Seven minutes later, Trevor called her back.
He was able to confirm that there was, in fact, an increased magic presence at House Demonte. He wasn’t able to go into detail about it, which concerned her because it meant there could be somebody listening. She thanked him and hung up the phone.
So, the boy sorcerer hadn’t been wrong. There was something strange going on at House Demonte, and Robin was going to be brought right to the center of it.
A nagging thought crept into her mind.
They’d never really solved the question of how Magnus even knew about Robin’s existence. Lucidia had been careful (and careful to her standards was like careful plus ten for anybody else’s). She would have heard up the grapevine if Magnus had sent scouts out to Portland, because she’d asked her contacts, like Maxine, to keep a special eye out for the area. Which meant that Magnus had all but plucked Robin out of a country of 330 million people. Those odds were unbelievable, even for an old, immensely powerful vampire.
Or, he’d had help.
So far, Lucidia had pieced together that Robin had some sort of influence on the people around her. She also knew that the charm, or compulsion, was an inherently magical ability. Then, there was the fact that a boy-sorcerer had claimed that the casters were orchestrating an attack on the vampires, and her source confirming that there was increased caster presence inside of House Demonte.
That last one was big, because vampires only trust casters as far as they can throw them.
Roots of fear and apprehension worked their way into her brain, and she pulled the car over.
Why, on the eve of a caster attack, why would one house be hoarding casters inside their walls?
Unless they were launching an attack on the other vampire houses.
Normally, this would work to her advantage. Take out House Xander, and she was a free woman.
But she’d learned about the history of power in the supernatural world. The balance of ability and reach formed a delicate ecosystem, where each of the creatures had both strengths and weaknesses. Wolves are the most powerful, but they healed the slowest. Vampires were immensely powerful beings, but they drew too much attention if they stayed close to humans for too long, forcing them to isolate. Casters were immensely powerful, but they were limited by the materials or life force of their focuses. And strongbloods… well, powerful, but half-human.
Through centuries of war and power-mongering, they’d settled into a pretty decent (but albeit enslaving) balance of control. Everybody kept to themselves, and no one group got too much firepower.
But in training, she’d learned about the last time two groups of creatures ganged up on the other.
It was 800 years ago, and it involved the werewolves and one group of vampires, House Karyl, tag teaming it against the rest of the vampire houses (the casters were dealing with their own war at the time, so they were pretty out of the picture). The werewolves and Karyl vampires decimated the leadership of the other seven vampire houses.
Problem solved, right?
Wrong.
Vampire houses were like carefully constructed anthills. If you stomp on it, you might think you’ve won, until the ants start pouring out and flailing about in pandemonium.
What House Karyl had actually done was cause a large sum of vampires to flock to the human cities, looking to hide. The leadership had been slain, and there was nobody to keep order, or punish any crimes. It was a bloodbath, and sparked pursuit by the Catholic church during the crusades. Strongbloods died too, because many of them were still beholden to whatever vampires were left and had no choice but to obey with the vampires’ greedy commands, landing themselves in prison or dead by church agents.
In short, it was a clusterfuck.
That period of lawlessness ended only when Hadriana the Great went on a rampage against her own kind, trying to “cut out the diseased limb so that the body may persevere!”
Hadriana was a total badass, and Lucidia considered the female vampire-conqueror to be one of her favorite historical figures. Hadriana singlehandedly ensured the survival of vampires during the plague times (when human populations were halved) by founding the practice of keeping humans at their strongholds and providing food and lodging in exchange for blood.
Granted, that turned into the slave trade they had today.
But Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all, and reform didn’t happen overnight. Unless you were the vampire Hadriana, wielding a flaming sword and cutting down your disobedient kin with a single strike.
Knowing the disastrous result of the last two-creature tag team effort, it worried Lucidia that House Demonte seemed to be completely and utterly prepared for disaster to strike.
She knew what she had to do.
But she really, really didn’t want to.
Calling Darian to warn him about the impending attack would be just what he wanted. He’d lord it over her as an act of fealty, a sign of her true faithfulness. The thought of him, smug and glib, made her grind her teeth together.
But in this day and age, where phones and social media had allowed for widespread communication, a slip up around the humans would be detrimental. Vampires and witches were already griping about how the human populations had grown too large for comfort. Through careful de-escalation, they’d been counselled not to act against the teeming masses, that another plague would crop them down. Right about then, germ theory was invented, and that plan went down the toilet.
A consequence of the vampires’ restraint and the humans’ unmitigated growth was that supernatural creatures were now painfully, astronomically outnumbered. A single slip up would result in ruthless persecution and eradication, much worse than the church debacle of the middle ages.
And it wasn’t just
