“He’s a very good bodyguard.”
I looked at him severely. “ ’Du, you’re not falling for a human, are you? You know how tacky that is.”
“Certainly not.” He shook out a sleeve. “Anyway, I bought him another one.”
I grinned.
“Stop that.”
“If you’re not here over the car, why are you here?” I asked curiously. Radu was certainly strong enough to withstand daylight, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable.
He poured me a glass of water from a bedside carafe and settled back with a disgruntled look. “Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps I thought you might want to know how the trial went.”
I sat up a little more. “They still had it?”
“Well, of course they still had it. Elyas is still dead, isn’t he?”
“As far as I know. What happened?”
“Louis-Cesare was acquitted of murdering that sniveling creature.” I felt my spine relax slightly into the pillow. “And convicted of mass endangerment by knowingly concealing a revenant.”
I sat back up again. “What?”
“Well, what did you expect? She almost butchered Anthony.”
“What’s the sentence?” I asked, feeling my stomach drop.
“Death.”
“Death?”
“But since Christine was under Elyas’s care—and supposed supervision—while committing the murders, Mircea managed to successfully argue that the sentence should be carried out on him.”
“On Elyas?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“But he’s already dead.”
“Yes. Quite the time-saver, that.”
“So… they’re just going to let Louis- Cesare walk?” That didn’t sound like the Senate.
“Not entirely. He did sire her, after all, and failed to deal with the problem. He’s lucky they didn’t do worse.”
“Radu! What did they do?”
“Threw him off the Senate—both of them. And he is banned from taking Senatorial office again for at least a century.” He crossed his legs to get them out of a creeping patch of sunlight. “Of course, that’s a lot of tosh. It was really the only compromise anyone could think of to the problem of which Senate should get him. Neither was willing to back down, and we can’t very well afford a conflict when we’re already in one….”
“So Louis-Cesare had to fall on his sword?”
“In a manner of speaking. For my part, I think he should be pleased. It’s going to be hell in the senate until all the new members settle in.”
“So the challenges went off without a hitch?”
“Thus far. Of course, tonight was merely round one, and no one truly expected a problem yet.”
“I assume Ming-de’s candidates are cleaning up?”