I hated to admit it, but he was right. I shrugged. "If I think on it, I'm sure I can come up with something."

"Would you, as you Americans say, frame us?"

I sighed, and let my hand fall away from the gun. "No, I guess I wouldn't."

"Then I say again, why are we here? What have we done to anger Jean-Claude?"

"You know exactly what you did," I said, "and why we're pissed at you."

"No, truly, Miss Blake, I do not."

"It's Ms. Blake, or Marshal Blake, to you."

He made a small gesture. "Ms. Blake, then."

"What would you have done if you had succeeded in rolling the minds of six Masters of the City?" Asher asked. His hair hid half his face, a golden dis­traction.

"I will not answer your question for you are not master here, nor power­ful enough to be te'moin."

"Fine, what he said."

Merlin looked at me. "What is that, Ms. Blake?"

"Don't make me repeat the question, Merlin, just answer it."

"I don't understand what you hope to gain by this little discussion, Ms. Blake. Truly, I do not."

"You tried to mind-fuck six Masters of the City, plus a half-dozen or more rulers of the local lycanthropes. Hell, we've got animals to call of several masters, plus human servants. You tried to bite off a great, big, bloody chunk, and you weren't master enough to swallow it."

"Merlin could have taken you all." This from Elisabetta.

I shook my head without looking at her. "No, he couldn't, or he'd have done it."

"What do you want from us, Ms. Blake?" Merlin asked.

"I want to know why you did it. Don't give me shit about wanting all your audience to enjoy the show. If you have truly been mind-fucking all the mas­ters at all the performances, then you wanted to know if you could take them all here tonight. I want to know, why?"

"Why what, Ms. Blake?"

"Why try to roll everyone? Why run the risk of insulting all of them? Why throw this big a gauntlet down? You're a master vampire. You're so damn old you make my bones ache just sitting there. Vamps like you don't make mistakes, Merlin. Vamps like you always have a reason for everything they do."

"Perhaps I do not believe that a human who has barely seen three decades of mortal life would be able to understand my motives."

"Try me. Better yet, try Jean-Claude. You said it yourself; when you speak to me, you speak to him."

He went very still then. I knew the quality of that stillness. I'd surprised him in some way. Stillness could be as telling on a vampire as a gesture on a human.

"Touche, Ms. Blake." He made another small gesture with his hands. "You will not believe that I did it only to make our production more enjoy­able to all."

"No," I said.

He did that hands-out gesture again. I was beginning to wonder if it was his version of a shrug. "Perhaps, after succeeding in city after city, I had sim­ply grown arrogant. Perhaps I truly believed I could do you all."

"I believe you're arrogant. I might even believe that you rolled the rest of the masters individually. I'm not sure on that one, yet. I've felt your mind; I won't say you couldn't do it, just that you might not have tried."

"Then why did I try tonight?" he asked.

I smiled. It didn't feel like a happy smile, more like that curl of lips when I'm pissed. "That's what I'm trying to find out, and what you keep avoiding answering."

"Am I avoiding the question?" he asked.

I nodded, and this time my smile was almost happy. "Yeah, you are."

"Perhaps I have answered it, and you simply do not like the answer."

"Perhaps you're trying not to outright lie in case Damian, or Asher, or one of the others smells or feels the lie. But you are definitely not answering the question completely."

"Do you truly believe that if I wished to lie in front of the people you have in this room, that I could not do it successfully?"

I thought about that for a second. I fought the urge to look at Asher. Damian played his hand along my shoulder. "I think you could, but not without using more mind power tJhan you want to use around me."

"And why do I not wish to use mind powers around you, Ms. Blake?" His voice held disdain, almost amusement. I wasn't insulted; his voice was like everything about him, practiced, calculated.

"Because you're afraid that Mommie Dearest will hear it, and pay a sec­ond visit tonight."

He tried for arrogant disdain, and made it, but I could taste die change in him. The faintest, thinnest taste of fear. "And who is Mommie Dearest?"

I stared very hard at that graceful line of jaw. I'd have loved eye contact, but didn't want to risk it. "Do you really want me to say her name?"

"You can say anything you like," he said.

I nodded, and found my own heart beating faster, my newly scarred hand clenched into a fist. "Fine"—and my voice was a little breathy—"you're afraid the Mother of All Darkness will show up again."

Did the lights grow a shade less bright, or was it my imagination?

"She is lost to us, Ms. Blake. You know nothing of her."

"She lies in a room that is underground, but high up. There are windows around the front of that room that look out upon a cave, or underground building. There's always firelight down below, as if whoever watches is afraid of the dark."

"I am aware that Valentina has been inside the room you describe, and lived to tell the tale. Do not seek to impress me with secondhand stories."

I was beginning to think that Merlin didn't know that I'd been in his head with her. Did he not know that I'd seen his memory of her coming out of the darkness? "Let's try another secondhand tale, then. I saw her in the shape of a great cat, maybe a type of extinct lion, bigger than anything that we have today. I watched her stalk you in a night where the world smelled of rain and jasmine, or something like jasmine. I mean, I don't know how long jasmine has existed as a plant; maybe my mind just calls it 'jasmine' because it's the closest smell I know."

I thought he'd gone still before, but I had been wrong, because now he went so still that I had to concentrate on his chest to make sure he didn't just disappear. So still, more still than any snake, still in the way that live things don't get. Still, as if he were willing himself not to be there anymore.

His voice was as empty as his body when he said, "You shared her mem­ory tonight."

"Yeah," I said.

"Then you know her secret."

"She's got a lot of them, but if you mean that she's a shapeshifter and a vampire, simultaneously, then yeah, I know that secret."

He drew a breath. A lot of them did that when they came back from that still-stillness. They drew a breath as if to remind themselves they aren't dead yet.

"But Ms. Blake, everyone knows that you cannot be both."

"The strain of vampirism that we have today is destroyed by the lycan-thropy virus, but maybe once it wasn't, or maybe it's a different kind of vam­pirism. Whatever. I know what I've seen."

"Musette brought some of the Dark Lady's cats to visit us," Asher said, "they were both, and neither."

"Yes, Belle Morte says the sleeping cats of our mother have woken to her call," Merlin said. "What do you think of that, Ms. Blake? Do you think Belle Morte has grown so powerful that the servants of the mother have woken to her call?"

"No," I said.

"Why no?" he asked. His voice was still empty, his body not moving much. He wasn't trying to play human now.

"Because Belle Morte doesn't have that kind of power."

"You have never seen her in the flesh," Adonis said, "or you would not be so quick to judge." He didn't sound happy as he said it, which was interest­ing. It was the first time I felt that he'd lost control of his voice.

I glanced at him. "She's powerful, but it's not the same kind of power as Mommie Dearest. It's just not."