Murphy didn't waste time arguing with Constanza, nor did he intend to play mind games with Lady Midnight. He knew himself best. He understood that his current insight was built on gathering information and intelligence, as well as experience from another world. Without those advantages, he wouldn't be any more shrewd than the Vampire Dukes.
And the woman before him was a heavyweight in every sense of the word.
One of the Blood Ancestor's three children, she had been a key figure in bringing about the "Night of Godslaying." After the Blood Ancestor fell, she founded the Blood Spirit Court and secretly manipulated the world's changes for thousands of years. Even amid the catastrophe that destroyed the world, she had managed to save her forces with a masterful sleight of hand—and still found time to have a pure romance with a young man.
After arriving in the new world, she quickly distinguished herself among the vampires, was invited to join the Department of Mysteries, and swiftly rose to second-in-command. She took part directly in many forbidden experiments, sensed the presence of the Blood Ancestor's power, and persuaded Fator to experiment alongside her. Then her luck ran out, and one misstep left her in a deathlike slumber for a thousand years.
Yet even in that desperate situation, she had laid three fallback plans in the months before the crisis erupted: the Callumites, the evil god Dagon, and the revival program. She had also struck a deal with Murphy's predecessor, that mysterious will of the Underworld, and accurately predicted that the Creator's successor would appear in the next era. She'd left all sorts of guiding clues behind to build herself some "reputation."
If Murphy hadn't had his own way of doing things, if his personality weren't the exact opposite of Constanza's, then