask me to go back for her,” I said dully. “Probably right after Radu. I didn’t know what I was doing then, what being Pythia even meant. It would have been easy to talk me into it. But he didn’t get the chance before the geis complicated things. And later, after everything we’d gone through, the pain and the triumph and . . . everything, how could he ask me then? How could he ask me to retrieve his wife?”
Rian didn’t say anything. I was oddly grateful for that.
“Then the consul got involved, separating us, because of her paranoia, and g
iving him no chance to lock me down. And he needed that, didn’t he? Had to be sure of me, sure I’d do anything for him, and he wasn’t sure. That’s why he was so upset over that army. Not just because the senate wanted it, but because it was the first time I’d ever said it. It was the first time I ever told him no.”
There was more silence for a while, long enough for me to start to feel ashamed. I couldn’t afford to just sit here. I had—God, so much to do. But I didn’t know how to do any of it, and for the first time in all this, for the first time since the whole crazy journey began, I was starting to think the words. The ones I’d never allowed myself to say.
The ones that seemed more likely every minute.
“They get obsessed, the older ones,” Rian said softly.
I lifted my head. “What?”
“I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen it in Carlos, although he won’t admit it. But it’s there, a burning need for the respect he never had in life. It’s the root of almost all he does, even how he dresses. The nobles of his youth, the caballeros he grew up with—you could tell them by their dress. They were so flashy. . . .”
I wondered what the hell she was talking about.
“It’s why he so wants this hotel to work,” she continued. “Not for the money, but for what it represents. When he was young, you were only important if you were a landholder, someone of means. You were looked up to, almost worshipped by the small folk, and envied by the impoverished gentry, of which his family was a part. Now it’s prosperous businessmen who hold that position, and he so wants to be one, Cassie! And needs to be, in truth.”
“Needs to be?”
She nodded. “It’s as I said: they get obsessed, the older ones. It’s something different with each of them, each one I’ve known, at least: wealth, beauty, fame, power. . . . But it’s always something that eluded them in life, something that caused them great pain, something they feel they must overcome.”
“And if they don’t?”
The beautiful head tilted. “Haven’t you ever thought about it? How the great ones gain in power every year, with each new family member, every new master. Yet how many as old as the consul do you see? The younger ones die of all sorts of things, but the old ones, the powerful ones, the ones who rival some of our lords in strength—what could kill them?”
“Plenty of things.” Vampires didn’t die of old age, but there were lots of other ways. Most of which involved others of their kind. “Duels, wars, conflicts with other masters . . .”
“Some, yes,” she agreed. “But all? Where are all those millennia-old masters? The ones as old as your consul could fit in a large room. Where are the rest who started out with her? They were numbered in the thousands once, yet now . . . where are they?”