Wonderful.

But I might as well get it over with. “Lay it on me,” I told him.

“Yes, well, it’s a little involved. Perhaps you could start by telling us what you recall from last night—”

“She doesn’t remember a damned thing,” Marlowe said sharply. “She wouldn’t have asked that question if she did. I told you—”

“Anything at all could be helpful,” Radu added, ignoring Marlowe with aristocratic ease. “Even small details.”

And then everybody looked at me.

Claire had set a glass of orange juice at my elbow, because the arrival of unwanted guests was not going to interrupt her morning routine. I took a moment to sip it, as if gathering my thoughts, which I wasn’t really doing because there weren’t any to gather. But I somehow didn’t think that was going to go over well.

“We know you made it as far as the marina—” Radu began, before Marlowe cut him off.

“Don’t help her! If you compromise the memories, they’re of no use to us!”

“The marina,” I repeated blankly, and then something did stir. Something about me and a vampire and a job we were supposed to—“Crap.”

“What is it?” Claire asked.

“Headache.” Which was putting it mildly. A stabbing pain had just run ear to ear, like an ice pick through the brain. And why did that sound familiar?

“We need whatever you can give us, Dory,” Radu said. “The smugglers are bad enough, but with the Black Circle—”

“Damn it, Radu!” Marlowe exploded.

“Oh, pish. She already knows they’re working together.”

“But other people don’t!”

“Such as?”

“Such as a yard full of fey, not one of whom we know a damn thing about!”

“They’re my security,” Claire said indignantly. “And part of the royal guard.”

“Oh yes?” Dark eyes flashed. “And would that be the same royal guard who betrayed you and almost got your son killed—what? Two weeks ago?”

“I’ll vouch for them!”

“And who will vouch for you?”

“Kit, please. This lovely young woman isn’t going to say anything,” Radu said, patting her hand. And thereby saving Marlowe a world of hurt without even knowing it.

Not that he was grateful. “How the bloody hell can you—”

“She is the daughter-in-law of one of our senior fey allies,” Mircea murmured. “Is she not?”

Marlowe did not look pacified, maybe because the first time they’d met, Claire had thrown him out of the house. And judging by the narrowed emerald eyes, she was contemplating an encore. “Not to mention that this area isn’t secured,” he continued. “There could be listening devices all over the place!”

“Like the ones you left in here that we had to remove?” Claire snapped.

“Why bother to remove them if there was nothing to hear?” Marlowe snapped back.

Claire flushed almost as red as her hair. But before she could say anything, Radu broke in. “And what if people are listening? Our allies already know what we’re doing and our enemies…Well, after last night, I think it’s safe to say they have figured it out.”

“All right. What happened last night?” I asked, dropping the pretense. Because it was starting to look like maybe I did need to know.

“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to tell us,” Radu said reasonably. “But I’ll see what I can do to jog your memory—without compromising anything,” he added before Marlowe could intervene again.

He waited a moment, but the chief spy didn’t say anything else. That had a little smirk flitting around the edges of Radu’s mouth that shouldn’t have been there, because Marlowe was perfectly capable of delivering a smackdown if he felt like it. But it looked like he wanted the info more than he wanted to bitch about security.

“Now,” Radu said complacently, “you’ve been working with us on a task force to destroy a network of illegal portals—”

“I know that. I lost a day, not a month, ’Du.”

“Hush.” He leaned over to swat my knee. And then proceeded to tell me a lot of other things I already knew, because the Great Portal Hunt, as I had started to think of it, was the biggest thing in otherworldly vice at the moment.

All sorts of dangerous crap from Faerie was being smuggled through portals that weren’t supposed to exist. Only they did, and a bunch of fat cats had been getting noticeably fatter as a result. The fattest of them all had been a douche named Geminus, who had used his portals to smuggle in Dark Fey for a series of underground fights that had gotten him a lot of money and them a lot of dead. This had continued until he recently met his own maker, and not in the vampire sense of the word. Who was probably as skeeved out as the rest of us who had known him.

But as bad as Geminus had been, things weren’t any better with him dead. In fact, the reverse was true, as would-be successors popped out of the woodwork to divvy up the very large pie he had left. Lately, the infighting had been getting pretty vicious, as every crook with delusions of grandeur struggled to become the new king of the hill.

There was just one problem, namely that Geminus hadn’t been the trusting type, and had failed to share the location of his portals with the riffraff. And it wasn’t like they could just go out and replace them. Even the few smugglers with money and connections enough to manage it had to contend with the fact that every time a new portal was brought into existence, it lit up the metaphysical skyline like a searchlight. Which tends to be bad for businesses that run on secrecy.

So, the criminal element was trying to find Geminus’s portals in order to beat each other out in the smuggling game. The Black Circle, a group of dark mages, was trying to find them to bring in more weapons for the war they were waging on the Vampire Senate. And the Senate was trying to find them to shut them down before either of the other groups got lucky. But the only person who actually knew where they were was Geminus’s lieutenant, who had been smart enough to guess how much fun life would be with everybody breathing down his neck.

“Varus,” I said, interrupting Radu as my memory coughed up a name.

“Yes, well, I was getting there,” ’Du said.

“What about him?” Mircea asked softly.

“He agreed to give the Senate the location of the portal system in return for immunity,” I said, trying to focus on slippery-soft memories that slid out of reach every time I grabbed for one.

“But that did not occur.”

“No. Because he was kidnapped last night.”

“Yes!” Radu looked smugly at Marlowe. “Yes, he was. And naturally, as soon as we found out, we put together a task force to go after him. But our enemies had expected that and laid a trail full of red herrings in all directions, requiring us to field numerous teams. Like the one you were on.”

“I was on a team?” I asked, because I usually work alone. And because I didn’t recall that at all.

Radu nodded. “You know how it is these days. No one is allowed to go anywhere alone, particularly not for something like this. And Lawrence was assigned to you.”

“Then why not ask him what happened?” I asked, afraid that I already knew the answer.

“Because he’s dead,” Marlowe said savagely. “They’re all dead. Eleven fucking senior masters were sent out and exactly none came back. We found them hacked to pieces, those we got to before the sun took care of them. Butchered—every single one.” Brown eyes bored into mine. “Everyone except you.”

Chapter Six

I just sat there, stunned, while Claire lit into the chief spy. “What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything,” Marlowe told her, his eyes never leaving mine. “I am stating it outright. Eleven masters and one dhampir went out, and only the dhampir returned. And I want to know why.”

“You know why.” The voice was Louis-Cesare’s, from the doorway. I didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, but apparently it had been long enough, judging by his expression.

“No, I do not!” Marlowe said, turning on him. “I know how she got out of that hellhole. I don’t know how she got in, or why. They kill Lawrence, someone with knowledge of the inner workings of my family, of the intelligence department, of the Senate itself, yet leave a dhampir alive?”

Angry dark eyes swerved back to mine, but I didn’t respond because I was trying to comprehend that ridiculous number. “Eleven?” I repeated, certain I’d heard wrong.

“Kit is exaggerating,” Mircea told me. “But only slightly. Most were found as he said, although two teams remain missing. But they did not report in and no one can contact them, including their former masters.”

And that wasn’t good. Mental communication within a family was a given, even after a Child reached a high enough status to be emancipated from his master’s control. Their makers should have been able to reach them—if there was anything left to reach.

“By ‘senior masters’ you mean what?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around it.

“None under second level. Most were first.”

I just stared. “No.”

“I didn’t believe it either,” Radu said quietly. “When they told me. It just seemed…” He trailed off with a flutter of his hand, because he didn’t have adequate words for it.

Unfortunately, someone else did.

“Seems what?” Claire asked, looking around, obviously confused. “It’s a tragedy, yes, but we’re only talking about eleven—”

Marlowe made a retching sound, like someone had just kicked him in the stomach, probably because he couldn’t attack her.

“Claire,” I said. Provoking him right now was not a good idea. Not that I thought she would deliberately do that—she was normally far more sensitive to others’ feelings than I was. But Marlowe was likely to take it that way. If brown eyes could burn, his were doing it.