Hard Bitten - Chloe Neill [126]
Remarkably, she did as she was told. I could finally see her eyes—which were wide, her irises almost completely silver. She wasn’t running the show—she’d been drugged.
I’d had it wrong. Again.
I looked up at Tate. “You’re controlling her with V?”
“Only partially. I assumed you’d come calling when you figured out the connection between Mr. Cermak and me. When the police report was accessed, I received an alert. In the meantime, I thought we might amp up the drama a bit. I understand Ms. Desaulniers was quite a warrior; I decided to test V’s effects on a woman already known to be skilled. Does it make her a better fighter? A worse one? As a former researcher, you must appreciate my approach.”
“You’re crazy.”
Tate frowned. “Not even a little, unfortunately.”
Celina hopped off the corner of the desk and walked along its length, trailing a fingertip across the desktop. I kept my sword trained on her, and one eye on Tate.
“You said you were only partially controlling her with V. How else are you controlling her?”
He just sat there and smiled at me—and in that moment I felt the telltale prickle of magic in the air. But not the mildly irritating stuff Mallory and Catcher threw off. This was heavier—oilier, almost, in the way it suffused the room.
I swallowed back a burst of fear, but solved another bit of the puzzle. “You added the magical binder to the V.”
“Very good. I wondered if you and yours would discover that. Call it a signature, of sorts.”
“What are you?” I asked, although I knew part of the answer: he wasn’t human. I don’t know why I had never been able to feel it before, but now I knew it was true. The leaden magic he was throwing off was nothing like Mallory’s or Catcher’s.
Frowning, he sat forward and linked his hands on the desktop. “At the risk of sounding incredibly egotistical, I am the best thing that’s happened to this city in a long time.”
Was there no end to this guy’s ego? “Really? By creating chaos? By drugging vampires and putting humans at risk?” I pointed at Celina. “By releasing a felon?”
Tate sat back again and rolled his eyes. “Don’t be melodramatic. And you’ll recall Celina took the fall for the drugs. Very tidy how that wrapped up. The least I could do was reward her a bit—here in the privacy of my own home, anyway.”
I guess he’d been in on the plan to fake Celina into a meeting at Street Fest—and to make a confession. She confessed because she knew Tate would let her off the hook; the confession served Tate by “solving” the V problem. I glanced over at her. She seemed to be completely unaware Tate was talking about her. She’d stopped moving at the side of Tate’s desk and begun drumming her fingers nervously across the top. It looked like the V was beginning to kick in, to give her that irritating buzz.
“Frankly, Merit, I’m surprised you don’t appreciate the tremendous boon that V offers to vampires.”
“It makes you feel like a vampire,” Celina intoned.
“She has a point,” Tate said, drawing my gaze back to him. “V lowers inhibitions. You may think me callous, but I believed V would help weed out the less agreeable portion of the vampire population. Those willing to use V deserve to be incarcerated.”
“So now you’re entrapping vampires.”
“It’s not entrapment. It’s good urban planning. It’s self-selection for population control. I understand you aren’t susceptible to glamour. Doesn’t that make you different? Better? You don’t have the same weaknesses. You’re stronger, with better control.”
I swung the katana in Celina’s direction. “Make your point, Tate.”
“Do you know what kind of team we could make? You are the poster girl for good vampires. You save humans, even when the GP would seek to bring you down, to punish you for your deeds. They love you for it. You help keep the city in balance. And that’s what we need, if there’s any hope for vampires and humans to survive together.”
“There is no way in hell that I’d work with you. You think you’re going to walk away from this? After setting up vampires and contributing to the deaths—to the endangerment