by Karen Chance
“Making me an enemy.”
“Yes.”
He finally left the door and approached, but wisely didn’t attempt to touch me. Another man would have tried to hold me, to comfort or to control. Or to figuratively pat me on the head, telling me by his every action not to be such a drama queen.
Mircea was smarter than that.
He just stood there.
But it hurt nonetheless, staring up into that beautiful face, wondering if I knew what was going on behind those eyes at all. Sometimes it felt like there were two halves to Mircea’s personality, too. The human, who I loved and laughed with and trusted, because he’d always been there for me, for almost as long as I could remember. And the vampire—cold, calculating, and assessing—who told me only what he wanted me to hear and, I strongly suspected, manipulated the ever-loving shit out of me.
And whose real feelings I didn’t know at all.
If anybody had a split personality, it was Mircea.
“You’re upset; I understand,” he said, dark eyes grave. “But you can rest assured that Dorina is not a threat to you.”
“I must have missed that part!”
“I meant to say that tonight was . . . atypical. For one thing, Dory was seriously injured in the attack, and it made Dorina uneasy—”
“Injured how? Mircea, I sent her to Long Island. She shouldn’t even have been here.”
“She has a way of turning up whenever there’s trouble. You two share that ability.” He smiled slightly.
I didn’t.
“I went to see her after I left you,” he added. “And put her to sleep. She should have been out for the duration of the evening—”
“So what happened?”
“Someone interfered. Someone who knew she was on edge, and might be . . . impulsive. Someone who has surveillance over almost everything that goes on in this house, and therefore knew she might have a grudge against you. Someone who has the power to override my suggestion—”
“Someone?”
“The consul,” he admitted. “Dory isn’t the point. She was merely a tool. The consul is trying to separate us, to drive a wedge—”
“I thought she was trying to kill you! That’s the rumor. Did you know that? Have you heard? Jules thinks they’ll be taking bets on it next! And don’t take this out on him,” I added, because Mircea’s eyes had narrowed. “He was only repeating what everyone knows. Except for me, apparently!”
“She doesn’t want me dead.”
“Oh no. She just gave you the most dangerous job on the planet for kicks! And you took it and never said a word—”
“It was only decided today. When should I have told you?”
That had been a little sharper, and I was glad for it. I wanted to ruffle him, wanted to break that perfect control. That was the vampire part of him, when I wanted the other Mircea, the passionate man with the flashing eyes and the terrible sense of humor and the honest emotions, the man who sometimes emerged when he forgot to be the senator.
“So you were going to tell me about it?” I said evenly. “We were going to talk?”
“Yes, as I told you earlier.”
“Like we talked about the consul? You’ve known about that for—I don’t even know. But a long damn time! You must have. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What would have been the point?”
“The point?” I stared at him.
“This is politics, Cassie. The usual court intrigue. It isn’t something the Pythian power can help with—”
“This isn’t about the power! This is about—damn it, Mircea! One day you tell me I’m your wife, that that’s what this means—” I jerked aside my collar, showing off his marks. “And the next, you tell me I don’t deserve to know anything about your affairs unless it’s something the power can help with!”
“That isn’t what I meant—”
“Then what did you mean?”
He did touch me then, gripping my shoulders. Only to run his palms down my arms to take my hands. It soothed me, even though there was no power behind it—I didn’t know what I’d have done if there had been. But Mircea didn’t need it; his presence was usually enough to calm me. But tonight, that might have worked against him; anger made it hard to think, and suddenly, I was clearheaded.
“I told you the truth,” he said. “She doesn’t want me dead. But she has noted my increasing power base. You are part of that, Dorina is part of that, Louis-Cesare—I have been drawing people to me, powerful people, not intentionally, but it could be misconstrued that way. And the more antagonism she feels from any of that number, the more she worries.”
“So you were afraid I’d do what?” I asked incredulously. “Tell her off?”
“No, of course not. But your emotions are closer to the surface than ours. You have a good poker face when you choose, but you can’t be on guard all the time, nor would I wish you to. You shouldn’t have to live like that, constantly watching everything you say—”
“Not constantly. Just when I’m around her.”
He shook his head. “But she has spies everywhere. And they notice more than expressions—heartbeat, breathing patterns, a thousand tells a human would never see. And in your case, I needed to be especially careful. She only moved against her own master when she obtained an ally. She didn’t duel him alone; Anthony helped her—”
“So now she thinks we’re planning to do the same?”
“Thinks, no. But she wonders. She fears. Her antagonism toward you is born of that fear, although I doubt she would call it such. It has been so long since she feared anything, I think she has forgotten the taste. She wanted me to control you for the senate, but feared I was growing too close to you, and began pulling me away. Giving me work on the other side of the country, keeping me busy. I was to charm but not to be charmed, to control but not to care.”
I blinked, slightly taken aback. Because that was the most honesty I’d gotten from Mircea in . . . maybe ever. But it didn’t change this.
“Then how can you ask me what’s the point?” I said. “She’s dangerous—”
“All consuls are dangerous.”
“Forgive me if I think that someone two thousand years old, who I saw turn into a writhing bunch of snakes once, who I saw strip the flesh off a guy in about a second flat with a sandstorm she conjured out of freaking nowhere is a little more dangerous than most!”
But Mircea didn’t seem moved. “She isn’t. Her abilities are impressive—after such a time, of course they would be. But other consuls can do as much. It is her plotting that has kept her on top for so long—”
“And this is supposed to make me feel better?” I moved away because his touch was soothing and I didn’t want to be soothed. I didn’t want to be distracted. I wanted answers.
He sighed, and ran fingers through his thick, dark hair. “No. But the fact is that she needs me—”
“And when she doesn’t?” I rounded on him. “When you return from Faerie a victorious general with a loyal army behind you? What then?”
And I actually saw him blink.
Goddamn it!
I closed my eyes. Sometimes I honestly thought that every damn person around me believed I was an idiot. Maybe Jules was right; even vamps still tended to trust their eyes over anything else. And to the eyes, I was a skinny blonde with flyaway curls and freckles, who frequently fell over her own two feet. But that didn’t make me a fool!
And even if I had been, how much brain power did it take to add two and two?
God, I just . . .
I sighed, feeling the anger drain out of me, but not because of anything Mircea had done. But because I was just too tired to do this now. The adrenaline of the fight was wearing off, and the power I’d been forced to exert, little though it had been, had negated the shot in the arm I’d gotten from Jules’ whiskey and Ro
sier’s snack packs. I felt almost as bad as I had when I first woke up, and on top of all that, my feet were killing me.
“I do not take you for a fool,” Mircea said as I opened my eyes to look around for a chair. “I never have.”
“Are you reading my mind?” I asked sharply.
“Your face. I doubt I could pick up on even surface thoughts tonight. After the last two days . . .”
“Was that why you couldn’t stop her?”
“Possibly. But I know Dorina’s mind. I all but constructed it myself. I should have been able to prevent her from even entering the room, just as I should have noticed her tracking me to the basement. But I failed, from fatigue or from being opposed—”
“Then the consul wanted her to kill me? She’s decided that she needs you, so I’ll do as a target?”
“No.” He shook his head. “The demon alliance you forged is the foundation of all she hopes to accomplish. We cannot fight the fey on our own, just as the demons cannot on their own. But together, we have a chance.”
“Unless she’s decided that Adra doesn’t have a choice, and would ally with her anyway. She may have needed me to forge the alliance, but she doesn’t need me to keep it.”
“But she does need you as Pythia. You have no heir, and even were you to name one, there would be no time for her to be trained.”
“Then why is she siccing a pissed-off dhampir on me?” I asked, dropping into a chair by the fireplace. It was hot, this close, but the flames did more than the candles to dispel the gloom. They splashed Mircea’s face with light when he joined me on the opposite chair and sat forward, the handsome face earnest and open and tender and concerned.
And damn, he was good!
“My guess is that she didn’t realize that you were exhausted,” he said. “She assumed you would be able to deal with Dorina easily, by freezing time around her if nothing else. But a short fight would have cemented your distaste for her—and for the one who hid her from you.”
“And are we going to talk about that?” I asked steadily. “Or is this going to be another bullshit session where you distract me and I let you and nothing gets accomplished?”
His lips quirked, and he ducked his head. Mircea had always found my tendency to call a spade a spade funny. Maybe all those years of having to choose his words so precisely made hearing something blunt amusing.
Or maybe it was something else entirely, because who the hell knew?
“I will tell you the truth,” he said, looking up, suddenly somber. “About Dorina, and a great many other things. If you will listen?”
Chapter Thirty-nine
“Long ago, I made a mistake,” Mircea told me. “You know part of it, how my naïveté and thoughtless words helped to get my family killed. But I never told you the rest.”
“Why?”
“Fear. Unlike the consul, I know it only too well. I have tasted it every day, for centuries.”
I shook my head. “I know that’s a lie. You’re not afraid of anything.”
“I wish that were true.”
He stared into the fire. “Shortly after I was cursed, I attacked a young woman. The bloodlust was new to me; I hadn’t learned how to control it then. How to feed without harming, how to take enough to stave off the madness when I felt it growing and was not near a willing donor. It overtook me, and if we hadn’t been interrupted, I would have killed her. As it was, I had taken enough to return to my senses a short while later, and when I did . . .
“It terrified me, what I had become. I didn’t know what to do. I had no master to teach me, nothing to go on but legends that informed me that I was now a monster, doomed to live as an outcast or to risk hurting everyone I had ever loved. I believed that I had to get away, before the same thing happened again, this time to Elena.”
“Elena?”
“Dorina’s mother.”
Her mother, I thought. Of course, she’d had a mother. “So you left her?”
He nodded. “I gave her some money, or had Horatiu do so,” he said, talking about his longtime servant. “I couldn’t face her. The fear was clawing at me, the certainty that, if I saw her eyes, I wouldn’t go, and I had to go. I believed that, utterly and completely. If I didn’t go, I would kill her, and I couldn’t bear that.
“I fled. In time, I settled in Venice. It was an open city then, a refuge—of sorts—for masterless vampires. A place where we would not be hunted. Years passed. I learned to control myself, to navigate this new life, and decided to return. I didn’t know about Dorina then; she was born after I left. But I wanted to do what I hadn’t before, and give Elena the choice. To be with me as I was, or to make a new life for herself elsewhere.”
“Did you?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t have the chance. A war had broken out, the first of a string of rebellions against the senate after the death of the old consul. Some of the fiercest fighting was in my old homeland. I wasn’t allowed to go there until it was resolved, and if I had been, young and powerless as I was, I would almost certainly have been killed.
“Finally, the rebellion was put down. I went home. And discovered that I had a child, one that must have been sired while I was undergoing the Change. I was cursed, as you know, not bitten, and it takes a few days to complete the transformation. It is only in that narrow window that a dhampir can be created, which is why there are so few of them.”
“It must have been . . . a shock,” I said. Sort of like all this. That Mircea had had a mistress wasn’t surprising; he’d been a king’s son, after all. But this didn’t sound like a passing fling. He’d gone back for her, even before he knew about the child.
She must have been special, this girl.
“Yes, but not a happy one for Elena,” he agreed. “The townspeople viewed dhampirs as monsters. Dorina was seen as an abomination, only slightly less so than the one who had sired her. While I was gone, Elena had been pressured by the local people to give the child up, or to face exile herself, and she had nowhere to go. She also didn’t know what kind of life Dorina would have in such a place, among those who openly despised her. She therefore allowed herself to be persuaded to give her to a passing Romany band, who valued dhampirs for their protection on the road.”
I blinked. “She gave away her child?”
“Briefly. She almost immediately regretted it, and tried to find the band again, to retrieve her. But they had already traveled on, and her efforts were fruitless. She needed someone with greater resources for a larger hunt, and as it happened, my brother was on the throne. . . .”
“Which brother?” I asked, getting a sinking feeling.
“Vlad,” Mircea said, his eyes rising from the fire for the first time, full of grief and remembered fury. He didn’t have to tell me what had happened; it was there on his face.”
“He killed her? Just for that? For asking for help?”
“He believed her story to be a lie, that she was trying to fake a family connection to get money out of him. And that she was taking a jab at his own low birth—his mother had been a Gypsy. So yes, he killed her,” Mircea said, his voice rough. “In the most horrific way possible, killed her while I was away, killed her and dumped the body, I didn’t know where. And then tried to kill me after I returned and uncovered the truth.”
“But you didn’t kill him.” It wasn’t a question; I’d met Vlad myself once, many years later. Still as crazy as ever, but very much alive.
Well, in an undead sort of way.
“No. I fled, having found Dorina and needing to get her to safety. I was far too weak to challenge him and his army at the time. But before many years had passed, his fortunes changed, and I returned. And was about to take my revenge when he told me . . .”
“Told you what?” I asked, because he’d trailed off.
Mircea abruptly got up. If he was human, I’d have said he was nervous, and ne
eded to move. But in his case . . . I didn’t know what to think in his case.
“He didn’t even try to run when I caught up with him, in the barn of a friendly noble. He had been waiting for me, he said, sitting there on a mass of hay bales, dressed in the clothes of a peasant, which he’d been forced to adopt to avoid the enemies who were searching for him every bit as hard as I was. But you’d have thought he was dressed in velvets, seated on a throne of gold. His arrogance was as strong as ever, his belief in himself and his destiny unshaken. He laughed when I told him why I’d come.”
“He was always crazy,” I pointed out.
Dark eyes met mine. “But not stupid. People often conflate the two. They shouldn’t.”
He went to the bar to get a drink, and tilted the decanter at me, but I just shook my head. I watched him pour, wondering what he wanted it for. Mircea rarely drank, and usually then only to keep me company. Again, it almost looked like he was nervous, and wanted to give his hands a job.
“I had grown stronger over the years, and wealthier, with powerful friends,” he told me. “Vlad demanded money for a mercenary army, and a contingent of vampires to ensure that they overwhelmed his enemy’s forces. In return for helping him to regain his throne, he offered a trade.”
“A trade?” I said, in disbelief. “After all he’d done, what could he possibly think—”
“You owe me that much.” The hate on Vlad’s face was palpable.
“I owe you? You can say that after—”
* * *
“Yes, I can say that after. After being thrown away as a boy, given as a guarantee of a treaty Father had no intention of keeping. After being beaten—and worse—once he broke it. After seeing my younger brother whore himself to get out of the Turks’ dungeons, the same ones I lived in for years, until the screams of the damned no longer woke me at night—yes, I can say it after!”
* * *
