Curse the Dawn (42 page)

“I wouldn’t have left,” I told him. “It’s nice here.”

Pritkin’s mouth hardened for a heartbeat before relaxing once more. “I’m considering selling. It’s too large for one person. And the reason it was acquired no longer exists.”

I looked around. So this was the house he’d bought with his wife in mind. It suddenly became more interesting.

One of the few things Pritkin had told me about himself was his early—and, as far as I knew, only—attempt at the have-a-normal-life routine. Sometime in the nineteenth century, he’d met a girl and gotten married. Only no one had bothered to mention what might happen to a half incubus who took a wife. The result was the other side of his nature coming out on their first night together and draining the poor girl of life without Pritkin having any idea how to stop it. He’d had to watch, horror-struck, as she died because of him.

I could see him picking this place out in the months before the wedding. He’d probably expected years of quiet, happy normalcy. Only that so hadn’t happened.

I could relate.

“Are you all right?” he finally asked.

“I’m fine,” I said, because it took too much energy to explain all the ways I wasn’t.

“You don’t look fine.”

“Sorry.” I tried to relax against the hedge growing behind the bench, but its branches poked me like too-sharp fingernails. I couldn’t get comfortable and sat up straight again.

“There is something you should know,” he told me.

“Not now.” My brain was already overstuffed with all the things I hadn’t had a chance to think about, to accept, to find a place for in my self-image where they might not do too much damage.

“It isn’t more bad news,” he insisted.

I looked at him warily. He seemed sincere. “Okay,” I said cautiously.

“Jonas overstated the situation regarding your father. What we know about him was gained from interrogations of minor figures in the magical underworld—the sort of people that the vampire who brought you up once employed. The Black Circle uses such people for errand runners and cannon fodder but limits considerably what they are told. And their information came years after your father’s death. Much of it was likely not garnered from personal experience but from rumor and conjecture.”

“You’ve never interrogated a single Black Circle member?”

“No.”

“That doesn’t seem possible. You guys have known about them for hundreds of years. You must have captured at least one—”

“It’s a rare occurrence, but it does happen.”

“And none of them ever talked?” I couldn’t imagine anyone who did the kind of stuff that made vampires blanch having all that much loyalty to his partners-in-crime. It sounded more like he’d sell them out the first chance he got.

“They never lived long enough.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Black Circle has a similar tattoo to ours but with a more sinister purpose. Every Black Circle mage we’ve ever caught self-destructed within minutes. It’s one reason most of them fight to the death. Capture, for them, is the same thing.”

It was gruesome to contemplate, but it made a grim sort of sense. “I guess their tattoo doesn’t come off, huh?”

“No. And as we have never captured one without it, I can only assume it is a requirement for admission.”

“Isn’t the Silver Circle’s?”

“Yes—for most people.”

“Why not for you?”

He smiled slightly. “Mixed-blood applicants need not apply. The Circle was pleased to have me around to hunt the more dangerous types of demons, but they preferred not to give me access to their power base.”

“I don’t get it. Wouldn’t you have been donating, not taking?”

“Power drains can work both ways. It’s the main reason the Circle cut off the connection to your pentagram—they were afraid you would reverse the flow.”

“Marsden seems to trust you.”

“Perhaps. But the Council as a whole decides most issues, with the head of the Council there to advise, to set up the meeting agenda and such. He has only one vote unless there is a tie, and on the subject of my joining the Circle as a full member, there was close to a consensus.”

“Nice friends you have there.”

“On such a matter, they were wise to be cautious. But we have strayed from the point. Necromancy is illegal. It is grouped with other prohibited manifestations of magical ability, such as those possessed by the children you are helping. But the mere fact of someone being a necromancer doesn’t make them evil. The power can be misused, but the same is true for any magic.”

“You seem to have a different take on it than the Circle.”

“When I was young, the differences between dark and light magic were not as clear-cut as today. The only difference was the way power was acquired and the uses to which it was put. Magical energy is no different than any other—it can be perverted or it can be used for good.”

“Well, my father’s was perverted.”

“You can’t know that!”

“Yes, I really can.” I rubbed my eyes. I didn’t want to have to spell it out, but this was apparently face-up-to-crap day and no one had told me. Not to mention that the truth was pretty damn obvious. Pritkin wasn’t stupid; he’d work it out for himself soon enough. I preferred that he heard it from me.

“Energy is the only coin of the ghost world,” I said. “Once you’re dead, money, the things it can buy, prestige—all that goes by the wayside. Ghosts are only really interested in two things: revenge, or whatever reason they hang around, and energy. Mostly energy, because without it, they’ll fade away.”

“Not fade,” Pritkin corrected. “They transition to other realms.”

“Yeah, only most don’t want to go. And power is what they need to hang around. It can be generated by things like Billy’s talisman or gleaned from places that have a significant psychic residue. People in serious distress shed life energy like skin cells, and in an old house or a graveyard, there’s often enough built up to sustain one or more ghosts. Graveyards are particularly popular because more distressed people show up all the time. It’s kind of like a supernatural grocery store, always getting new deliveries.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with your father.”

“Everything. The only other way to get life energy once you’re dead is to beg, borrow or steal it from someone who already has it. For a ghost, that means cannibalizing other spirits, which they do all the time, or getting it directly from a living donor. The latter is a lot more uncommon unless the spirit is really pissed off or unbalanced, because attacking a living body uses up more energy than it gains.”

I stopped, having finished Ghost 101 and feeling strangely reluctant to go further. Intellectually, I knew that my father’s crimes weren’t mine, that I shouldn’t feel any guilt over them. But emotionally, it felt like the taint of what he’d done had rubbed off on me, as if it was my fault somehow. I scrubbed my arms. The sun suddenly didn’t feel all that warm anymore.

“So, like I said, life energy is hard to come by and highly prized. It’s the only thing my father could have offered the spirits who worked for him.”

“Jonas said he could command them,” Pritkin reminded me. “They may have had no choice.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that, but I don’t claim to be an expert on necromancy. Some people think that’s what clairvoyants are—minor-level necromancers—but it isn’t true. I can see ghosts and donate energy to the dead, but that’s it. I can’t bring anyone back to life—or any semblance of it. But I do know something about ghosts. And most spirits wouldn’t have been able to go around gathering intelligence without a regular energy draw.”

“Perhaps some are stronger than others.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way. Strong, weak, whatever you were in life—when you’re dead, you’re dead. And ghosts use up energy even faster than humans do. Their haunts normally only provide a subsistence. To do extra work, they need extra power. Like I give to Billy.”

And for the first time, it struck me as perverse that I had such complete power over anyone. I’d always thought of our relationship as a fair trade—I gave something, Billy gave something, and we both benefited from the arrangement. Billy had saved my life dozens of times, just as I had helped to sustain his. Quid pro quo. Only now I wasn’t so sure.

Was it really equal when one party could walk away from a deal, and the other couldn’t? Billy could live without me. He survived for a century and a half before we met, because his necklace provided the same subsistence for him that most ghosts received from a house or graveyard. But that’s all it was, a subsistence. Without regular donations from me, Billy couldn’t go more than fifty miles away from the talisman, and even within that range, he couldn’t do much.

What would it be like, I wondered, to be tied to an object that could end up anywhere, dragging you with it? To be too weak to do more than watch life go by—a life you no longer had? How had he lived for so many years with no companionship? Of course, he could talk to other ghosts, if he wanted to take the risk of being cannibalized. But even then, ghost conversation tended to be a little one-sided.

Like our relationship.

I decided that maybe I owed Billy an apology, although what I could do about the problem was debatable. He was a ghost; I couldn’t change that. But maybe I could do a little more to show my appreciation for all he did for me. Maybe I could make a conscious effort not to take advantage of him.

Maybe I could try a little harder not to be like my father.

“Donating life energy is not a crime,” Pritkin said, obviously still not following me.

“Depends on where you get it.”

He frowned. “You use your own.”

“Because I feed one ghost. Uno. And even then, there are times Billy has to rely on his necklace, because I don’t have anything left to give.” I saw comprehension begin to dawn in his eyes. I looked away before he hit revulsion. “So how much power would a ghost army need? There’s no way one mage could supply dozens, much less hundreds, of hungry ghosts. Just no way.”

“Dark mages are known to steal power from whomever they can,” he murmured.

“And now we know one thing they use it for—or used to.” I got up, suddenly finding the stone bench really uncomfortable. “And when a dark mage catches someone, correct me if I’m wrong here, but don’t they usually drain them?”

“Yes,” he said softly.

“And draining a magical human—”

“Kills them.”

“So my father was a murderer. And if he supplied an army, he was a mass murderer.” Not to mention kidnapper and probably rapist. I walked off a little way, the chimney suddenly getting a lot more interesting. “I’d say that’s pretty dark, wouldn’t you?”

It was really hard to imagine, because my only actual memory of him was a positive one. He’d been throwing a three- or four-year-old me into the air and hearing me squeal in glee. It was hard to reconcile that man with someone who could kill a person just for gain, for the coin that it would gain him in the spiritual world.

“If he was a member of the Black Circle,” Pritkin said. “But we don’t know that he was. The Circle chooses to believe the rumors at present because it suits their purpose.”

“And if it is true?”

“It doesn’t change anything,” he said urgently.

“Except that my father was a monster.” I’d never been under the illusion that he was some kind of saint—no one at Tony’s was. But this . . . no. I hadn’t really been prepared for this.

I felt hands on me, turning me around. The little dagger-shaped links of the bracelet around Pritkin’s wrist slipped over my skin, feeling suddenly oily and strangely heavy.

I’d acquired it in a fight with a dark mage, when it deserted him for me. Ever since, it had clung to my wrist whether I liked it or not, defeating all attempts to remove it. At the time, I’d assumed that it had simply gravitated to the greater source of power, which due to my new position was me. But what if there had been another reason? What if it had been drawn to the greatest potential for evil?

“Cassie!” Pritkin’s hands tightened on my shoulders, hard enough to be painful. I looked up, hurt and confused. “My father is a demon lord,” he said crisply. “I win.”

Pritkin isn’t kind, exactly, or tactful at all, but he still sometimes manages to say the right thing at the right time. I guess if there was one thing he knew about, it was dysfunctional families. It didn’t make things all right—I had a feeling nothing was going to do that for a long time. But it helped. Even with Rosier for a father, he’d turned out okay. Better than okay, I thought, smiling at him.

“Thanks.”

He inclined his head. “No problem. But if you mention anything about getting in touch with my feminine side, I will shoot you.”

And for the first time in days, I laughed.

“We have to discuss Jonas’ offer eventually,” Pritkin pointed out few minutes later.

And yes, we did. But I didn’t have to like it.

We’d been sitting watching Marsden pick things out of his overrun garden. He’d acquired a hat, I noticed, and squashed most of the hair underneath. He looked almost normal.

“I have a theory about war mages,” I said. “The more powerful they are, the worse the hair.”

“Cassie.”

“You could make my day and tell me Saunders is bald.”

“And you could make mine by facing up to this.”

I scowled. “I can’t believe I’m actually thinking about joining a coup.”

“There no longer seems to be much choice.”

“What happened to wait and see? A few hours ago—”

“A few hours ago, I hadn’t heard Tremaine’s evidence. A few hours ago, I hadn’t seen the newspaper. Jonas is correct. Leaking that story is a clear-cut sign of the Circle’s intentions. If Saunders had any plans to work with you, he would be suppressing unfavorable press, not assisting it.”

Yeah. That was the way it looked to me, too. I sighed. “What do you know about Marsden?”