“You’re crazy!”
“We’re not leaving you—”
“You’ll get yourself killed!”
“Shut up!”I yelled loudly enough for some of the fleeing people to jump and stare at me.“This isn’t a joke!This iswar, and you’re going to listen to me.Or else we’re done.I can’t be responsible for you if you don’t obey me when it matters.And that goes for all of you,” I added, because Sophie was looking belligerent.
“Lia, seriously,” Chayton said.“Wecan’t—”
“What you can do is get to Sebastian.Arnou’s muscle has arrived by now, and these assholes are rounding up Weres.He’s going to have something to say about that, and he’s closer than the Circle—”
“And they’re going to listen to us?”
“You think Arnou will fight for these people?”Noah demanded, incredulous.“They hate them!It’s allvargulfsdown here—”
“They’ll fight for them now, or they’ll fight against them later,” I said, checking out Gerald’s stash.It was half-depleted, even though the guy never went anywhere unless loaded for bear.Great.“The Black Circle is probably down here recruiting, like they’ve been doing all along.Only it looks like it’s no longer voluntary.”
“Recruiting?But they’re focusing on Weres—”
“Yeah, like Jace!”
“But they don’t have the juice,” Noah protested.
He was talking about a potion developed by a traitorous bastard named Jenkins, one of the Circle’s own, who had put the mad in mad scientist.He’d stumbled across a way to release the ancient version of the Were strain from modern Were DNA, creating what he’d called Relics, as in relics of another age.They were to us what saber-toothed tigers were to housecats, being some of the most powerful, fearsome creatures anybody had ever seen.
Fortunately, his “juice” had been contained, with most of it destroyed and the only remaining vials securely locked away.And no one else had it, especially not the Black Circle, as Jenkins had been fighting against them in his own, perverse way, trying to give the Corps an advantage in the war.But maybe the dark had something else, I realized.
“What is it?”Caleb said, seeing my face.
“I fought three guys last night who were a lot stronger than they should have been.The leader was also skilled, but the other two… they were just strong.Abnormally, unbelievably strong, yet they knew almost nothing about magical combat.”
“They could have been hopped up on stolen magic,” Caleb said.“The Black Circle has been known to do that before a battle.”
“For their best fighters, sure.But in a time of war, when they need every bit of magic they can get, they’re gonna waste a precious resource on unskilled hacks?Because those guys knew jack all.I took one out with a fireball to the chest because he’d dropped shields in the middle of battle, and a vamp got the other—”
“Avamp?”
“One of the waiters.He was loading up the buffet tables.”
Caleb’s lip curled, as if that was what he’d have expected from the Black Circle.The ones we often fought were shit-tier at combat, so high on stolen magic that they couldn’t see straight, or so focused on getting more to feed their addiction that they often forgot their mission.But those were the cannon fodder.
The organization had far better mages, and the council member I’d met had been one of them.
“The leader was something else,” I told Caleb.“He said he was a council member—”
“And you believed that?Those cowards never fight themselves!”
“I believe something.”
“Meaning?”
“We know the Black Circle has been feeding norms fey wine for a while,” I said, talking about an import from Faerie that could get even a vamp drunk, a mix of potent herbs and flowers from their world that regularly wreaked havoc in ours.Not least because it had very weird side effects on regular humans.“They’ve been using it to force any latent magical talent to the surface and taking the strongest people they find into their ranks.Looks like they’ve progressed to magical bloodlines—”
“Except fey wine makes our kind high and nothing else,” Caleb protested.
“In its original form.But the Black Circle has been experimenting with it, trying to make it better.That was what started Jenkins on his crazy research.He didn’t want us to fall behind.”
“So he experimented on magical creatures,” Caleb said, scowling.“Including sapient ones!That lab of his was a nightmare!”
