“No, they were members, all right. It was confirmed for me later.”
“I don’t understand,” Janice said, frowning. “Why would they attack a Zorya?”
I glanced at Magda, now really curious as to what Frederic had told them about the events in Iceland. He knew full well that I was a Beloved, but he didn’t appear to have mentioned it.
Magda gave a tiny little shake of her head, obviously just as baffled as I was.
“That doesn’t matter now. What does matter is the fact that you are blindly following the precepts of an organization without any justification.”
“We’re not mindless sheep, you know,” Janice replied quickly. “The Brotherhood has been cleansing evil from the mortal world for almost five hundred years. It could not have done so without a need for such acts. There is precedent.”
“Precedent,” I scoffed. “That’s the blind following the blind if I ever heard it. Tell me, do you even know why the Brotherhood started going after vampires?”
“Er . . . no,” Rick admitted. He looked a bit shamefaced. “I’ve done quite a bit of research on the Brotherhood, but haven’t gone that far back in the records yet. We only joined a few years ago, after Janice had a bad experience with an evil being.”
“Not a vampire, I assume?” Magda asked.
“No, it was a necromancer, a woman who was trying to raise an undead army,” he said in all seriousness.
Magda and I gawked at him.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “An undead army? Like of zombies?”
“Liches, from what I understand,” Rick answered.
I blinked at Magda. She blinked back, saying, “This is so . . . so . . .”
“Hollywood bizarre,” I finished for her.
“Like a B-movie scriptwriter gone insane,” she agreed.
“Regardless,” I said, giving myself a mental shake to remove the Night of the Living Dead images from my brain and focus on more important things. It was easier said than done. “Well, hell. I’ve forgotten my point.”
“Vampires are good; Brotherhood is crazy,” Magda said absently. “What exactly is a lich, do you know?”
I ignored her attempt to sidetrack me. “The point is that you have no real reason for believing that vampires are the evil undead deserving of merciless slaughter, and I for one refuse to be a part of any such organization.”
“But you are a part of it,” Janice pointed out.
“Only until I can find someone to give the Zorya stone to.”
“You were a part of the incidents in Iceland,” Rick said, frowning. “You were involved in all those deaths.”
“I told you, there were only a couple of people killed, and they attacked us-”
“The vampires wiped out the entire Icelandic branch!” Janice interrupted. “There were at least fourteen people altogether that your friends slaughtered.”
I stared in openmouthed surprise for a moment before saying, “They’re not all dead! Two were held by the Icelandic police, although the Zenith is now dead, and it wasn’t a vampire who shot her. The others are in the custody of the vamps, but they’re not dead, either.”
“How do you know?” she asked, and for a moment, I was speechless.
I looked at Magda. “Christian wouldn’t kill the reapers, would he?”
She looked somewhat doubtful. “I don’t think he would. Not without cause. Did he say anything to you about what would happen to them?”
“No,” I said, frowning as I cast my mind over the events of the last couple of months. “They don’t have fourteen people, though. They only caught a couple of them: Mattias and Kristjana, and those two people who Frederic brought.”
“Then it would seem that we aren’t the only ones who can be accused of falling victim to blind faith,” Janice retorted. “You don’t know that the vampires are treating the Brotherhood, your own people, well at all. You only assume they are, but you don’t know for a fact what has happened to them. For all you know, they could be dead.”
I wanted to protest that point, but I had an uncomfortable feeling that any explanation I made would sound just as feeble as their mindless attacks. “You’re right. I don’t know for certain that they’re not dead, but I highly doubt that it’s so.”
“They didn’t hesitate to kill others,” Janice said, her eyes calculating. “Why should they stop at doing so to those captives?”