The cardinal vampire had been pacing for ten minutes already, and it was nearly five in the morning, which meant we only had about an hour before sunrise. Every minute that went by without him speaking felt like a ratcheting up of tension.
And yet . . . I felt strangely calm. Seeing Jesse almost die had snapped me out of my pregnancy-news frenzy, forcing me to be present for the current crisis. Shadow, whom I loved, was missing, and we were facing an unspecified threat from some very bad people. I could put the whole abortion thing aside until we found Shadow and stopped the Luparii.
Shut up. I could.
“You left town without telling us,” Dashiell finally ground out, though he didn’t bother to slow down or even look at me. Yeah, I think we all knew who he was talking to. “You invaded another cardinal vampire’s territory. You left the bargest with a human. The Luparii, who are back in my city, stole the bargest back and broke Petra Corbett out of prison. And now they’re all loose in my city.” He finally stopped, turning to glower at me, and spat out, “You irresponsible child.”
Jesse sat up straighter, about to defend me. I reached for his hand under the table and squeezed it to stop him.
“I made a mistake,” I said to Dashiell. Despite the two-hour nap with Jesse, I was more exhausted than ever. “I’m sorry.”
“What was so important that you had to run to Colorado without telling anyone?” Kirsten broke in. She seemed more surprised and curious than anything else.
“It’s a personal matter,” I said.
They really didn’t like that. “Your personal matter, or Allison Luther’s?” Kirsten pushed.
I didn’t answer. Dashiell looked like he was ready to yell again, but Will, who had been fairly quiet thus far, stepped in. “This is getting us nowhere,” he said in his calm voice. Will looked like a lovable sitcom dad, and he was the most chill werewolf I’d ever met. But that only meant he was calm for a werewolf. “I understand there should be consequences for Scarlett’s actions, but I suggest we put a pin in that until Shadow and the Luparii can be found. Agreed?”
He gave Dashiell a pointed look, and the cardinal vampire probably realized the same thing I did: with the Luparii running around LA, Will and his pack had the most to lose.
“Agreed,” Kirsten said readily.
“Fine.” Dashiell didn’t exactly sound gracious, but he’d managed to stay just shy of begrudging.
“Are we sure they’re even still here?” Kirsten asked. She looked like she couldn’t decide whether or not to be hopeful. “They’ve got Petra and Shadow. They put us in our place. Why not take their toys and go home?”
“Shadow is not a toy,” I said through gritted teeth. Now Jesse reached over to squeeze my hand. “She’s basically a person.”
Dashiell let out a little disgusted snort, but didn’t deign to respond to my outburst. “That is possible,” he said to Kirsten. His gaze moved to Jesse. “Mr. Cruz? What was your impression?”
“Well . . . they definitely wanted to kill Scarlett,” he said, shooting me an apologetic look. “I got the sense that it was a priority.”
“But what about now?” Will asked. “Would they stick around just to kill her?”
His phrasing made me bizarrely indignant, but Jesse answered before I could. “I can’t really explain it right, but I got the sense that there was a bigger play happening. It’s something that Sabine was looking forward to. It was like . . .” He paused for a moment, searching for the words. “Like they were working through a list, and Scarlett needed to die before they could move to the next item. Whatever their plan is, I don’t think Scarlett’s supposed to be around for it.”
Everyone looked at me—Kirsten and Will, at least, seemed worried. But I was still enjoying my strange new sense of calm, so I just shrugged. “Happy to disappoint.”
“Even if that’s true,” Will said, “there’s nothing to suggest the next part of their plan doesn’t take place back in France. They could be cutting their losses.”
“It doesn’t have to be France.”
Dashiell’s voice was uncharacteristically low, like he was thinking out loud. Since no one else was willing to question him, and I was already in trouble anyway, I said, “What do you mean? Isn’t that where they live?”
“Some of them, yes.” He stood up, as if to pace again, but instead he wandered over to the patio door and stared at whatever was inside. Without turning to face us, he said, “There’s something you all should know. After the first time the Luparii came to my city, I thought it prudent to have my contacts in Europe gather more intelligence on them. As it turns out, our previous information had become . . . outdated.”
Jesse and I looked at each other. Somehow I didn’t think Dashiell meant the Luparii had shriveled up and died in the last three years. “Are they still a big-ass family of werewolf hunters?” I asked, because sometimes my mouth just does things.
Now Dashiell did turn and come back to the table, though he stood in front of his chair and leaned his fists on the edge. “Yes and no,” he answered. “The Gagnon descendants still run everything—and it sounds like this Sabine, at least, is one of them—but they have been accepting additional witches into their ranks. Witches with different or no specialties. The Luparii name has come to encompass the entire . . . organization.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kirsten nodding. “My aunt has heard similar rumors,” she reported. “They are very secretive, though, and Scandinavia isn’t considered part of the Luparii territory.”
“Not yet,” Dashiell muttered. Ignoring Kirsten’s startled look, he finally sat down in his chair. “The Luparii have been growing in size over the last few decades, and they now have large cells operating in Portugal and Romania, as well as their main base of operations just outside Paris. They have become less a family and more of a . . . brotherhood.”
“Hang on, what are we talking about here?” I said. “Is this like the Mafia kind of brotherhood, or some kind of witch fraternity?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of the Freemasons,” Jesse told me. “But evil.”
“More evil?”
The others ignored us. “My aunt said they were even employing vampires now,” Kirsten put in. “Why do they care so much about expansion?”
Will, who had been texting—probably to warn his pack about the Luparii—looked up and added, “Especially since the wolves have been staying out of Europe.”
I wondered for the first time how dialed in he was to other werewolf packs. Wolves are territorial by nature, and communication across large distances is difficult in the Old World, because we don’t exactly trust the Internet or phone lines, and we’re not allowed to bring any outside humans into the know. Did Will keep in touch with other alphas anyway? I’d never thought to ask.
“What about the Luparii’s ideology?” asked Jesse. Out of all of us, he was probably the most accustomed to dealing with organized criminal wackos. “Has that changed, too?”
“I’m not sure,” Dashiell admitted. “I know that they are still devoted to the eradication of werewolves. Still, as Kirsten said, I don’t understand why they’ve been making a point to expand.”
We were probably all thinking it, but it was Will who said, in a carefully level voice, “You didn’t think it was necessary to tell us about any of this?”
Dashiell didn’t seem offended, which surprised me a little. He spread his hands. “In truth, I thought we were done with the Luparii. Three years ago, when I negotiated with Aldric, their leader, I was unaware of the organization’s scope. By the time I found out that they had grown to a much larger force, we had already made the deal to keep Shadow in Los Angeles and allow Petra Corbett to take the fall for the nova wolf. And I haven’t heard a word from them since then.” He shrugged, looking at me. “What is that phrase you’ve been using? ‘Not my circus, not my monkeys’?”
I pushed out a breath, nodding. I could tell by the way he hadn’t shot down Will for questioning him that Dashiell felt a little bad about not warning us. I couldn’t find it in me to blame him, though, even though he’d come down on me hard about going to Colorado. Dashiell had been alive for over a hundred years, and he could theoretically live forever. Of course he knew big-picture stuff he didn’t tell us about.