by Karen Chance
“To a frightening degree at times,” he murmured, combing his fingers through my wet curls.
“I don’t try to be.”
“I know.”
We just stood there a while, and it felt really good. He was freshly washed, with his dark hair still damp and combed back from his face, and he was wearing a robe like mine. I guessed that either the suite had a second bathroom or, considering how the hotel manager had been pretty much genuflecting, they’d opened another room for him. Or possibly the entire floor.
Anyway, this was better. This was the best part of the date so far.
Not that that was saying much.
“Cassie?”
“Hm?”
“You can’t stay in the bathroom all night.”
“Why not?”
“It’s wet.”
“Don’t care.”
“It’s going to get cold.”
“Don’t care.”
“And you’ll miss dinner.”
I looked up, feeling a slight bit of hope creeping in past the utter mortification. “Dinner?”
“Dinner,” he said, and pulled me out the door.
Chapter Fourteen
We reentered the living room and I figured out what everyone had been doing over by the fireplace. Flames danced on a row of silver chafing dishes, which had been strung out along the hearth to keep them warm. In front of them was a picnic area, if picnics featured silk cushions, bone china, linen so white it gleamed and napkins tortured into little birds of paradise. There was a single rose in a crystal vase that reflected the firelight. It was lovely.
It was also less interesting than the contents of those dishes, which smelled heavenly. My stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since lunch and it had been a busy night. I knelt in front of the fire and picked up the first lid, happy and hopeful and starving and—
“What’s this?” I asked, perplexed.
Mircea looked over my shoulder. “Pan-seared foie gras with cherries and foie gras caramel.”
I put the lid back. Duck liver had never done a lot for me, no matter what they cooked it with. “And this?” I was staring into the second offering.
“Poireaux vinaigrette aux grains de caviar.”
I did a quick translation. “Leeks and fish eggs in vinegar?”
He grinned. “It sounds better in French.”
Yeah, but did it taste better? Door number three had crab and artichokes in Pernod, which would have been fine, except that I hated two out of the three. Door number four offered up more artichokes—must have been a sale—with gnocchi and herbed cheese. Door number five had more foie gras, this time stuffed into a duck breast. Door number six had—
“What is this?” I looked up at Mircea hopefully, because the stew had potatoes and onions and some kind of meat in a rich sauce and smelled awesome.
“Hossenfeffer. It’s one of the house specialties.”
“Hossenfeffer?” It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t—
“Rabbit stew.”
I looked up at him tragically.
“Is there a problem?” Mircea asked carefully.
“I used to have a pet rabbit,” I said, seeing Honeybun’s black eyes staring at me accusingly.
Mircea bit his lip. “This date isn’t going so well, is it?” he asked, half-amused, half-despairing. I recognized the look because I felt pretty much the same way.
“It’s . . . well . . . you know,” I said, and then realized I didn’t have anything else to say, so I shut up.
My stomach growled.
We regarded the last little dish in forlorn hope.
“You look,” I told him. I probably wouldn’t know what the hell it was anyway.
He leaned over and removed the lid, and some really wonderful smells steamed out. But I wasn’t going to get excited, not this time, because it was probably Bambi in shallots or Nemo with fennel or—
“It’s some kind of pork,” he told me.
That didn’t sound so bad. But then, neither had the others until I did a little translating. I moved closer and peered inside. And saw—
“It’s ribs and fries,” I said, in something approaching awe.
“Amish roasted pork loin with potatoes and apple-baked cabbage,” he said, reading off a little menu card I hadn’t noticed before.
“It’s ribs and fries,” I said, so happy I could have cried.
Mircea slanted me a glance. “It does look delicious. I believe I may—”
“Don’t even think about it.” I grabbed the dish and a plate and chowed down, while he watched with illconcealed amusement. He started on the rabbit. I tried not to notice.
The ribs were succulent and falling-off-the-bone tender, the apple-baked cabbage was a little sauerkraut in a hollowed-out apple that I pushed aside as the garnish it was, and the fries were the English kind, thick-cut wedges of golden potato that went great with fish but turned out to be pretty good with pork, too. And so was the wine, some Riesling or other that was crisp and fresh and tart on my tongue, and oh yeah . . .
This was more like it.
Mircea laughed, and I looked up. “What?”
“It’s merely . . . good to see someone enjoying their meal.”
“Bet you wish you hadn’t had that gourmet stuff now.”
Gleaming dark eyes regarded me over his wineglass. “You didn’t give me a choice. And I’m surprised you don’t care for that ‘gourmet stuff.’ I recall Antonio having quite a good chef.”
Yeah, till he ate him, I didn’t say, because we were having a nice dinner. “How did you end up changing that bastard anyway?” I asked instead. “I always wondered. I mean, he was just a chicken farmer, right?”
Mircea shook his head. “Not when I met him. He had inherited the farm, such as it was, when his father died, and used the money from its sale to move to Florence. There he became . . . I suppose you would call him the strongman for a small money-lending operation.”
“A thug, in other words.”
“As you say. But a thug with ambition. He eventually gained control of the business—”
“Imagine that.”
“—and under his hand, it grew considerably in size. By the time I met him, he was a man of some means.”
“That doesn’t explain why you changed him.”
“You might say that we had . . . complementary problems,” he said, refilling his glass with the red wine he preferred. He tilted the bottle at me.
I shook my head. “I’ll stay with this one. And what kind of problems?”
“In Tony’s case, it was the plague. The Black Death cut a swath through Italy every few decades in those days, and at the time it was raging in Florence. There was no cure; the only way to combat it was to flee. And Antonio tried, moving himself and his household to the country as soon as he heard.”
“But he got it anyway?”
“No, but several of his servants did and he was afraid he would be next. He therefore moved again—and again and again. But everywhere he went, it was already there or it broke out shortly afterward. He told me it was as if the plague was following him.”
I nodded. That sounded like Tony. He was paranoid even when he didn’t have a reason.
“He finally ended up in Venice, hoping to get a ship to somewhere without the disease. But he was told by the sailors he talked to that it was everywhere that year.”
“And he started freaking out.”
Mircea smiled. “To put it mildly. He was in a taverna, drowning his sorrows, when I met him. At the time, I was in dire straits myself—financially speaking. I had left my home with little some years before and had . . . someone with me for whom I was responsible. I needed money for living expenses, and also to allow me to avoid a certain first-level master who had decided to add me to her family—by force if necessary. She had tracked me to Venice, and I had narrowly avoided her twice in as many days. I wanted to get away; Antonio wanted to avoid the plague. We struck a deal.”
“He
gave you money and you Changed him,” I guessed. “Because vamps can’t get the disease.”
“Yes.” Mircea swirled his wine around. “He was the first child I ever made. It came as . . . quite a shock . . . when he threw in his lot with our enemies.”
“You thought him better than that?” I asked incredulously.
Mircea snorted. “I thought him smarter than that. I also thought it out of character.”
“Because it was a gamble.”
He nodded. “And Antonio doesn’t. Not with his neck, at any rate.”
I’d thought as much myself, more than once. Tony only liked to gamble when it was a sure thing. It made me wonder what he knew that we didn’t.
Mircea finished his meal and then lay on his side, a hand under his head and the other toying with his wineglass. “Why the sudden interest?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking about my parents and how Tony is probably the only person who could tell me much about them.”
“What about the venerable mage Marsden? He must know something about the former Pythian heir. I would be surprised if he hadn’t met her on occasion.”
“He did. But all he could tell me was that she was a charming young woman. As far as facts go, all I got was the standard bio stuff they’d give to a newspaper or something. Born Elizabeth O’Donnell, adopted by the Pythian Court at age fourteen, named the heir at age thirty-three. Ran away with Ragnar, aka Roger Palmer, my disreputable father, for reasons unknown, at age thirty-four. Died five years later in a car bomb set by Tony the Bastard. The End.”
“That is . . . somewhat terse,” Mircea agreed. “Surprisingly so, considering the Circle’s intelligence network.”
I shot him a look. “Has yours done any better?”
He grinned. “Now, why would we be checking on your mother?”
“Because you check on everyone?”
“It’s Kit, you know,” he told me mournfully, talking about the Senate’s chief spy. “I can’t do a thing with him.”
I ignored that for the bullshit it was. “What did you find?”
“Little more than that, I’m afraid,” he admitted. “Your mother was extremely . . . elusive. My people even had difficulty finding a venue for tonight. She rarely went out, and when she did, it was usually to small dinner parties of ten or twelve people, which wouldn’t have allowed you to see without being seen.”
“What about her background?”
“She was adopted by the Pythian Court from a school in Des Moines, one of those for magical orphans run by the Circle.”
I nodded; Jonas had said the same. And it wasn’t too surprising. The Circle ran a bunch of those schools, and not just for kids with no parents. They also locked up—excuse me, benevolently housed—kids who had families but who also had talents of which they disapproved—necromancers, firestarters, jinxes, telekenetics, etc. I assumed the orphans got out at age eighteen or whatever; the others . . . sometimes they never did.
It was something I was working to change, and not just because it was appallingly unfair to be locked up simply for the crime of being born. But also because if I hadn’t ended up at Tony’s, I might have been in one of those pseudoprisons myself. Nobody was afraid of clairvoyants, most of whom were assumed to be frauds, anyway. But the talent I’d inherited from my father was another story.
Having ghost servants who hung around, feeding off you and occasionally doing an errand or two in return, was seen as Highly Suspicious Behavior. Maybe because my father had refined it to an art form. According to rumors, he’d had his own ghost army, which he’d used in an attempt to seize control of the notorious Black Circle. The coup hadn’t worked and he’d ended up on the run, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d been powerful enough to try. And power like that would have gotten me put away real quick.
But my mother hadn’t had it. Which made me wonder what she’d been in for. “What was she in for?” I asked Mircea, who was savaging some poor bunny, apparently with relish.
He swallowed. “Nothing. Her records merely said that she was dropped off as an infant by person or persons unknown, with a note giving her name and birth date. The administrators assumed that a teenage mother had wanted to get rid of an embarrassing responsibility.”
“And the name?”
“There were no magical families by the name of O’Donnell in the area at that time. There were several in other parts of the country, but Kit found none who fit the requisite profile. He thinks the mother might have given the child the father’s last name, and that the father might have been human.”
I didn’t have to ask why that was a problem. Humans outbred the magical community by something like a thousand to one. Even assuming O’Donnell wasn’t a wholly made-up name to begin with, sorting through the number of possible human fathers would be—
Well, it wasn’t likely to happen. Not to satisfy my curiosity, anyway.
“Okay,” I said, moving on. “So the court finds her, probably because they keep a lookout for particularly strong clairvoyants.”
Mircea nodded and stole a fry.
“And then she joins the Pythian Court. And then the record scratches, at least according to Jonas.”
“And according to Kit. The Pythian Court is a separate, self-governed entity and does not have to vet its members through the Circle—or anyone else. The court tells us what it wants, when it wants, and has traditionally been . . . less than forthcoming.” Mircea shot me a suspiciously innocent look. “I think Kit is waiting impatiently for your accession, when he will finally have a conduit to all that lovely information.”
I snorted. Yeah. He could keep on waiting. I wasn’t his freaking all-access pass.
Mircea smiled. “This should prove . . . entertaining.”
“Something like that.” I drank wine. “So, anyway, Jonas dated Agnes, or whatever you want to call it, for thirty years, yet he never got the story about what happened with my mother. He said she became angry whenever he brought it up, so he mostly didn’t. Which means the only thing I have to go on is what happened afterward.”
“When she and your father went to live with Antonio.”
“And that’s what I don’t get.” I said, swirling a rib around in the gooey sauce. “My father was some big-time dark mage, right? So how does someone like that end up working for a rat like Tony?”
He pursed his lips. “It wasn’t a bad choice. Many of the mages who work for us have needed to disappear for one reason or another. Admittedly, most of them are running from the Silver Circle, not the Black, but the same rule applies: if someone is looking for you in one world, go to another. And the Circle often forgets that our world exists.” He smiled a little ferally. “Or it would like to.”
“But Tony? He couldn’t have done better than that?”
“With his abilities, doubtless. But you forget, dulceață, a more prominent court would also have been more risky, as it might have come under scrutiny by one or both of the circles. Whereas Antonio . . .”
“Wasn’t worth their time.”
One muscular shoulder rose in a shrug. “He was to the local branch, but I doubt he so much as registered at the national level. It was why I left you with him, if you recall.”
I nodded. After Mircea had found out about my existence, he’d considered bringing me to his court. But as a senator, he was watched constantly, and he’d been afraid that the Circle might get curious about me. And since I was a magic worker, not a vampire, he could have been forced to hand me over.
“Okay, I understand that,” I said, chewing thoughtfully. “My parents wanted to fly under the radar, so they hid out with a loser nobody cared about. I just don’t understand why they chose him.”
“Ah, now, that I can answer.”
It was so unexpected that it took me a moment to react. I’d hit so many brick walls trying to find out something about my parents, that I almost expected it now. “You can?”
“Yes. Well,” Mircea hedged. “I can tell you what Antonio t
old me. He said that he and your father had had business dealings for some years before Roger asked him for refuge.”
“What kind of business dealings?”
“You know that Antonio remained in the money-lending business?”
“He was a loan shark,” I corrected. Among a lot of other things. If he could make a buck off it, Tony had wanted in.
“As you say. In any case, many of his clients found that they could not repay their debts, and he was ruthless about confiscating whatever had been put up for collateral.”
“Yeah. We always had stuff sitting around,” I said, remembering. “Cars, boats—even a light airplane once. And then there was all the junk from the houses. I got in trouble for finger-painting on a Chippendale sideboard once, but how did I know? It was just another scarred, old table.”
“But antiques—even finger-painted ones—are easy to move,” Mircea pointed out. “That wasn’t true of magical devices, particularly unstable ones. They had to be disposed of properly, and such disposal is not cheap.”
I nodded. “You have to call in a Remainder.” They’d occasionally come to the farmhouse, men in stained coveralls who carted away boxes of suspicious charms, amulets and potions before they blew up in anyone’s face.
“And you know how fond Antonio was of spending money,” Mircea said. “But he couldn’t leave the items in place and risk having them burn down his investments, and he couldn’t abandon them somewhere without possibly coming to the attention of the Circle, which monitors that sort of thing. For a long time, he had to pay up.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with my father.”
“Antonio told me that Roger contacted him offering to dispose of any such volatile devices for free.”
I frowned. “For free? But isn’t that work kind of . . . risky?”
“Very. One of my cooks likes to tell the story of the time he bought a growth charm to use on his kitchen garden. But he didn’t monitor it properly, and it went past the expiration date. Shortly thereafter, he woke up to a garden of giants—squash as long as canoes, watermelons the size of small cars, tomatoes as large as beach balls—all of which had burst because of too-rapid growth. He said the mess was . . . astonishing.”
