She was startled by the context of the conversation. “You can . . . feel my emotions?”
“Yes, of course. As Vampyres grow older our senses become more acute. The eldest of us eventually lose our taste for blood and we feed on the emotions of those around us. I have not partaken of human blood for several centuries now.”
Good grief, Carling was a succubus. Niniane said, “You sense what other people are feeling.”
Carling shrugged. “I sense the feelings of those who are alive, at any rate. Other Vampyres are of no use to me when it comes to sustenance.”
What an intrusive ability. Niniane’s forehead wrinkled. Well, that explained how glossy the Vampyre had looked at various times today. Niniane wondered what the jagged landscape inside of her tasted like to a succubus. Could it taste as bitter to Carling as it did to her?
If she asked, would Carling tell her what Tiago felt about her? Would the Vampyre tell her if that sadness she thought she had seen in his eyes just before he left had been real or feigned? She clenched her fists and jaw so tight her teeth ached, in order to keep herself from asking the pathetic question.
It wasn’t as if knowing could change what had happened or bring Tiago back.
Carling said into the small silence that had fallen, “After two hundred years’ sanctuary with the Wyr, you may want to believe that you have forged an unbreakable bond with them. But remember, what was almost your entire lifetime is not so very long a time to those of us who have lived so much longer.”
Niniane’s mouth tightened. “I’m also well aware of my relative youth and inexperience, thank you.”
“It is not my intention to point out your inexperience or to make you feel inadequate,” said Carling. “And I don’t have answers for the challenges you face. I merely wish to caution you and give you food for thought. Stronger and longer alliances have certainly been broken, and the Great Beast is older than all of us. He is old and wily. His first priority will always be the Wyr, and you are not Wyr.”
Did Carling really mean to provide food for thought, or was she trying to sow distrust between Niniane and Dragos? Niniane shook her head. “Everything you said is technically correct. Old alliances can be broken, and of course Dragos’s first priority is the Wyr. But I don’t buy that as an argument for Dragos’s possible involvement in the attack against me. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would Wyr who were disguised as Dark Fae attack me, while another Wyr kills them to defend me?”
“I do not know.” Carling pursed her lips.
Niniane said, “If for some unfathomable reason Dragos wanted me dead, it would have been much more simple and efficient for Tiago to have killed me himself.”
“We do not have enough information,” Carling said. “Perhaps there is a schism within the Wyr of which we are only now becoming aware. Perhaps the Great Beast is playing a much deeper game than any of us can understand right now. I have always liked and respected Dragos, but I never completely trust him.”
Niniane took a careful breath. Could Dragos have played such a deep game that even Tiago did not know what it was? Dragos was certainly capable of it, but she would not believe that of him in this case, not unless she was faced with indisputable proof.
After a moment she forced herself to speak out loud again. “Thank you, Councillor. I’m glad we got this chance to chat, and I will think carefully on all that you have said.”
“Be sure that you do,” said Carling.
TEN
“I like your duck waddle across the parking lot,” Tiago told Clarence “JoBe” Watson. “It made its own statement. Maybe it wasn’t the one you wanted to make. But it was definitely its own statement.”
Tiago had found Clarence hanging with three of his homies on South Damon Avenue. They were wearing gangsta bling, displaying their colors and jamming to 50 Cent. The brothers had taken one look at Tiago striding toward them in his black fatigues, barbed wire tats and visible weaponry. The gods only knew what they saw in his face. Flares of white lightning kept flashing in his eyes. He had hidden them behind sunglasses. The brothers had bolted like so many rabbits flushed by a wolf.
Tiago had increased his pace to a quick walk. He had caught Clarence three quarters of a block later, grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed him into the side of a brick building.
Tiago said, “You might be wondering if you could have gotten away if you’d had your pants pulled up instead of hanging down around your thighs.”
“What the fuck, man?” Clarence shouted.
Clarence was twenty-two years old, six-foot-one and one hundred and ninety pounds. Tiago took hold of his jeans by the waist. With a heave, he lifted Clarence two feet off the ground. In one quick jerk Tiago shook him the rest of the way into his pants.
“I don’t think so,” said Tiago. “But we can always try this again.” He stepped back. “Go ahead. Run.”
“I’m gonna take you out.” With a flick of his wrist, Clarence opened his switch as he whirled around. “You crazy mo-fucker!”
Tiago took the knife from the child, pressed the flat of the blade against the nearby brick wall, and snapped it at the hilt. He said, “That was just another one in a long series of unwise choices, son.”
“You whack-job sum-bitch from hell.” The whites of Clarence’s eyes showed.
Tiago spun the guy around. “Here’s the good news, Clarence,” he said. “It pains me to say this, it really does, but you get to live.”
“Whatever it is I didn’t do it!”
“Oh yes, you did. If you hadn’t posted your little impromptu film footage, those of us in New York might not have found out about the shit going down in Chi-town in time for us to stop some more shit from happening. Now here’s the bad news.”
Tiago grabbed him by the back of the neck and the seat of his pants, and threw him into the wall. Clarence accelerated from a baritone, took the freeway past soprano and hung a sharp exit to arrive at a teakettle shriek.
“Life for you is going to get really fucking painful for a little while,” Tiago told him. “You might get away with only a few broken bones. And you don’t get to keep any of your toys.” He dragged Clarence to his feet again and pinned him by the back of the neck to the wall as he fished through the pockets of the kid’s jeans and jacket. He confiscated a nine-millimeter and continued his search. There had to be one. “I’ve been to your crib. I’ve taken out your PlayStation, your Xbox, your Wii, your laptop and two PCs, the 52-inch, the TiVo, the Blu-ray, the Pioneer and the home theater system. Oh, and your Flip, of course. Speaking of which, that’s a mighty lot of toys for someone who has no job on record. You dealing or did you just steal the shit?”
Ah, there it was. He pulled out an iPhone, dropped it to the pavement and ground it under one booted heel, which prompted more teakettle whistling. He picked up Clarence and reacquainted him with the wall.
“Now I’d have to stop doing this if some witness chose to call 911,” Tiago said. “What do you think, Clarence? You see any dots that connect from, oh, say the attack you watched and filmed the other night without doing any goddamn thing about it to your current state of discomfort?”
The teakettle whistle dissolved into a soggy snivel. Tiago reached down to pick the guy up again.
A strong, lean tanned hand came down to grip one of his wrists.
Rune said in his ear, “You got the chance to discipline him, T-bird. That’s enough.”
Tiago turned toward the gryphon. Rune had lion’s eyes the color of sun shining through amber. Whatever Rune saw in Tiago’s expression made those golden eyes turn careful. “Hey, buddy, it’s time for a debriefing,” Rune said. “You need to catch me up on what’s happened since we last talked.”