Rafe rescued me, taking her despite his elegant attire and jiggling her against his chest. She hammed it up for a few seconds, wailing like I'd been sticking her with pins, before finally subsiding into anxious snuffles and pressing her face to his shirt. Considering how fast she recovered, it was pretty clear she'd just wanted to flirt with the cute guy.
A white china plate joined my coffee cup. On it was a largish, nicely browned muffin. I looked at the muffin and, as far as I could tell, it didn't look back. Since it had passed the first test, I broke it open and sniffed it. Peanut butter and anchovy. A little chef was casually loitering nearby, waiting for a verdict. He was going to be waiting for a while.
"She reminds me of you at that age," Rafe said, vainly swiping the baby's lips with a napkin. It only made bad matters worse: now she had purple cheeks, too. "You could never eat anything without getting it everywhere."
Jesse stifled a smile at the other end of the long table, where he and a bunch of the kids were playing Monopoly. They should have been in bed—it was barely four a.m. — but nobody at Dante's kept a normal schedule. Having a staff partially composed of people who caught fire in sunlight probably had something to do with that.
Most of the older kids were intent on the game, but one of the younger ones was sitting on the floor, playing with an Elvis Pez dispenser someone had given her. She seemed totally intent on it, but the door behind her nonetheless stayed stubbornly open. It seemed that her parents had once hidden their embarrassing child in a small room with no windows, until she discovered that locks just loved to open for her and escaped. Now it had become a bit of a habit. It made getting around the casino something of a challenge, though: elevator doors simply refused to close as long as she was inside.
Watching her, I finally figured out what had been bugging me. These kids were just too young. The average age was eight, with several in the four-to-five-year-old range. Which made no sense.
At fourteen, I'd been one of the youngest in Tami's brood. Most had been mid-to late teens, old enough to have figured out what their lives were going to be like in one of those special schools and to have engineered an escape. Sure, there were occasionally younger kids who came through, but they usually arrived with an older sibling or friend. I'd never seen Tami with so many really small children. How had they gotten away? How had they survived on the streets until she found them? I'd barely managed it, and I'd had more years and more money than most of them.
"I didn't come to court until I was four," I reminded Rafe absently. A tiny car from the Monopoly game had decided to trundle down the table to us and bumped into my hand. I turned it around and sent it back, where it collided with a briskly hopping shoe. It looked like someone had enchanted the game board for the kids.
"To live, no, but your father brought you as a bambina," he replied, giving up on cleaning the sticky child. He held her against his chest with one arm, the palm of his hand curled protectively around her skull.
"What?"
"He loved to show you off. Of course, you were better behaved than some," he said with a sigh, as the baby began chewing on his tie.
"I never knew that." I knew so little about my parents that the tiny piece of trivia felt like a revelation. In my mind, «mother» meant a cool hand, soft hair, and a sweet smell. It was my strongest memory of her. Unless I thought very hard, it was my only memory of her. And I recalled even less about my father.
"Piccolina mia, please to stop," Rafe said in exasperation, pulling his tie away and substituting a pacifier before his squirming armful could protest. Luckily, the small tussle seemed to have worn her out, and she soon curled into his chest and went to sleep. "The visits ended when you were about two," he added.
"Do you know why?"
Rafe started to shrug, then realized it might wake up his new girlfriend. "My guess would be that you began showing signs of your gift. Your father must have realized that Tony would take you if he knew."
Which he had, only a couple of years later. "How did he find out?" I'd never known how Tony discovered that I might be worth acquiring. The idea that the tip-off could have been something I did was nauseating.
"Tony never trusted anyone, not even his longtime servants," Rafe reassured me. "There were people watching your father, who doubtless also had people watching them. The only ones Antonio did not monitor were those of us with blood bonds to him, which he knew we were not strong enough to break." The last was said with uncharacteristic bitterness.
"I don't suppose…Can you tell me anything about them? About my parents?" It wasn't the first time I'd asked him, but Rafe had never been able to answer. He'd been under orders to stay mute, and as the vampire who made him had given the order, the prohibition was even stronger than Mircea's.
Rafe regarded me with compassion. "I'm sorry, Cassie."
"I just thought, maybe, with Tony gone…"
"But he still lives," Rafe reminded me softly. "As does his hold over me."
"But maybe Billy could—"
"And Antonio's ban includes communication through the spirit world."
My ability to communicate with ghosts came from my father. It wasn't surprising that Tony would have thought to add that little caveat. I'd always hated him, but I'd never thought him stupid. Disappointment settled into its usual place behind my rib cage.
"Can't Mircea break the blood bond?" I asked after a moment.
"I haven't asked him. In his condition…I don't dare do anything to weaken him further."
"Which kind of brings me to why I wanted to see you." I glanced at the kids, but none of them was paying us any attention. Jesse was biting his lip and glaring at the board, where tiny foreclosure signs had just appeared on a bunch of his hotels. As quietly as possible, I brought Rafe up to speed.
"You want to storm a dark mage stronghold?" Rafe asked incredulously when I'd finished. "On your own?"
"Not on my own," I corrected. A night's rest had helped to clear my head and made me reevaluate my plan. I needed to get Mircea to the Codex, but trying to handle him by myself was foolhardy. Fortunately, there was another option.
Besides Rafe and a few other trophies, Tony had specialized in acquiring badasses, the kind with the skills and personalities to complement his network of highly illegal activities. And some of them had had several hundred years to hone their skills. I was going after the Codex, and I wasn't going alone.
"But if you already know where it is, can you not simply—" Rafe made an indeterminate hand gesture that was supposed to indicate shifting.
I respected him enough not to roll my eyes, but it took an effort. "If I could just run in and grab it, yeah. But I somehow doubt it's going to be that easy. I need Alphonse."
Rafe only sat there, looking horrified, but some of his tension must have communicated itself to the baby, who woke up and started sniffling. I watched her warily, knowing what that meant. But Miranda, having terrorized the staff to her satisfaction, came and took her away before the explosion came. And Rafe was still just looking at me.
The reaction wasn't exactly a surprise. Alphonse was Tony's right-hand man and chief thug. After the boss did his disappearing act, Alphonse had taken control of the family's East Coast operations as Casanova had in Vegas. And, no, on the surface, nothing about him was particularly reassuring.
For one thing, he looked like a boxer who'd lost one too many fights: his features were all slightly off-kilter, as if they'd been smashed too badly to ever fit together properly again. For another, he sounded scarily like Don Corleone. It was due to tracheal damage from a vicious elbow to the throat in his mortal days, but that didn't change the fact that every time The Godfather was shown at Tony's somebody lost it and ended up bleeding all over the floor. Which may account for why it was so often on the playlist.