Bone Crossed (Mercy Thompson #4)(23)

"She really had them all killed?" I whispered it, remembering some of what he'd given me while he'd been in my head. "All of your..." Sheep wasn't really PC, and I didn't want to tick him off, even if sheep is what all the vampires called the mundane humans they kept to feed off. "All of your people?"

I knew some of them, and liked one or two. For some reason, though, rather than the faces of the people I'd met living, it was the young vampire Danny I remembered, his ghost rocking in the corner of Stefan's kitchen. Stefan hadn't been able to protect him either.

Stefan gave me a sick look. "Disciplining me, she said. But I think it was revenge as much as anything. And I can feed off them from a distance. She wanted me starving when I landed at your feet."

"She wanted you to kill me."

He nodded jerkily. "That's right. And if you hadn't had half of Adam's pack at your house, I would have."

I thought of the obstinate look on his face. "I think she underestimated you," I told him.

"Did she?" He smiled, just a little, and shook his head.

I leaned my head back against the wall. "I'm..." Still angry with you didn't cover it. He was a murderer of innocents, and here I was talking to him, worried about him. I didn't know how to complete that thought, much less the sentence, so I went on to something else.

"So Marsilia knows I killed Andre, and you and Wulfe covered it up?"

He shook his head. "She knows something - she didn't talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don't think she knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me..." He looked at me from under the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day - I'd heard a heavy feeding could cause that. "I got the feeling I was being punished by association. I was the seethe's contact with you. I was the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill Andre's pet. I was the reason you succeeded. You are my fault."

"She's crazy."

He shook his head. "You don't know her. She's trying to do what is best for her people."

The Tri-City seethe of vampires had mostly been in the area before the towns were established. Marsilia had been sent here as punishment for sleeping around with someone else's favorite. She'd been a person of influence, so had come here with attendants - mostly, as far as I knew, Stefan, Andre - the second vampire I'd killed - and a really creepy character named Wulfe.

Wulfe, who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy, had been a witch or wizard as a human, and sometimes dressed like a medieval peasant. I supposed he could be faking it, but I suspected that he was older than Marsilia, who dated from the Renaissance, so the clothes fit.

Marsilia had been sent here to die, but she hadn't. Instead, she'd seen to it that her people survived. As civilization began to grow, life in the seethe became easier. The fight for survival mostly a thing of the past, Marsilia had settled into a decades-long period of apathy - I'd call it sulking. She had only just begun to take an interest in things going on about her, and as a result, the hierarchy of the seethe was restless. Stefan and Andre had been loyal followers, but there were a couple of other vamps who hadn't been so happy to see Marsilia up and taking charge. I'd met them: Estelle and Bernard, but I didn't know enough about vampires to figure out how much of a threat they were.

The first time I met Marsilia, I'd kind of admired her... at least until she'd enthralled Samuel. That had scared me. Samuel's the second-most-dominant wolf in North America, and she and her vampires took him... easily. That fear had grown with every meeting.

"Not to be argumentative, Stefan," I said. "But she's bug-nuts. She wanted to create another of those... those things that Andre made."

His face closed down. "You don't know what you are talking about. You have no idea what she gave up when she came here, or what she has done for us."

"Maybe not, but I met that creature, and so did you. Nothing good could ever come of making another one." Demonic possession isn't a pretty thing. I inhaled and tried to control my temper. I didn't succeed.

"But you are right. I don't know what makes her tick. I don't know you, either."

He just looked at me, expressionlessly. "You play human very well, driving around like Shaggy in your Mystery Machine. But the man I thought you were could never have killed Andre's victims like that."

"Wulfe killed them." He was making a point, not defending himself. It made me angry; he should feel the need to defend himself.

"You agreed to it. Two people who had already been victimized enough, and you two snapped their necks as if they were nothing more than chickens."

About that time he got angry, too. "I did it for you. Don't you understand? She would have destroyed you if she'd known. They were nothing, less than nothing. Street people who would have died on their own anyway. And she would have killed you!" He was on his feet when he finished.

"They were nothing? How do you know? It wasn't like you had a conversation with them." I stood up, too.

"They would have had to die anyway. They knew about us."

"There we disagree," I told him. "What about your vaunted power over human minds?"

"It only works if the contact with us is very short - a feeding, no more than that."