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“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 than 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 the 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 lycanthropy 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.