Page 50 of Smoke & Ashes
“It’s not one object.” She was still giving me that unreadable look. “In fact it’s not always an object at all. There’s a chalice in Genoa, another one in Valencia. Then some say it’s the philosopher’s stone or the blood of the Merovingian kings. Why do you want to know?”
I shook my head, not quite in despair, not quitenotin despair. “Mage stuff. The visions, you know.”
“I suspect you no longer want my advice, but I’d find wherever that little witch is recuperating and smother her in her sleep.”
“You’re the third person to tell me that.”
“Who were the first two?”
“Thelittle witchand a dead Satanist.”
“Well they were right. You’ll be free when she’s gone.”
I put my head in my hands then immediately regretted it. This would be a lesson for me: never fight an obsessive mass-murdering vampire seductresses while drunk. “Killing is your lot’s answer for everything, isn’t it?”
She stretched out. “It does solve a surprising number of problems if applied creatively.”
I was too busy nursing a broken bone to reply. In a way it was comforting that Julian hadn’t changed much—then again I’d been a far smaller part of her life than she’d been of mine. I didn’t want to do the maths but she was something like twenty or thirty times my age. The year or so she’d spent with me must have felt like a one-night stand from her immortal perspective. “What was it you said to Yelena about Patrick?” I asked instead. “You said he was Sebastian’s creature. I know he worked for him for a bit, that he was his guy inside the police and all that. Is there more to it?”
“They’re a funny bloodline, Patrick’s lot.”
“The Knights?”
“He’s adopted, you’ll remember. Yelena turned him, and from what I recall Diego de Flores turned her. Obsessed with her, you see. With that difficult witch-hunter/witch dynamic that can become so troubling so quickly.”
I remembered Diego quite bitterly as a man who’d made a spirited attempt to condemn me to death. “So, what, Patrick’s a creep because he’s descended from a medieval uber-creep?”
“Something like that. He’s responsible for his own actions ultimately, as we all are, and becoming a vampire only ever brings out things that were part of us all along. But I doubt I’d have embraced this particular side of myself so fully if I hadn’t been turned by a colossal pervert.” She looked almost small for a moment. “It’s quite worrying when you stop to think of it. Perhaps all I am is Anacletus in a prettier shell.”
I wasn’t in the mood for making her feel better. Despite her timely intervention earlier in the evening I was still pretty sore about the whole left-to-die bit. “Which has what to do with Sebastian, exactly?”
“Nobody has an eye for an asset like the Prince of Wands. Patrick has a sense for a certain type of person. Surely it didn’t escape your notice that his last two obsessions were both girls with untapped supernatural power, power that wound up being directly useful to Sebastian in his machinations?”
Deciding I was going to have to ride out the pain, I turned to her. “You mean he’s like a magical sniffer dog?”
“With a problematic undertone of ephebophilia, yes.”
“So you think he still needs Patrick for something?”
She nodded.
“He’s got a new girlfriend, you know.”
“Patrick?” One of Julian’s eyebrows arched. “How interesting.”
This was getting frustrating. “What’s going on, Julian?”
I got the big eyes treatment. Fuck, I’d missed the big eyes treatment. “I honestly don’t know, sweeting.”
“And stop calling me that.”
“Sorry, force of habit. But I really don’t. I knew Sebastian had sent Yelena after you—she’s old enough, dangerous enough, and unsubtle enough that people notice when she moves around. That business with the hearts…” She tsked. “Points for style I suppose, but hardly in keeping with the allegedly clandestine nature of our existence.”
I got a sudden very cold feeling. It was partly the broken arm, but it was mostly the nauseating wave of realisation. “He’s distracting us again, isn’t he? He’s got something else planned.”
“What did I always tell you about Sebastian?” She gave me a strangely sincere, strangely sorrowful look. “Just when you think you’ve worked out what he’ll do next, it turns out he’s already done it.”
I needed to find Patrick. Fishing in my left inside pocket with my left hand, I managed to work my phone out and unlock it. I had like eight missed calls from an unknown number. That was what happened when people tried to ring me while I was drunk, hallucinating, or having a vampire try to murder me. “Sorry,” I said, then immediately regretted it. I was very far from wanting to apologise to Julian Saint-Germain for anything still. “I mean, there’s some calls I should be making.”
