What the War Made #2
He looked at me. “A long time ago, you took something from me. I took something from you in return. I have always believed those transactions balanced.” He paused.
“I no longer believe that. And I think the people in this room deserve to understand the full history of the disagreement before they choose sides in it.”
“There are no sides,” I said. “There is one person in this room who has been engineering the deaths of civilians for three years, and there is everyone else.”
“There is one person in this room who has been calling himself the infrastructure of this city while bleeding it for a century, and there is everyone else.” He said evenly.
“What you built,” he continued, to the council now rather than to me, “you built on a model of debt and obligation and the threat of consequence, and you called it stability, and for a while it was. But the man sitting at this table is not the same man who built it. He is distracted. He has brought a human into the centre of his operation, a human with a blood type that has drawn three separate assassination attempts in weeks, and he calls it protection.” The smile came back.
“I call it what it is. A weakness he cannot see because he is inside it.”
I stood up and the room temperature dropped.
“You have no right to tell lies in this chambers, Marcellus.” I replied.
Marcellus looked at me with ancient eyes and did not sit down.
“Or what, Draco?” he said, very softly. “You'll do what you did the last time? Scar my face and call it a lesson?” He turned his head slightly, showing the council the long, pale seam that ran from his left temple to his jaw.
“The scar was a warning. You are about to learn that I was being generous.”
Greer pushed back from the table and her chair hit the wall.
Pryce said, “This is not the place—”
Marcellus moved.
He came across the table and his first strike was aimed at my throat, a pressure blow designed to interrupt the blood flow to the head rather than crush, and it was technically excellent.
I caught his arm at the extension, used his own momentum, and put him into the far wall with the full weight of what I was behind it.
The wall cracked.
Marcellus came off it and he was not performing anymore. The face that had been gracious and reasonable and politically calibrated was gone, and what was underneath it was very old and very hungry and had been patient for a very long time.
“There,” he said.
The five attendants moved.
Rowan took two of them before they cleared the wall. One of the attendants went down hard and stayed down. The other managed to drive an elbow into Rowan's jaw, which Rowan acknowledged by breaking the elbow.
Marcellus came at me again and grabbed me by the lapel of my suit.
He was faster than he had any right to be, which meant he had been feeding well and recently.
“You cannot win this in this room.” The hand tightened. “Stand down. Take the distributed governance arrangement. Keep your house and your contract and whatever is left of your dignity, and we can end this without anyone else dying.”
I looked at him.
I had known his face when it had been a teacher's face, when I had been younger and less finished and he had been the oldest vampire I had encountered who had not immediately tried to own me.
That was a long time ago.
“You taught me that patience was a weapon.” I said forcefully.
“Draco—”
“You taught me that the most dangerous thing an enemy could do was make you move before you were ready.” I tightened my grip on his wrist. “You also taught me that the second a man starts negotiating in the middle of a fight, he's already lost the fight.”
I broke his wrist.
The sound it made in that stone room was not subtle.
Greer was fighting one of his attendants.
She had gone full wolf at the top half, which she almost certainly would regret later from a clothing perspective, and the attendant was a vampire who had not prepared for the speed of an alpha at close range and was losing the exchange badly.
Blood on the table, on the stone floor, on the wall where Rowan had put the first body.
Aldric was bleeding from somewhere above his eyebrow, which meant one of Marcellus's attendants had reached him before the light went active.
Sable was pressed against the eastern wall with both hands up, not fighting, which was either cowardice or strategy and I didn't have the attention to determine which.
Corin was on the floor like the coward he was.
Marcellus got his feet under him and he was bleeding from the wrist.
“Enough,” he said.
The two at the standoff with Rowan went still. Even the fae light dimmed slightly, which meant Aldric was either responding to the command or losing blood faster than I'd estimated.
Marcellus straightened his jacket with his unbroken hand.
He was not looking at me with hatred. That would have been simpler.
“I did not come here to destroy you,” he said.
“You came here to take my city.”
“That is the problem, Draco. It has been your city.” He looked around the room, at the council members bleeding and crouching and pressed against walls.
“Look at this room. Every faction represented.
All of them bleeding because two vampires who share more history than either of us is comfortable admitting cannot find an arrangement that doesn't end here.”
“The arrangement ended when you started selling contaminated blood to children,” Greer said, from the floor.
Marcellus looked at her. “I regret the collateral,” he said. “I do not expect that to be sufficient.”
It was the most honest thing he'd said in the room.
“Leave,” I said.
He turned back to me.
“You were my best student,” he said. “That is not nothing. Even now.”
He gathered his attendants, those who could walk, and he walked through the western door that he had entered from, and the blood ward on it sealed behind him as if it had always known he was leaving.