That stopped both of them for a moment.

“Are you sure it was members of the Brotherhood who attacked you?” Rick asked slowly after he and Janice exchanged a couple of doubtful looks. “Did the vampire tell you it was members of the Brotherhood? Perhaps he was mistaken, or you misunderstood.”

“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.