“You knew where he was, even to the room number, and you said nothing?” Louis-Cesare demanded. “Do you wish to trap him or not?”

“Not!” I responded heatedly. “That’s Mircea’s thing. I want to kill him. I think I’ve been pretty clear on that. But I’m only going to get one shot at it, and I’m not exactly prepared right now. That was the point of coming here in the first place, to get some decent weapons.”

“The Senate has weapons!”

“And I’m sure they’d be thrilled to turn them over to me. Besides, they don’t have the kind of stuff I need. Or if they do, they aren’t likely to admit it.”

“That was why you did not want me with you. You were planning to buy illegal weapons!”

“Until Benny got dead, yeah. That was the plan. The plan now is to steal them.”

Olga’s massive forehead was wrinkled as if thinking was causing her pain. When she spoke, though, it was clear that she’d followed the conversation well enough. “This Drac you speak of, he killed my Bienvior?”

“Yeah. He had mages with him who did the dirty work, but he was in charge.”

Olga nodded, as if that was all she’d needed to know. “If he here, I kill him for you,” she said simply.

Louis-Cesare and I exchanged a glance. “Um, Olga…” I stopped, both because I had no idea how to explain how unlikely that was and because the crew had arrived. At least, I supposed they were behind Lars, but his bulk filled the doorway, making it impossible to tell.

“Take down wall,” Olga told them, pointing to a spot beside the doorway. “Then we kill things.”

What we found after hacking through two walls of solid rock was a warehouse. But it wasn’t anything like I’d expected. Stretching in a long line down either side of a rough-hewn corridor were tiny, shallow cells, barely more than indentations in the walls. Most were empty, but a few were not. And one caught my attention immediately because, although it was at the end of the corridor, the scent emanating from it was unmistakable.

The cell was empty, but the scent was strong. Too strong for the occupant to have been gone long. The trail led to a door, which even before I reached it I realized was heavily warded. I cocked my head, filtering out the sounds coming from behind me, and concentrated. Yeah, I’d thought so.

I ran back to the other end of the corridor, dodging trolls and demons and the assorted creatures they were releasing from the cells, and grabbed some of the larger chunks of rock from around our newly created doorway. Running back the way I’d come, I managed to avoid Louis-Cesare, who was standing in the middle of the corridor watching me with a bemused expression, and reached the door again. I heaved the rocks at the warded door, every nerve ending singing at me to hurry.

The wards held firm, as I’d assumed they would, but the guard on the other side, who had been jingling change in his pocket and humming off-key, suddenly came to attention. He might not be able to hear through the door, but he could certainly hear the strident alarm that had gone off when the wards were tested. “Come on,” I said under my breath. “You can handle this. Probably just some stupid slave got loose. Did you double-check the last door you closed? Because if not, and you go for help, you’ll catch hell. Come on in and check it out on your own. Then no one needs to know.”

I don’t have the kind of mind-control abilities that vamps do, but if I concentrate really hard, I can manage to plant a basic idea in someone’s head. It doesn’t have the compulsion behind it that Mircea’s thoughts do—no one has to act on any of my little doubts, but people often do, anyway. Especially if they sound like something they might have thought up themselves.

Louis-Cesare came up behind me, but for once he refrained from saying anything. A moment later the wards fell—I could feel tendrils dissipating like smoke about us—and the door opened. The guard wasn’t a complete idiot. As soon as he heard the cacophony that a dozen trolls make when ripping apart steel doors, he tried to shut the heavy metal slab again, but my foot was in the way and a second later, my hands were around his throat.

“You have got to be kidding,” I said in disgust after riding him to the floor. Underneath me lay a human, plain and simple. I sniffed him to be sure, but there was no doubt about it. “A norm? What, are they nuts?”

It shouldn’t have surprised me, since a vamp would have been unaffected by my mind games and a demon would have thrown them back in my face. But I still had trouble believing that the Black Circle had left a norm on guard duty. They’re even more contemptuous of regular old garden-variety humans than most mages. They call them dims and, for the most part, ignore their existence.

Louis-Cesare managed to squat elegantly alongside the norm. “He could be booby-trapped.”

I shook my head. “No.” I’d seen such things before, mages using humans like trip wires, with a spell designed to detonate if the norm’s heart began to race or at some other indication that trouble was near. But I knew the signs, and this one had none of them. He smelled of fear and sweat, of socks that had been worn too long without laundering and of the sausage and onion sandwich he’d eaten earlier. I could tell what shampoo he used and that he’d massaged Ben-Gay onto his left calf today, but there was no stench of dark magic around him. In fact, there wasn’t any that I could detect anywhere, which was more than a little odd in a Black Circle stronghold.

“Look, t-take whatever you want. Just d-don’t eat me, okay? I had garlic for lunch,” he said, so panicked that the whites showed all the way around his watery gray eyeballs.

“Good. I love it when dinner’s already seasoned.” I snatched the creep to his feet. “One chance. What’s going on here? And I’ll know if you lie to me.”

“Th-the auction. It’s almost over, but you can probably get in on a few lots if you hurry.” He looked at something over my shoulder and what little color he had went on vacation. “O-or just take what you want. Anything, really.”

I glanced behind me to see that Olga had joined Louis-Cesare, with a crowd of assorted creatures behind them. One of the smaller trolls had something by the hind foot that I eventually identified as a were cub. It had taken me a minute because the full moon was several weeks away, yet the small snarling creature was in full wolf mode and currently attempting to bite through the troll’s tough skin. The troll cuffed it hard enough to send its head cracking against the wall, leaving it dazed and slightly more subdued.

I looked at Olga. “No eating,” I said, hoping she’d agree since there wasn’t a lot I could do about it if she didn’t. “We have to find out what’s going on.”

She had a muttered conversation with the troll, who scowled through his beard and defiantly bit off one of the were’s toes. The small creature howled in pain and started thrashing about even more, while Olga sent troll boy face-first into the cave wall. She slammed a foot down on him when he bounced off, putting her considerable weight onto his torso, and he let go of the were. Crazed with pain and fear, it began slashing at anything within reach until Louis-Cesare grabbed it by the scuff of the neck and knocked it out.

I turned back to the human, only to find that he’d passed out on me. I sighed and gave him to Olga, who was steadily grinding the troll’s face into the hard cavern floor. “I’ll be back,” I told her, and she nodded pleasantly.

The tunnel let out onto a much larger one, which in turn led to what looked like a naturally formed cavern, about a story below the mouth of the tunnel. Crude stone steps had been carved into the side, leading down into the gloom. A few lights—some magical, others more prosaic—lit the place in patches, especially the small, cleared area serving as the auctioneer platform. I could see even in the shadows, but was soon wishing I couldn’t.