by Karen Chance
“I haven’t lost anything—”
“Except your mind!”
“—except my patience! Go home, Cassie. This doesn’t concern you!”
“Doesn’t—” I cut off, because my brain was having trouble even processing that. And then it managed. Oh, yes, it did. “Mircea, what the hell—”
The hand over the mouth thing resumed, and I was abruptly jerked further back into the trees. Which would have made me even more furious, except that somebody was coming. Somebody who was maybe three feet high, and would have had me wondering why a child was running around on its own at this time of night. But the crazy VampVision gave me a glimpse under the hood as it hurried up the road toward the house where Mircea had been standing.
And that . . . was no child.
“What is that?” I demanded, when Mircea once again let me go. But only after the creature had knocked quietly on the thick front door of the house, and been let inside.
“One of the reasons you’re not needed here,” he said shortly, and started off.
Until I shifted him back to me, and used the Pythian power like a rope to bind him to a tree. I would have used it to drag him back home, kicking and screaming, but there was nothing to keep him from coming right back again. And in a contest over who would tire first, me or a first level master . . . well, there was no contest.
“I want answers,” I told him, as he struggled.
The cords of my power tightened, in response to the huge amount of force he was exerting, and held. But how long that would remain true, I didn’t know. This wasn’t a new ability; I’d been training with Gertie all month, and her idea of an easy session usually left me gasping and winded—and in possession of some novel way of using my Pythian abilities that I’d never even dreamed about before. But I wasn’t used to most of those yet, having had no need for actual combat all month, so it was a relief when he finally stopped struggling.
“I need you to let me go.”
There was power behind the words, at least as much as there had been in the bulging muscles a minute ago, enough to knock my head back.
And to piss me off.
“I need answers! Trade me,” I said shortly, because that was the one language all vamps understood.
And I guess Mircea was in a hurry, because he didn’t hesitate. “My wife is in that house.”
What a surprise. “And?”
“And I need to see who she’s meeting!”
I just crossed my arms and looked at him.
“You know that ability you have,” he snapped. “To page through someone’s life like reading a book?”
I frowned. “What about it?”
“I discovered it on my own, last night. After we got back, I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping.”
He lifted an arm as if to run a hand through his hair, a familiar gesture, but the bonds restrained him. He snarled a bad word in Romanian, but didn’t struggle again. That was the thing about Mircea, and one of my main worries in all this: he was a damned quick study.
“I was thinking about Elena,” he added, “and, suddenly, there she was. Memories of her, hundreds of them, cascading like pages, but they weren’t my memories. Some I wasn’t in and had never even seen before.”
So, I wasn’t the only one learning new skills, I thought grimly.
Even worse, this particular one was freaking advanced, to the point that I’d only done it once myself, by accident, when helping a friend who had been hit by a combat-level spell. It had turned him into little more than a lump of flesh, with no mouth to speak, or ears to hear any response if he had. But the Pythian power had put me in contact with him, nonetheless.
And it had been just like Mircea said: a cascade of memories like flipping through the pages in a book, but controllable, unlike those freaking items in the Pythian museum! I’d been able to slow things down, get a good look, decide what I wanted to view next. And, apparently, so had Mircea.
“What did you see?” I asked.
“That’s just it; I don’t know! I came across this memory, from the period after I left Wallachia, but Elena. . . She and her visitor weren’t speaking Romanian, or any other known language, and that thing—did you see that thing?” Dark eyes blazed into mine.
“I saw.”
“It’s some kind of fey, at a guess, but my people don’t know which. I couldn’t get a good enough look at it to describe it properly. It never takes off that damned hood, and all I could see—”
“Were teeth,” I finished for him.
“If you want to call them that! Huge, slavering—he took my child!”
“What?”
“Elena gave him my child—Dorina! Why would she do that?”
“I . . . don’t know,” I said, caught off guard by the question. And by the raw emotion on Mircea’s face. He was as handsome as always, but he looked frankly deranged. His hair was limp and straggling in his face; his color was high and his eyes were glittering.
“I want to know what happened,” he told me savagely. “I want to understand. I don’t understand anything!”
“You understand that Dorina was all right,” I pointed out. “She’s fine now, so—”
“Is she? Who knows what was done to her, where he took her? Elena said she was giving her to the Romani!”
“But she ended up with them—”
“That’s not the point!”
He was straining against his bonds again, hard enough to make me feel it, but I didn’t think he noticed. “Try to understand, Cassie. I don’t know anything, not anymore. Who my wife was, where she came from, what happened to my daughter—none of it!”
“And that’s all you want? To understand?”
“I don’t know what I want anymore,” he said, and there was a thread of something I had rarely heard from Mircea in his voice: pure honestly. There was confusion there, and anger, and fear, and guilt. And probably a hundred other things I might have been able to parse better, if I hadn’t been standing in a freezing forest in the middle of the night! But the honestly sparkled through everything else, like snow in moonlight.
“You’re not going to try to interfere?” I pressed him. “Or talk to her? Or attack anybody?”
His expression suddenly changed, from frantic desperation to a much more familiar outraged haughtiness. “Of course not!”
“Says the man who chased an entire party of fey across a countryside, after shifting me into a tree!”
“That was different.”
I thought about stabbing myself in the eye, but I didn’t have anything handy. I thought about stabbing him—there were plenty of branches around, I should be able to find a suitable stake—but it wouldn’t do any good. Not unless I planned to kill him. The only thing—the only thing—I could think of that might help was giving him what he thought he needed. Which right now, was information.
Maybe, if he figured out the mystery of his wife, it would be enough.
And if not, I thought grimly, I could always stake him later.
“If you breathe so much as one word to her—” I began, and Mircea’s eyes lit up.
Damn it, my life would be easier if he was dumber!
“I won’t.” It was earnest.
“Or be seen,” I added, “by anyone.” Because that outfit would be hard to explain away.
“I won’t be seen. Or do anything else to hurt the timeline. I just want to know what’s going on!”
I closed my eyes, and wondered if I was going crazy, too, because I was seriously considering this. But what was the alternative? Endlessly chasing him through time? And, at the rate he was going, in a week he’d know more about the Pythian power than I did!
“Betray me, and I’ll lash you to your bed for the next century,” I told him fiercely.
“You know I would never betray you, dulceață.” He genuinely looked hurt.
I rolled my eyes so hard that I thought I saw the inside of my skull. And, not for the first time, seriously wondered about my taste in
men. Then I let him go.
And, immediately, he went sprinting for the house again!
“Goddamnit!”
I shifted in front of him, back beside the shuttered window. But to my surprise, I didn’t have to do anything else. Because Mircea stopped there, and peered through the gap in the wood, just as he’d been doing when I arrived.
After a bemused moment, so did I.
The interior of the house was simple but neat, just a square of rough wooden boards, with no ceiling to interfere with the herbs hanging from the rafters. A bed, a spinning wheel, a chest, and a table comprised the furniture. And a few shelves stacked with wooden bowls and a pretty ceramic pitcher made up the housewares.
Along with what looked like a brand-new wooden cradle, which was currently empty because the child wasn’t in it. She was in a woman’s arms, Elena’s arms. For a second, I just stared.
I don’t know why. I knew why we were here, knew who lived in the house, knew approximately what she looked like. I’d even seen her briefly, if only as a blur. But this was different.
She was beautiful, I thought. Really beautiful. Like a Renaissance Madonna or a painting of a dark-haired angel. She had huge, liquid black eyes, pale, almost luminescent skin, dark brown hair that rippled down her back practically to her knees, and a small, lithe body that looked completely incapable of what I’d seen her do.
Of course, she hadn’t done it yet, being months away from her date with destiny.
She didn’t look too happy, though, with dried tears on her cheeks and more in her eyes. I could see them only with the help of my borrowed eyesight, because she’d lit no candles. There was also no fire in the grate and no lantern in the hand of her visitor, who was pushing aside the baby blanket with a gnarled old hand that looked like it ought to belong to a monster.
But the touch was gentle, and the voice gruff but kindly when he said something. I couldn’t understand it, but not because of the distance. They were on the opposite side of the room, not that it mattered with vamp senses. But I didn’t know their language.
But despite what he’d said earlier, Mircea obviously did, judging by the way his hand clenched on the wall, hard enough to leave fingermarks in the plaster. After a second, I noticed an odd little thing sticking out of his ear, like a metal hearing aide, and did a quick check on his other side. Yeah, he had two.
I grabbed one and he sent me a look, but didn’t try to snatch it back. I put it in my ear, and then quickly jerked it out again because of the volume, which was head splittingly loud. I must have messed something up when I—oh.
A little ball on one end moved around, and seemed to control the sound. I fiddled with it until I was no longer in danger of bursting an eardrum. Then put the contraption back in place and waited for something to make sense.
I waited a long time.
“—for a price. You know how they are.” It was a metallic sort of voice, unpleasant and artificial, and with a vague British accent. But it was understandable. And judging from the fact that the hooded figure had just stopped talking, I assumed the device had been translating for him.
“They’ll tarry until I come? You were clear on that?” That was the translation for Elena’s voice, although it was nothing like her dulcet tones.
“I was clear,” the small creature said. And then the gnarled old hand was back, hairy and claw tipped, this time on her arm. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I don’t have a choice. Here, you must—” she broke off, looking up and clutching her child, as the sound of horse’s hooves came thundering up the road. A lot of them.
“Take her and go!” she said, thrusting the child into the creature’s arms.
“What about you?”
“I’ll hold them off until you’re clear—”
“And then what?”
“It doesn’t matter! My life is over; hers is just beginning. Now quickly—out the window!”
Mircea and I looked at each other, and then mutually shifted around the corner, just as the window was kicked out and a small figure emerged, with a baby sized lump under his cloak. He hit the ground and took off for the woods, but a familiar looking, white fletched arrow slammed into his back a second later. He hit down, face first; a baby cried, a startled intake of breath; and I grabbed for Mircea, knowing without being told what was about to happen.
Only to find out I was lashed to a damned tree truck!
Quick study, I thought grimly. And lassoed him back, with a thick coil of the Pythian power, halfway to the fallen child. It was almost a miss, he was moving so quickly, but the shimmering coil grabbed one ankle and I jerked, hard enough that he hit the ground. Just before a squad of fey warriors came running around the house.
Chapter Twenty-Six
There had to be twenty of them, and more inside judging by the sounds of combat. They were the same kind of fey we’d faced at Vlad’s city: Svarestri, their long, silver hair gleaming in the moonlight, like the blades they’d just unstrapped from their backs. I didn’t understand why at least twenty guys were needed against one, three-foot-tall, possibly dead whatever, but right then, I didn’t care.
All I cared about was Mircea, who was already breaking free, who was surging to his feet, who was still surging to his feet, who was surging some more and would be for a while, because I’d just hit him with a slowdown.
Fortunately, nobody noticed me doing it, but he was far too visible on the open ground for safety. All the Svarestri had to do was look down and a little to the left—and then one did. So, I hit him, too.
It would have made more of an impression on his companions, except that he was still on his feet, looking like he’d merely paused. And because the others were distracted. Somehow, the hooded figure was up on his own feet—or hooves, or whatever he had under there. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t concentrate on it, being too busy shifting Mircea back to me, and preparing to shift us both out.
But the problem with vampires is that they’re damned tricky! Which is why I was left clutching thin air when he broke free of the time spell and shifted away. And he’d been smart enough to shift out of sight, meaning that I had to go find him before I could get us the hell out of there—assuming that I could.
I wouldn’t be willing to place any bets on that, after two slowdowns in a row. In fact, I shouldn’t even have been able to manage that last one, not after shifting all this way first. Why I wasn’t passed out on my face, I didn’t know, like I didn’t know where the hell Mircea was.
And then I did, when a familiar body came crashing through the side of the house.
What he’d been doing in there was a mystery, but maybe he’d heard a cry from Elena. If so, his ears were still better than mine. I couldn’t hear anything over the sounds of curses and the ring of sword on sword combat coming from a huge cloud of dust where the small creature had been standing.
To make matters worse, someone decided to throw a spell, which I guessed missed or was deflected. Because it hit the goat pen, destroying part of the fence, and leading to a stampede of small bodies through the clearing—including the part that I was currently using! And before I could get out of the way, the warning bells in my head started up again, letting me know that the timeline was currently imperiled.
Yes, I know, thank you, I thought savagely, crawling through a forest of tiny hooves—just how many goats did one village have, anyway? –and then through the ruined wall in the house.
And right back out again when somebody grabbed my leg and jerked.
I slammed whoever it was in the face with my foot, rolled over when they let go, and found myself staring up at Svarestri warrior. That would normally have had me pissing myself, but I was too angry right now. And since Mircea wasn’t around to take it out on, the fey got it, instead.
More accurately, he got shifted into the top of a tall tree, which he promptly fell out of, bouncing limb to limb to limb before disappearing into the forest. Because I can learn, too, Mircea! And then I flip
ped back over, only to see the bastard in question—
In the house again, fighting back to back with his former wife against a crap ton of Svarestri.
I scrambled to my feet, wondering why they needed so many elite fey warriors to capture one small woman.
Okay, maybe that’s why, I realized, as I finished taking in the scene. Half of the fey were already dead, and the other half were getting sliced and diced by a master vamp who was definitely not playing, and a crazed woman with a gleaming sword in her hand. It looked like she’d ripped it off one of the guards lying lifelessly on the floor, because it was fey, too.
Of course, how she’d done that when they were armed and she—presumably—had not been was an open question. But might have had something to do with the fact that she was moving so fast I could barely follow the motion. And that was with vamp eyesight!
And, suddenly, we were all out of fey, except for those in the yard, I supposed. Only a glance over my shoulder showed that the tiny man seemed to be holding his own as well, arrow in the back or not. At least, as far as I could tell, since the dust cloud left me mostly looking at fey heads, elbows and swords that flickered into view, here and there. I couldn’t see him at all, but the fact that they were still fighting indicated that he wasn’t dead.
Unlike I was about to be, because Elena had just leapt off a table at me, gleaming sword in hand.
I screamed, because that’s what I do when someone’s trying to murder me, and shifted onto the roof. Only to have a dainty looking fist punch through it a second later and grab my foot, trying to jerk me back down. And reminding me of her daughter more every minute, I thought, grasping hold of a few sheaves’ worth of thatch and then shifting her into the middle of the damned road.
That was about the time that I noticed the people—regular, peasant type people—
streaming out of the other houses with lanterns lit and pitchforks in hand. Some of them were running after the escaping animals, whose reflective eyes were catching the light, and glowing like fireflies in the forest here and there. But others were looking at us, including at me, probably wondering why a crazy woman was on the roof in the middle of the night.
