“It works.”Sort of, but that wasn’t his business.
Fortunately, he didn’t seem too interested.“I wasn’t talking about elite war mages.The rank-and-file type used as ground troops at the time were not on that level.You forget, the Corps wasn’t in Romania in those days.They were fighting it out with the Black Circle for control of Europe, and getting the shit beaten out of them half the time.”
I glared at him, and he grinned back.“No, I don’t suppose that’s how they tell it in little war mage school, but it’s the truth.Anyway, why do you care about ancient history?”
I swallowed bile and got down to the point.“You said you foughtUlfhéðnar.That doesn’t just mean wolf—”
“I know what it means.”
“Then you saw one?One of the captains?”
“I told you, Ifoughtone.”The vamp stubbed out his cigar, and his grin faded.“Big bastard and crazed with battle, to the point that you couldn’t talk, couldn’t reason, couldn’t do anything but fight and run.Blood lust, battle fever, whatever you want to call it—this fucker was lost in it.We were beaten and in retreat, but did that matter?
“Hell, no.
“Asshole wanted flesh,myflesh, and would have had it, too, if one of the senior masters hadn’t come to help me.And even fighting alongside a master almost a thousand years old, I barely got out of there alive.I lost most of the blood in my body and had to take a transfusion from him, sucking on his wrist in the middle of the goddamned woods, just so I didn’t wither too much to come back.
“It was brutal.We didn’t take down our enemy; weescaped.And not many of us.So, yeah, I don’t want to meet another of those fuckers again.Might go ballistic if I ever did, to be honest.”
Great.
I sat there a moment, absorbing that.
“Did he, uh, did he show any special skills?”I asked.“Anything other than savagery?”
That got me another eyebrow lift.“Who the hell had time to notice?The bastard targeted me from the start, picked me right out as a commander, and after that, it was all claws, teeth, andrip, tear, shred.Like a whirlwind of fur coming at me, so I wasn’t taking notes!”He thought about it for a minute.“I will say this.It was hard to be sure because of all the trees, but in the few cleared spots, it almost looked…”
“Yes?”
“This is gonna sound crazy, but it almost looked like we were facing one creature instead of hundreds.Like the ranks of the other wolves were the claws, the front of their column was the head, and theÚlfhe´dinnwas directing the body like the brain, through some crazy kind of hive mind…”
He shook his head.“I don’t know.Maybe I’m projecting, ‘cause that is something like how vamps fight if they’re from a single family, only this… It wasn’t just like they were talking to each other mentally, but as if theywereeach other, one giant piece of savagery descending on us like a wolf the size of a goddamned mountain.
“Anyway, I didn’t hear any commands being given.You think it’s gonna be all howls and barks and shit when facing Weres, but not that time.Eerie silence is all there was, even to our ears, with those fuckers moving like ghosts through the forest until suddenly, out of nowhere—”
He cut off, shuddering.And the sight of that massive, powerful, giant vampireshudderinghad gooseflesh breaking out on my arms.What the hell had I gotten myself into?
Nothing, because none of this had anything to do with me!I didn’t fight like that, couldn’t fight like that—and didn’t want to.And yes, some Weres had come running at my call in Tartarus, but I had given Sebastian the answer for that, and it was the right one.They’d gotten a chance to fight back for the first time since being ejected from their clans, and they’d taken it.
That was all.
“Anything else you can tell me about him?”I asked.“Any other attributes, no matter how small, would be helpful.”
He thought for a moment, but then shook his head.“It was a long time ago, and I was too busy surviving to notice much.But if you’re talking details, you got that part wrong.”
“What part?”
I looked down at my pad, where he was pointing to one of my notes.“Why do you keep calling it ‘him’?”he asked, the dark eyes meeting mine.“The bastard that wiped out our column was a woman.”
Chapter Fifteen
You look beautiful,” Cyrus told me some hours later.
I was fixing my updo in a mirror on the wall of our suite, and he had come up behind me.He was wearing a close-fitting black tux, which complemented his broad shoulders, dark hair, and sun-bronzed skin, and even went well with the stubble he’d already regrown, despite shaving a few hours ago.He looked edible.
I didn’t look so bad myself, having ditched the wacked-out souvenirs posing as clothing for one of the evening dresses the girls had bought me.It was slinky, silver, and cut down to there and up to here, which could be construed as an insult to the council since it was minimal enough to make a Change easy.Like I cared.
They had so many rules, half of which contradicted the other half, that there was no way to keep them happy.And I was tired of trying, and dealing with them at all—thinking about them, talking to them, and especially socializing with them.At this point, I just wanted to tell them where to go.
