“It helps in detecting lies,” I said. “But she wasn’t lying.” I paused. “I don’t think. After a while, when you can use your nose to be certain, you get a feel for what lies look like.”
Adam agreed with a nod. “If she were going to lie, she wouldn’t have been so careful with her words.” He pursed his lips. “We can smell blood,” Adam said slowly. “There was something . . .”
“On her neck,” I said, tapping the side of mine just below my jaw. “A cut, I think. It had definite edges. But if it was damage from whatever happened in the seethe on Friday . . . I wouldn’t expect a werewolf to still be showing the effects of battle. How quickly do vampires repair their wounds?” It was a rhetorical question. Vampires could heal very quickly as long as they could feed.
“Or a goblin, either,” agreed Larry. “A vampire? If one is feeding regularly and the wounds are not severe, a vampire can heal very quickly. Hours rather than days.”
“She could have come to us if she needed help,” I told them. “Our pack—or even you, Larry. She can teleport.” And so could Stefan. I didn’t know if Larry knew about that.
“Yes,” said Larry. If he hadn’t known, he was concealing his surprise very well. “Though I don’t think that she’d have come to me. If she and Stefan are not here, it’s because they don’t want to be here.” He raised a palm at my indrawn breath. “There are many reasons that could be. Let’s add that to the ongoing mystery.”
“Hostage,” said Adam grimly. “Marsilia spoke like a hostage in a terrorist propaganda video. Very careful with her words.”
“Or maybe,” I added, “as if someone who could tell if she were lying would interrogate her.”
Vampires didn’t have a supernatural ability to sense if someone was telling the truth the way werewolves could. But our local seethe did have a magical artifact that used blood, pain, and magic to detect lies. I rubbed the palms of my hands together in memory.
“Hic sunt dracones,” I murmured involuntarily.
Larry looked up sharply.
“What?” Adam asked, his glance falling on me and then Larry.
“Here there be dragons,” translated Larry. “Why do you say so?”
I started to brush it off, and then decided there was a possibility it might actually mean something.
“After I hit the spell web, I had a . . . I think it was a dream.” I told them about it.
“Who is Daniel?” Larry asked when I was done. “There isn’t a Daniel in your pack or in the seethe.”
“You didn’t see the ghost in Stefan’s house?” Cats could see ghosts—for some reason I thought that meant that goblins might, too. “Daniel was one of Stefan’s people.” The rest seemed a little complicated, so I simplified it. “He was caught up in vampire politics—not his fault—and”—I stole Larry’s phrase—“returned to the grave. Now he haunts Stefan’s house, though so far I’m the only one who can see him.”
“He was sitting on the couch while we were fighting the spider,” Adam told me.
I didn’t know what that meant. Had Daniel gotten stronger? Or was Adam picking up abilities from me the way I could sometimes borrow his voice of command?
“You saw him, too?” Larry asked me. “At Stefan’s house just now?”
“Before, during, and after both fights,” I said. “Though he didn’t come upstairs with us when we left.”
“He was fresh in your mind when you hit the spell web.” Larry’s voice said that the conclusion was obvious.
“Yes,” I agreed, remembering opening my eyes to see Daniel’s face close up. “Very fresh. I guess seeing him in the dream was more expected than not.” Or maybe he’d been pulled into it with me.
“Was it just a dream,” mused Larry aloud, “or was it something else?”
“Her fur had frost on it, and her breath was cold,” Adam said. “As if she’d been running in an arctic forest for a while.”
“Dragons, lions, and wolves,” said Larry.
I cleared my throat. “Dragons, lions, and Wulfe, I think.”
“Does that mean something to you, Larry?” Adam asked, because the goblin king had stiffened.
“Other than a fair warning,” Larry said after a second. “It’s just . . . You know how vampires, the old ones, are given Names?”