She just stared at him, her face a mix of shock, disbelief and revulsion. I took my chance. “How are you still walking around?”
He scowled at me. “I could ask you the same thing. Louis-Cesare should have been able to battle his way through that, but not you. I sent repeated burst of magic at you; those things should have eaten you alive.”
So that was why we’d suddenly been so popular, I thought, and barely refrained from kicking him.
But he noticed, and his expression sharpened. “I bet your bitch sister is having fun in Faerie, if she’s still alive. I bet—”
He broke off with a scream, probably because Efridis had just torn out most of his hair. She did not seem to be in a good mood. And Jonathan, however much pain he was in, knew it.
“Tell us what you did!”
“All right, all right!” he glared up at her. “I was doing an experiment—with permission, of course. King Aeslinn lost a lot of fey at the recent battle over his capitol. I asked if I could have some, for an experiment I wanted to run—”
“Some . . . what?” I asked.
Those creepy, colorless eyes turned to me. “Bodies. What else? He said yes.”
There was a change in the air of the room suddenly. I couldn’t have said exactly what it was, as no sounds were uttered that were audible to me, and nobody appeared to have moved. But there was an element of menace that hadn’t been there before.
Jonathan felt it, too.
“I’m not lying!” he said, sending his eyes around. “He said it. He said he didn’t care. And how was I supposed to know about your religion?”
“You’ve lived in Faerie long enough,” Efridis hissed.
“But I don’t pay attention to those sorts of things! I was there to get godly tech, to help with my experiments. As far as I knew, they were just dead bodies. Stronger, more resilient, but dead, all right? I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—”
“What in the hell were you doing with them?” I asked.
Jonathan looked annoyed. “The obvious, I should think. I am, as you can see, very dead. That puts me in a bit of a bind. Luckily, I had already started the aforementioned experiments, to see whether fey could make decent zombies. The answer is no, by the way—”
“That isn’t all you were doing,” Efridis said. “You changed them.”
“Yes, well, that’s what experimentation is. I was trying out different possibilities. Fortunately, I had put a bit of my soul into several, to see if I could control them. It didn’t work very well, but it meant that, once I died, there was a tiny bit of me still around. But it’s very little. I basically had to make a zombie out of myself in order to—”
“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”
Jonathan waited.
“You put the bits of soul . . . from the fey experiments . . . into your dead body and . . . reanimated it?”
Jonathan blinked at me. “Isn’t that what I just said?”
“I think I need to sit down.”
To my surprise, one of the fey brought me over a chair.
I took it, because this was so surreal, nothing surprised me anymore.
“So, I’m dead,” Jonathan continued, like this was a perfectly normal conversation to be having. “But I’m still useful. I did a great deal for the Svarestri royal house, and I can do much more. These idiots have the device, so I can do the operation as soon as you find the girl. Plus, you know what I’ve made here.” And no, we didn’t, but then, he wasn’t talking to us anymore. His eyes had slid over to Efridis, who was standing there, as still as a statue. “I can give it to you instead of him. I can hand you your husband’s throne; the thrones of all the great houses of Faerie. I can give you honor, fame, renown for the ages—anything you want.
“And all I want in return,” he said, looking at Louis-Cesare. “Is him.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Dory, Hong Kong
“Why?” I said, getting in Jonathan’s face. “What do you need with him? You have all the magic that anyone could possibly want—”