Page 153 of Fortune's Blade

She glanced around the room, despite the fact that everyone had left. “It’s what I came to tell you. Mircea would kill me, if he knew, but . . .”

“But Mircea is gone.”

She nodded, biting her lip. And then came out with it. “I need him for the war. I know how that sounds, especially to you, especially now. You almost died and lost practically your whole family, and here I am, worried about politics. But I am; I have to! And your father and I and another man, a mage, are in a triumvirate of power and without Mircea it doesn’t work. Without him it’s all screwed up!”

She got up before I could comment, if I’d had one, because little of that had made sense. And paced slightly away from the bed before whirling around again. “Do you know where I’m going when I leave here? To help our third, a mage named Pritkin, in a fight for the Green Fey throne and possibly his life. I was feeling pretty good about his chances, but now, with Mircea gone—”

“Triumvirate?” I croaked, because I was still trying to catch up.

She paused, as if realizing that not everybody was up on whatever weirdness the Pythias thought normal.

“A spell in which we share power and abilities,” she explained. “It magnifies what we would have alone, many times over, and is how your father was able to do what he did in the battle. Pritkin is part incubi, and their royal house has a talent for taking on the form of any being whose soul energy they consume. And your mother had been splattered with Athena’s blood in their fight—”

“And my father is a master vampire.” The clever son of a bitch.

She nodded. “He ingested the goddess’s blood, then took on a body with her attributes using Pritkin’s power. That sort of thing is one reason, maybe even the main one, why we aren’t losing this war. But we aren’t winning it yet, either, and with him gone—”

She bit her lip again and came back over, kneeling on the tile beside the bed. “You did an amazing thing. You and Dorina and everyone—just amazing. You stopped an invasion, killed a senior goddess, and sent her allies running. But they’ll be back; they have no choice. You saw Athena. They’ve outgrown their energy sources back home and need this universe to feed on.”

“And you need father to stop them.”

She nodded. “But I can’t feel him anymore, his power, his strength. And Ray . . . he lost the link to Dorina when the portal blew out. I think it’s too far, this world, too different—” she shook her head. “I don’t think I have my triumvirate to lean on anymore, just when I need it the most. I am going to help Pritkin, but I don’t know any more that we’ll win. We’ll do our best, but we need your father. The war is in jeopardy if Mircea isn’t found.”

I regarded her steadily. “What do you want me to do?”

She swallowed, looking miserable. “I’m so sorry. You’ve done so much already. I hate to ask—”

“You’re not asking. I’m telling you—if there is a way to find my father, my whole family, I want it. And you’re going to give it to me.”

She smiled at me through watery eyes. “You remind me so much of him—”

“Then tell her what to do, already,” Ray said, emerging from the corner where he’d wrapped shadows around himself to hide from us, and to spy more easily.

“It would be helpful,” Louis-Cesare said, from a crack in the door, where he’d been doing the same. Not that he’d needed it, since even good, stout oak doesn’t stop vampire hearing.

Or magic, I thought, as Louis-Cesare pushed the door wider, allowing me to see my team stumbling out of a cloaking spell that Ranbir, their resident dark mage, had erected for them. “Um,” Sarah, the pretty brunette leader of the group, said. “We were just, uh, we were . . . we were about to . . . um.”

“Oh, please,” Ranbir said. “You’ve been a mercenary for how long and you haven’t learned to lie better than that?”

“Well, at least I’m trying!”

“Why bother? No one else is.”

Point to Ranbir, I thought, and cleared my throat.

“Come on out, Claire,” I called, because I knew she was there somewhere.

“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said, as she and the bodyguards she didn’t need appeared a little further down the hall. And she managed to do it with dignity, although whatever spell her light fey guards had used to hide them had left her hair looking a little frazzled. “I just wanted to make sure that your guest didn’t tire you out.”

“Damn. I should have thought of that,” Sarah muttered.

“Are the vamps under the bed?” I asked dryly.

“No, they went to get a drink,” one of the fey said. “They aren’t doing so well in a place with this much fire.”

Typical. “Tell me,” I said to the Pythia, in tones she probably wasn’t used to hearing. But to her credit, she didn’t even seem to notice my lèse-majesté.

“There’s a portal in my basement,” she said simply. “It . . . doesn’t exactly go to Jotunheim . . ..”

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