Tempt the Stars

like trying to herd cats.
    “Obsessive, chattering cats,” Roger agreed, because I guess I’d spoken that last out loud.
    “But Jonas—the head of the Silver Circle—told me your ghost army was watching the Circle’s every move.”
    Roger laughed. “Did he, now?”
    “You’re telling me that wasn’t true, either?”
    “Of course it wasn’t true. I don’t like the Silver Circle, but the Black’s even worse. I wasn’t about to help them, but they kept insisting. They’d gotten the idea that I had several hundred ghosts lying about, which I suppose they thought was a waste since they were feeding them! So I made sure that rumors reached the Silver Circle to make them extra paranoid and give me an excuse for not catching much.”
    I stared at him. He sounded so blasé about it, like lying to the two most powerful magical organizations on earth was no big thing. “And your army—”
    “When people hear the term ‘army’ paired with anything, they tend to give it respect. Ask Tony.”
    “You lied to him, too.” It wasn’t a question.
    “Well, we couldn’t stay at the house,” he said peevishly, looking a bit annoyed. Like he’d expected me to ooh and aah over his accomplishments. I was impressed all right—that he’d lasted as long as he had. I was also coming around to Pritkin’s point of view—there was a damned good possibility Daddy was nuts.
    “Why couldn’t you stay at the house?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
    “Your mother outright refused. I told you, she prefers the woods, and anyway, she didn’t like Tony.”
    Imagine that.
    “And in any case, the bastard bunch of ghosts they have over there kept trying to savage Sam and Daisy! I had to get us out.”
    “So you faked the demon attack so Tony would exile you to the cottage,” I said, because of course he had.
    “Fire spell. You know how vamps are.”
    “—and then you booby-trapped the forest—”
    “Well, we had to grow it first.”
    “—and built those things so nobody would come out to spy on you.”
    “I’m less worried about the spying than the dying,” he said dryly. “If the damned Spartoi show up, I need something better than Tony’s lot to buy us time. Something even a god won’t expect. And I still had the specs for the homunculi from when I was with the Black Circle, so . . ” He shrugged.
    I sat there. I had about a thousand questions I wanted—needed—to ask, and this might be my only chance. Because if Mom was anything like Agnes, she wasn’t going to be happy to see me. I knew that, knew I needed to seize the opportunity while it was here, but I was having a hard time with it.
    “You . . . you lied about everything,” I said, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of this completely ordinary guy somehow convincing everyone—the Black and Silver Circles, Agnes, a master vampire,
everyone
—that he was a force to be reckoned with. When all he had were some junky robots and a couple of smart-mouthed ghosts.
    “I prefer to think of it as creative problem-solving,” he told me stiffly.
    “And you got away with it,” I said wonderingly. Because that was probably the most difficult part to accept.
    “You sound surprised.”
    “I’m flabbergasted,” I told him honestly. He smirked. “You should have been dead
years
ago.”
    The smirk faded. “Thanks,” he said sourly, switching the baby over to the other shoulder, since that one had been sufficiently drooled on. “But maybe one day you’ll learn, people are gullible. Often they’ll just believe what you tell them, if you sound confident enough—and if it’s something they like. They want to believe, so they do half the work for you.”
    “But . . . but the
Black Circle
,” I said, trying to impress on him the type of people he had been dealing with, since apparently he still didn’t get it.
    “The maxim holds true for crooks as much as anyone else,” he told me. “Maybe more so. They get so used to everyone being too scared to try to con them that they just assume you must be telling the truth.”
    I just sat there and looked at him some more. “And that army you kept promising? Wouldn’t they expect to see it, sooner or later?”
    “Well, yes,” he said, more quietly, because the baby had fallen back asleep. “That’s why we had the falling out. They demanded results and I . . . well, I stalled for as long as I could, pointing out that ghost recruitment is a little more difficult than the usual