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

“If Belle Morte did not wake the servants of our good mother, then who did?” Merlin asked.

I had a moment of insight. I don’t get them often. I debated on whether to act on it, or ask Asher’s opinion first. Then I thought, to hell with it. I was tired. I’d fed, but the healing had taken more than the feeding had given back. I was too tired for games.

“Do you want her to wake up, Merlin? Or do you fear her waking up?”

He sank back into that stillness again. “I do not know how to answer that question.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Then I will not answer it.”

“Are you a flunky of the vampire council, is that it?”

“Merlin has been outside the circle of inner power for centuries,” Asher said.

I nodded. “Yeah, you guys filled me in on the limo ride here. He grew so powerful that he was given a choice of giving up his territory, or being killed. He gave it all up, and vanished into the mists of time. Jean-Claude thought there might be a place for him here on American soil.” In my head, I thought, and the next time that Jean-Claude offers refuge to someone this fucking powerful, he better run it by me first. I’d made that clear in the limo. He hadn’t even argued with me.

“If you’re not working for the council, then who are you working for?” I asked.

“If I said myself, would you believe me?”

“Maybe, maybe not, don’t know, try me.” My hand was on the gun again.

“Why touch your gun?”

“Because, I think if you don’t want to answer the question that you may try vampire powers again. It just depends on what you’re more afraid of.”

“I am not afraid of your little gun,” he said.

“Probably not, but you are afraid of Mommie Dearest, aren’t you?”

He actually licked his lips. The gesture gave me hope that his façade was cracking, and it made me give his eyes a full glance. Which was what it was supposed to do. He tried to roll me in that moment of eye contact, and he might have done it, except that Asher and Damian touched my bare skin at the same time. It was enough to distract me, make me look away.

“There must be more to the two of you than I have been told,” Merlin said, and his voice was back to emptiness again.

“He is her vampire servant,” Adonis said, “it isn’t rumor.” His voice wasn’t empty, more hollow with an edge of anger.

“But that is not what saved her,” Merlin said. He looked to Asher, and I saw what I had rarely seen, one vampire look away from the gaze of another. Most vamps’ power, like my own necromancy, protected them against vampire gaze. They couldn’t roll each other—but Merlin could, or Asher feared he could. Scary bastard.

“You were the weakest of Belle Morte’s master vampires. That vampire would not have helped save anyone from my gaze.”

“I have never met you before,” Asher said, his hand still on my arm, and his gaze averted from the other vampire.

“I have been closer to you than you know, Asher.”

I did not like the direction this talk was taking. “Look, we brought you back here to get answers, not the other way around.”

“And what answers do you think that I want from you?”

“You wanted to know how powerful we were. I don’t know why, but you did. You wanted to test us. Why?”

“Perhaps I have sought long and hard for another master I could call my own. Someone who was powerful enough to make me feel that he was worthy to follow.”

“You’re Merlin, not Lancelot,” I said.

“Lancelot was fiction, as is most of what you know today about me, and the ones I served.”

I blinked in his direction. “Are you saying you’re the Merlin, as in King Arthur and the Round Table?”

“Are you saying I am not?”

I started to argue with him, but decided not to. It was no skin off my back if he wanted to pretend to be the real Merlin. I wouldn’t even point out that Merlin, himself, was a late addition to the legend of Arthur. It was his delusion. Obsidian Butterfly thought she was an Aztec goddess. She’d been powerful enough that I hadn’t burst her bubble either.