“Dark mages,” I said, shaking my head regretfully. “You can’t trust ’em.”

“You expect me to believe that one of his allies threw this at him?”

I was surprised, shocked even. “What other explanation is there?”

Marlowe nudged the guy in the ribs with his toe. “Is that what he will say when he wakes?”

“Who knows? Mages, such liars.” I wasn’t worried. The captain wasn’t likely to rat on the person who’d saved his life, and Louis-Cesare had promised Mircea not to do anything to hurt me. Turning me in to Marlowe would definitely go against that promise. It seemed we both had secrets.

Nonetheless, I kept my bag close to hand, since there were some other unsavory devices still inside. There would be a lot more as soon as I got the chance to visit a certain old acquaintance in Vegas. Drac wanted me alive for now, but why? And for how long?

“We do need your help,” Louis-Cesare was saying, which seemed to get Marlowe’s attention more than my attempts at conversation. I left them to talk things over, because I saw a familiar shadow dart by the door and into a room across the hall. If it had been any farther, I’d have let it go. I have an excellent sense of direction and don’t usually lose my way, yet MAGIC’s layout seems to change every time I’m there. It could be a spell, one of its many built-in defenses, or simply nerves on my part. I strongly suspected that a whole coterie of dark mages would be more welcome around here than I was.

I met another vamp, one of Marlowe’s boys, coming in the door and smiled at him. He bared fangs, but cringed away slightly at the same time, as if I’d really stake him in front of his already pissed-off master. I pushed past him and crossed the hall, noting that it was riddled with bits of serrated iron that were half-buried in the floor. Normally, these form what passes for decorations on the sconces and chandeliers about the place, but in times of attack they become lethal projectiles that target anyone not on the approved list. Since my name was definitely not on that document, I was glad to see that they appeared inactive.

I pushed open the door and saw whom I’d expected. “Hello, Uncle.”

Radu, in his usual swashbuckling attire, champagne-colored satin in this case, froze in place. He had the guilty look of someone caught in headlights with a body, a shovel and a big hole. I found his expression interesting, since not much disconcerts the older vamps, especially not ones who have seen and done as much as he has.

I glanced around, but nothing seemed unusual. We were in one of the small, unremarkable rooms that litter the rabbit warren of MAGIC’s lower levels. Like the one across the hall, this one looked more like it belonged in a hospital or laboratory than a supernatural stronghold. But there were no alien bodies in formaldehyde or anything else to account for Radu’s expression. He smiled nervously, the famous turquoise eyes that had once garnered him the nickname of “the Handsome” wide and scared.

“Stop looking like you expect me to draw a weapon and come after you,” I said irritably. I don’t know why he does that—I’ve never actually tried to kill him—but maybe he figures there’s always a first time. I sat on the edge of a nearby counter and lit a joint, trying to look casual and put him at ease. Considering the tenseness that practically radiated off him, I wasn’t doing so hot.

“You’re a brunette again,” he said, and then looked flustered when he realized that making personal comments wasn’t the best way to start a conversation.

“Temporarily.”

He tried widening the smile, but it trembled on his lips and he soon gave it up. “It has, er, been a long time, Dorina.”

“Dory, and yeah, I suppose so.” I thought for a minute. “Let’s see, World War II was still on. I remember because you were bitching about the Krauts sinking some ship with a bunch of your stuff on it—”

“The blockade, you know, around Britain.” He gestured helplessly. “Such a bother. Some of the rarer herbs simply aren’t available anywhere else.”

“Right.” I glanced around the room at the rows of shelves holding valuable ingredients. “Bet there’s no problem getting unusual stuff now, with you working at MAGIC.”

There was no earthly reason for Radu to jump slightly at that comment. The Senate had used him for the last century as one of its brain-trust weirdos, hanging around the lower levels, concocting God knew what. There was nothing new about it, so his reaction interested me. But since I knew I had about as much chance of getting information out of him as of being voted most popular by vamps worldwide, I switched subjects.

“I’m working with Louis-Cesare now—did anyone tell you?”

He nodded vigorously. “Mircea said something about it. How are you two getting on?”

“Famously. Until Jonathan showed up.”

I watched Radu carefully, but there was no sign that he recognized the name. And if he had, there would have been. It never ceased to amaze me that he and Mircea were full brothers. “Who?”

“Nothing.” I gave him my sweetest smile, and for some reason, he blanched. “I’m glad I caught you, Uncle. I need a favor.”

“There are three great houses of the Light Fey,” I was told by the nondescript little vamp Radu had dug up. He smelled like old, musty books and dust, and was gray all over—hair, eyes, clothes and teeth. But the bookworm knew his stuff; for once, Uncle had come in handy. “The Blarestri, or Blue Elves, are the current ruling house, but their grip is less than firm because their king has no heir. Or, rather, he does have a son—Prince Alarr—but he cannot rule.”

“Why not?” I perched on the overflowing desk, an enormous rolltop like something out of Dickens, that filled most of the tiny office. The vamp was one of Marlowe’s beetles, a group attached to the spy network who acted less as operatives than as librarians. He was one of those responsible for keeping track of info on the Fey, and Radu had called in a favor so he’d allow me to pick his brain for half an hour. So far, it hadn’t yielded much.

“Alarr is half-human, and the ruler must always have a majority of Fey blood,” the beetle explained. “But there are those who doubt that he intends to follow the old ways if they deprive him of a throne. People fear civil war should the king die, for there is another claimant. The king’s sister married a Svarestri noble, and bore him a full-blooded Fey son with royal Blarestri blood. They call him Æsubrand—it means the Sword of the Æsir.”

“I understood about one word in seven of that,” I told him frankly. “Back up. Who are the Svarestri?” The cram course on Fey politics was already giving me a headache. And I couldn’t even complain because I’d asked for it.

“The Black Elves, as they are known, are the second great house of Faerie. And because the Alorestri, the Green Elves, have never shown much interest in politics, it is the Svarestri who pose the greatest threat to Blarestri rule. In fact”—he paused to light a pipe—“according to legend, they did rule once, long ago, when the Æsir walked the earth.”

“The who?”

“How can you have lived so long and be so ignorant?” he asked tetchily.

“The Æsir were the lords of battle,” Radu put in.

The beetle glanced at him approvingly. “Quite. Said to love war more than the very air they breathed—Odin, Thor and the like. They displaced the Vanir, the older fertility gods, and banished their followers, the Blarestri, from Eluen Londe—”

“What?”

“Eluen Londe.” I looked at him blankly. “Faerie!” he clarified impatiently. “They gave its rule into the hands of those who pledged themselves to their service—the Svarestri—who ruled it until the Æsir departed.”

“Departed for where?”

“But that’s the great mystery, isn’t it?” Radu asked excitedly. “No one knows. One day, poof. They simply weren’t there anymore.”

I raised an eyebrow but didn’t question it. I really didn’t care where some probably mythical beings had gone on vacation. “Okay, how about more modern history? What’s the situation now?”

The beetle looked vaguely perturbed. He hemmed and hawed for a while, but the upshot was that the vamps didn’t know squat. There were rumors of turmoil in the Fey capital, and no one had seen the king for weeks, but whether that signified a coup, no one could say. I’d sat through that whole history lesson and learned absolutely nothing useful.

“All I want to know is why a party of Fey wanted to kill me,” I said heatedly.

The beetle’s lips twisted enough to show fang. “Doesn’t everyone?” Radu hustled me out the door before I could find out if the vamp’s plump little carcass would fit into his overstuffed desk.

Radu escorted me back to Marlowe’s digs, then made his excuses and disappeared into his lab. He closed the door, waited a few seconds to see if I’d follow, and continued toward the blank wall he’d been facing when I’d stopped him. I knew this because I’d left an Eye of Argus charm looped around the back of a nearby chair. As soon as Radu disappeared through the wall, I slipped back into the lab, retrieved my little eyeball cluster and put it back on my key chain. Time to find out what had Uncle so jumpy.

The hidden entrance to a corridor carved out of the local sandstone wasn’t warded. I stopped at that realization, more than a little worried since where the Senate doesn’t have wards, it tends to have even nastier things. Most wards are designed to keep something or someone out of an area, or to set off an alarm when an intruder passes through them. Booby traps are used when the Senate doesn’t care about interrogation, and only wants any snoopers dead, usually in a very unpleasant way.

It took me a long time to get down that corridor, because I was convinced that a trap lay waiting somewhere along it, and had to test every foot before I dared to move ahead. I have a charm that makes any magical traps in a two-foot area become visible, but it takes twenty seconds or so to kick in every time a new reading is needed. I had to move ahead two feet, stop, let the charm do its thing, get a negative reading and start all over again. It was the sort of thing that made me want to scream.