Greywalker - Kat Richardson [129]
“You speak of a crisis upon me, but I see none beyond your annoying pricking.”
“Carlos is the only one of your people who could recognize the problem, and I imagine he stopped looking out for your interests after Seville.”
He raised a cool eyebrow, though I saw the momentary flicker of his corona.
I smiled a little.
He laid the weight of his gaze on mine and tried to push me. The ache in my chest distracted me enough to wrench my line of sight aside just as he spoke. “Tell me what you know and how you came to know it.”
I slipped into a shooter’s concentration no wider than a bullet hole at twenty yards. I could not afford to miss this mark, nor slide under his control. “I’ll tell you and give you the solution, but only for a price.”
Edward ground his teeth. “You defy me? You bargain with me?” Surprise and outrage broke his pressure against me.
I centered my stare back on his and kept my voice low. “I came to help you, so you would help me. This room is filled with your enemies. If you harm me—a defenseless daylighter under Carlos’s protection—they will have a cause against you to rally around, a match to the powder of their hatred and fear. They will attack you on every side. If you survive, your cat’s-paws and your assistants and supporters at TPM will vanish. You’ll lose your ability to control your empire in the daylight world and in the nightside as well. That’s the real key to your power. That’s why they came here tonight. That’s why they helped me and then kept the mud stirred up. They want your head. I can’t stop Alice and her cronies, but if you listen to my proposition and let me leave alive and unharmed, anyone who hasn’t already made up their mind will have no reason to join her against you, and the rest will back you for their own good. Carlos cannot fight you, but he won’t help Alice if you give him no cause. So, are you angry enough to cut your own throat while you cut mine, or do you want to listen a moment longer?”
Edward put his drink down and propped his elbows on the table. He rested his chin on his upraised hands and stared at me. The smolder level went up and so did the albedo of the Grey, thickening to snow-light cut with brilliant neon. Silence hung.
“For a woman, you have the most amazing pair of balls.” He stretched one hand toward me and glided the back of his fingers down my arm.
A jolt of something that was not pure revulsion shot through my belly. It fought with the urge to gag, but my disgust was still stronger than his casual manipulations. I twitched my arm away from him and leaned back into my chair. “I’m not on the menu, Edward.”
He withdrew his hand and re-propped his chin. “I’m intrigued. So speak your piece. I promise you no harm. Tonight, at least.”
I nodded and began. “There is a sort of necromantic battery sitting on top of a nexus of the magic power grid—whatever you choose to call it—in this city, diverting and storing energy. It’s become overloaded and unstable as nitroglycerin. Its previous masters are all dead, and it’s come back into the possession of its ghost. He’s a powerful and vengeful spirit and I know he can’t be trusted. He won’t be kind in his use of this power, or careful.”
“Carlos told you of this?” The temperature around us dropped and the air thickened.
I barked a derisive laugh, though doing so hurt. “I found it myself. I only asked him to identify it. He wants nothing to do with it,” I fudged. “But it has to be dismantled—and soon—by others with power, or it will collapse. The sudden release of this power on the creatures of the nightside would be like dumping an unrestrained overload of the Hanford reactor into Seattle’s power grid in one blast.”
Edward’s face was stone. “And we would all burn like Hiroshima.