“Because I don’t have a choice,” she spat. “I practically begged Mircea to break my bond, but all he did was talk: soon, soon. Well, it wasn’t soon enough!”

“But . . . Alphonse is fifty years younger than you!” I protested. “And he’s been able to ignore Tony’s orders for years! You don’t have to—”

She cut me off with a laugh. “Yeah. And he’s an idiot, you know? I taught him everything—how to talk, how to act, what to do to impress the boss. He’d be nothing without me. But power doesn’t care how smart you are. Doesn’t even care how old you are. Some people never reach master status, and others do it in a matter of decades! And I’ve never been strong. Why do you think I put up with Alphonse? He was the only way I had any position at all.”

“That’s why we couldn’t catch you,” Marco said, lighting a cigarette. “It was pretty clever. Everyone was looking for the traitor among the old masters, the guys close enough to a Senate member for Myra to have wasted her time trying to turn them.”

“Which is why Tony decided to use me.”

“The Consuls aren’t here, as you can see,” Pritkin said, watching her narrowly. “Whatever your master ordered you to do, you’ve failed. Mircea can still break your bond. You have no reason to—”

He broke off at the identical expressions of disgust Sal and Marco were sending him. “Why the hell do you hang around this guy?” Marco asked me.

Pritkin looked at me, and I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way,” I told him numbly.

“Why not? If she is truly under a compulsion—”

“Vampire law doesn’t care about the why. It only cares about the result. Or in this case, the intended result. And Sal came back here intending to kill the leaders of the six vampire senates. It doesn’t get any worse than that.”

“Close, but no cigar,” Sal told me, sounding awfully unconcerned for someone facing certain death. “I’m just the doorman, you might say.” She held out her hand, and a shaft of light through the balcony doors lit up something on her open palm.

“My pentagram,” I said, recognizing it even from this distance. “You said you’d get it fixed.”

“Yeah. Only it’s a lot more useful broken.”

“I don’t get it.”

She laughed.“You know, I used to think it was ludicrous—you with Lord Mircea. I figured he was just using you, like everyone said. But lately, I’ve begun to think you two deserve each other. You’re just as clueless as he is!”

Marco tensed. “Give it to me,” he told her.

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” she asked incredulously. “You don’t have a lot of threats left, Marco.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Mircea didn’t specify how the traitor was to die, just told me to take care of it if anybody showed up. I got a lot of leeway here, Sal. Give me a reason to make it quick.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s tempting. Or I could follow Tony’s orders, and when his side wins, I not only don’t die, I get the position I always deserved. How about that instead?”

“Your side isn’t going to win,” Pritkin told her.

Sal ignored him. It looked like she was having fun. I was beginning to wonder how hard she had tried to resist Tony.

“Remember MAGIC?” she asked me. “Because this is gonna make that look like a sideshow.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “It’s just a ward. It can’t—”

“A ward that channels your power—or used to,” she corrected. “Lately, it’s been channeling something else instead. You know, that damn wardsmith gave me a fright. I thought for sure one of you would figure it out. You survived direct contact with the ley line even though you couldn’t access your power. Yet even when he told you your ward was feeding off the Circle, you still didn’t get it!”

“Get what?”

Pritkin drew in air, and Sal grinned at him. “Dumb as a rock, isn’t she?” Her gaze returned to me. “Let me spell it out. Tony and company figured out a way around Artemis’ spell. It acts like a lock on a door, but a door isn’t much help when the wall of the house is split open. To get Apollo back, they needed to rip apart the space between worlds. They needed to crack open a ley line.”

“But nobody on Earth has that kind of power,” I protested. “That was the problem all along, trying to figure out who . . .” I stopped, a really horrible idea surfacing.

Sal saw my expression and grinned. “Yeah, that was the best part, hearing everybody say, over and over, that no one had that kind of power. When it was right under their noses, all the time. You had it. Apollo gave part of his power to the Pythias. All we had to figure out was how to access it.”

And suddenly, I caught up. I looked at Pritkin. “You said the Circle wouldn’t give you one of their tattoos, because power drains work both ways. They’ve been draining me, haven’t they?”

He nodded slowly. “It’s possible.”

Sal snorted. “Hell, it was easy. Richardson—our guy on the inside—just opened the conduit to your ward again. The Circle had closed it off, thinking you might try to drain power from them. Instead, we opened it up to do the same thing to you. Then Richardson got it to our allies by bundling it with the percentage Saunders was selling to fund his early retirement.”

“You used my power to weaken the ley line,” I said, still not quite believing it.

“Yeah. We almost had it porous enough to get Apollo and his army through, but Richardson just had to pull his little stunt with you. He hated you so much, he was afraid someone else would get to kill you. And then the battle broke out and ripped a huge-ass gash in the ley line, screwing everything up!”

“But why didn’t Apollo come through then?” I asked, confused.

Sal just stared at me. “Don’t you get it yet? He’s been here since MAGIC fell! But it wasn’t supposed to happen then, and it took everyone by surprise. The breach was supposed to take place over Vegas and to have to run all the way to the ley line sink at MAGIC before it was sealed. That would have given him time to get his whole army through.”

“But it hit MAGIC and sealed almost instantly,” I said, remembering that awesome funnel of power disappearing over the hill. I suddenly remembered something else, too.

My vision at MAGIC had shown me a ruined Dante’s. I finally understood why. If I had gone back and changed time, ensuring that MAGIC never fell, I would have handed Apollo everything he wanted. In that case, the original plan would have been carried out and he and his whole army would be here. And by now, the magical community would be well on its way to extinction.

My other visions were starting to make sense, too. The second had shown me the route the ley line’s destruction was meant to take on its way from Vegas to MAGIC. It was trying to do more than warn me about Rafe; it was telling me that the danger was still there. The third vision had reinforced that once again and showed me at the center of it all.

Because it was my power that would give our enemies a victory.

Chapter Twenty-eight

“Apollo got through,” Sal told me, “but the rest of his forces didn’t. He was back, but he’d been severely weakened when the line exploded around him, and he was stuck in a world with a quarter million war mages, any fraction of whom could banish him again. He realized that he needed to bring through his army before he threw down with the Circle.”

“But contact with the ley line fried my ward. You can’t get any more power!” I pointed out.

She shook her head. “As long as the ward was on your body, it continued to pull from you, but instead of transmitting the power to us, it stored it. It’s been building up the amount we need ever since the breach.”

So that was what Dee had sensed. Not Apollo, but my pentagram. And Sal, waiting for her master.

“Now we have enough,” Sal said cheerfully.

“Because the line is still weak,” I murmured. Mircea had said that it would take a couple of days to calm back down.

“Yeah, that’s why we have to do it now, before the line starts to strengthen again. Of course, Apollo thought it was a bonus that the consuls were also meeting here tonight. Destroy the leaders and everyone else would fall that much easier.” She grinned at me. “But you know, I really think he’ll settle for you.”

The sky flared red beyond the balcony doors. Crimson streaks that were nothing like a sunrise crackled across the heavens, shedding a killing radiance that made the hotel’s electric lights look feeble by comparison. Something was coming.

The whole time she talked, Sal had been slowly backing up, edging closer to the balcony. No one had tried to stop her. After all, even a vampire was unlikely to survive a fall like that. But now she could toss the pentagram over the edge anytime she chose, and we’d never find it. Not before her master did.

“Give me the pentagram, Sal,” Marco said again. He suddenly sounded deadly serious.

“Are you still trying that? When you have nothing to offer me but a quick death?” She sneered. “Don’t expect me to be so generous with you!”

The wind picked up as the light grew brighter. It looked like dawn was coming early. Or the sun anyway, I thought dizzily.

And then, faster than my eyes could track, Marco moved. I blinked and Sal was still standing there, but the hand clutching my ward was flying through the air—straight at me. She twisted, a snarl overtaking her face, and the next second Marco was staggering back, a sliver of the ruined couch frame sticking out of his chest.

I didn’t get a chance to see if it got his heart. Because Sal’s severed hand hit me and the impact jarred my ward loose. It went flying, I dove after it and Sal dove after me.

And then, just as suddenly, she was gone.

I felt a breath of wind pass me and looked up in time to see Nicu come out of nowhere and tackle Sal by the waist. I don’t know if he didn’t realize that she was as close to the edge as she was, or if he thought the railing would catch them. But it had taken as much abuse as the rest of the apartment and gave way under their combined weight. I saw bright gold eyes staring at me for an instant before they fell, and then they were gone.