She’d joined the Pythian Court only recently, coming out of retirement to return to the organization she’d belonged to many, many years ago, before her sister was chosen as Pythia instead of her. Gertie had gone on to have an illustrious career and to train my predecessor, Agnes. Hilde, on the other hand, had eventually gotten married, popped out a couple of kids, and had several careers of her own. And then retired, never mentioning to a soul along the way, including her three husbands, that she’d never really left the court at all.
She’d become a fail-safe, one of only two currently living, who were former acolytes selected by the Pythias to take over the court in case of emergency. And since an emergency might include an attack on the court and anybody supporting it, the fail-safes’ existence had to be kept quiet. Nobody knew who they were or even that they existed at all until needed, and it was up to the fail-safes themselves to decide when that might be.
Since the whole supernatural world was currently at war, and the Pythian Court in London had recently blown up, and the hotel and casino we were currently calling home had been attacked by an army of dark mages, Hildegarde had finally decided—you know, this looks a lot like an emergency.
And unlike Abigail, the other fail-safe appointed by Agnes, Hilde no longer had young kids, or even young grandkids, to go home to when the immediate threat was over. I suspected that she’d been a little bored, messing about with her garden when she’d always led a very busy life. And then we came along, a court, as she saw it, in serious need of straightening out. Hildegarde had found her calling.
I still wasn’t sure if I was happy about that or not.
But I was pretty damned sure that Rhea wasn’t. I doubted that Hilde had noticed, because Hilde rarely noticed anything less subtle than a bat to the head, but Rhea was not on board with some of the changes she’d been making around the court. Not on board at all.
“What now?” I sighed.
“I am sorry, Lady,” Rhea said, dropping a curtsy. And damned if she didn’t make it look elegant even in jeans. “But I think you should hear this.”
“Hear what?” I asked, only to have Hilde’s booming laughter float across the room from where she was holding forth over a display case.
I looked at Billy; he looked back at me. “You’re Pythia, kid,” he reminded me.
As if I could forget.
I pulled up my big girl panties and went off to see what had Rhea looking flushed and bothered.
“No! You do not age the knife,” Hilde was saying to a cluster of the older girls while waving around a wicked-looking weapon. “It is metal. It will take a very long time—and thus a great deal of your energy—to do it any harm.”
“Then what do you do?” One of the oldest, who was maybe twelve, asked. Her name was Belvia, because magical families hadn’t gotten the memo about modern names, but everybody called her Belle. Some of the other girls looked scared or intimidated, which wasn’t surprising considering the array of weapons in front of them and everything they’d been through lately, but she was grimly determined.
I felt my own face fall into a frown.
No kid should have to look like that.
But Hildegarde regarded her approvingly. “You age the hand holding the knife.” She thought about it. “Unless it’s fey, in which case you’re probably better off aging the knife. Those bastards live forever.”
“Hilde,” I said brightly. “Can I see you for a minute?”
Hilde didn’t curtsy, but she agreed affably enough. “When I come back, we’ll discuss magical restraints and how to get out of them,” she promised the girls.
I led her out of the shop, to the cracked sidewalk in front where several of my vamp bodyguards were trying to look unobtrusive. Armani suits and Gucci loafers were working against them, as were the chiseled, model-worthy profiles. Mircea—the master vampire who’d loaned them to me—normally worked in diplomacy, and he’d discovered centuries ago that his own good looks were a useful tool. So, he often Changed handsome men.
I’d once asked him why he bothered, when a glamourie could make anybody look good. He’d just laughed and said yes, but that men who were attractive from birth knew it and had a confidence that was virtually impossible to teach. They also ventured in where angels feared to tread, because they were used to getting away with things.
I’d also asked him why he never Changed women, but didn’t get an answer there. As the one-time diplomat to the North American Vampire Senate, Mircea’s secrets had secrets. I’d found out the hard way that I actually preferred when I didn’t know what he was up to.
The guards smiled at me, and one stubbed out a cigarette before they disappeared inside. Not that it mattered; they could hear us perfectly well from there or from a couple blocks away. But that sort of thing was intended to put people at ease.
They shouldn’t have bothered; Hilde struck me as the type who’d never been ill at ease in her life—and who never let anyone else take the lead.
“You’re going to tell me the initiates are too young,” she began, before I could get a word out.
“Because they are! And they’ve just been through a trauma—”
“Exactly so.” She looked at me kindly, but with resolve. “It’s been made very clear that our enemies will not take their youth into consideration, other than to view them as easy targets. They have to be able to defend themselves.”
“We have to defend them. It’s our job—”
“And what are we to use to accomplish this job, hm?” she demanded, her head tilting. “There’s you—and you’re always away, battling gods; there’s me, and while I am certainly formidable, I’m not as young as I used to be; there’s a bunch of vampires, God help us, who’re good enough for the simple things, I’ll grant you, but—”
“They helped!” I said, remembering the Battle on the Drag, as it had come to be known, the recent assault on our home base by several hundred dark mages.
“Yes, they did,” Hilde agreed. “But it was your ability with the Pythian power that saved the day. We must have more adepts.”
“We have Rhea—”
Hilde harrumphed. I stared. I’d never heard anyone actually do that before.
“Something might be made of that girl eventually, it’s true, if she has anything of her parents in her,” Hilde said. “But right now, she’s almost as ignorant as the rest of ’em. They need training, not coddling.”
She sounded like somebody else I knew. John Pritkin was a war mage who had helped to protect me when I stumbled into this crazy new life—well, eventually. Our first meeting had not gone well, and neither had a bunch of subsequent ones. But when he finally figured out that I was serious—that, untrained as I was, I was trying, goddamn it—he got on board.