by Karen Chance
“I—Yes. Of course.”
He looked up and those vague blue eyes were suddenly anything but, and the expression on that usually jovial face was almost scary. “Right away, Cassie.”
I nodded, a little freaked-out, and suddenly he was all smiles again. “Enjoy your date,” he told me, and left.
Marco closed the door and we stood there, staring at each other. “Mages,” he said in disgust. “They get weirder every year.”
And I couldn’t really argue with that one.
Chapter Eight
“You are sure you’re ready?” Mircea asked me.
It was seven hours later and several decades earlier, and I wasn’t sure of a damn thing. My hands were sweaty and my stomach hurt and I was starting to rethink my dress choice for the evening. I’d already rethought it once, going with the red silk, which had seemed chic and sophisticated in the shop. But now I thought the top might be a little low, and I hadn’t had time to have it altered, so it was too tight in some places and too loose in others, and I wasn’t sure that the color looked that great with my hair, especially since I hadn’t gotten all the green out yet, and—
“I’m fine,” I said tightly.
Mircea gave me a look that said I wasn’t fooling anyone. But he pressed the doorbell nonetheless. And at least he looked like he belonged here.
His dark hair was sleek and shining, confined in a discreet clip at his nape. His black tuxedo fit his broad shoulders like a glove, the material soft and sheened as only truly fine wool can be. He’d paired it with a crisp white Frenchcuff shirt with small gold links that glinted under the lights. They were carved with the emblem of a royal house, although he hardly needed them. Nobody was ever going to mistake him for anything but what he was.
Apparently the butler agreed, because despite not having an invitation, we were ushered straight into the party taking up most of the ground floor of a swanky London mansion. There were a lot of gleaming hardwood and glittering chandeliers and softly draped fabrics and fine carpets, and I barely noticed any of them. Because across the main salon was a small, dark-haired woman in red. And by her side was . . .
“She is beautiful,” Mircea said, snagging us champagne from a passing tray.
I didn’t say anything. I clutched the flute he handed me, feeling a strange sense of detachment. I could feel the cool crystal under my fingertips, taste the subtle bite of the alcohol, but it seemed distant, unreal, like the people crowding all around us. I heard the soft sounds of their laughter and the conversation that swelled and ebbed, like the notes someone was playing on a distant piano. But none of it mattered.
Not compared to the tall girl in the bad eighties ball gown, standing by the side of the former Pythia.
Her dress was electric blue satin with big, puffy sleeves and a peplum. There was a lace overlay on the top and little jeweled buttons down the front. Her shoes were dyed to match. It was absolutely awful, like something a bridezilla would stick on a too-pretty bridesmaid. Yet somehow she carried it off. The blue matched the color of her eyes and complemented her dark hair and pale skin. And when she laughed, you forgot all about the dress, didn’t even see it.
Because you couldn’t take your eyes off her face.
An arm slipped around my waist. “Dulceață, I do not think you want to get so close.”
I suddenly realized that I was halfway across the room, although I couldn’t remember moving. Mircea pulled me off to one side, near a row of floor-length windows that looked out into the night. The one in front of us was as good as a mirror, allowing me to stare at the girl’s reflection without being so obvious.
Mircea is right, I thought blankly. She was beautiful. And delicate and fragile and poised.
She looked nothing at all like me.
“I don’t agree,” he murmured. A warm finger trailed down my cheekbone, tracing the track of a tear I couldn’t remember shedding. “There’s a similarity in the bone structure, in the shape of the eyes, the contour of the lips. . . .”
“I don’t see it,” I said harshly, gulping champagne and wondering why I was suddenly, blindingly angry.
“You said you were prepared for this,” he said, pulling me against him.
His chest was hard at my back, but his arms were gentle. I felt myself relax into his embrace, even knowing what he was doing. All vampires could manipulate human emotions to a degree, but Mircea could practically play me like a violin. It was a combination of natural talent and more knowledge of what made me tick than I probably had. But for once, I didn’t care. I clutched the familiar feeling of warmth and comfort around me like a blanket and told myself to stop being an idiot.
I didn’t know why I was reacting this way. I’d known in advance what she looked like. I’d seen a photo of her once, a faded, grainy thing taken at a distance. But it had been clear enough to show me the truth.
I didn’t resemble my mother in the slightest.
“I’m fine,” I told him, my throat tight, only to feel him sigh against my back.
“You are not fine, dulceață. You are feeling anger, loss, betrayal—”
“I don’t have any reason to feel betrayed.”
“She abandoned you when you were a child—”
“She died, Mircea!”
“Yes, but the fact remains that she left. And hurt you in the process.”
“I wasn’t hurt. I was barely four.”
“You were hurt,” he insisted. “But you do not deal with such emotions, Cassie. You ignore them.”
“That isn’t true!”
“That has always been true. It is one of the defining aspects of your character.”
I scowled at his reflection in the window, but if he saw, he didn’t react. He took the empty champagne glass from my hand and sat it on a nearby table. Then his arms folded around me again, trapping me, although it didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to talk about this. But suddenly I didn’t want to move, either.
“Do you recall when I visited Antonio’s court when you were a child?” he asked.
“Of course.” He’d been there for a year, from the time I was eleven until I was almost twelve. It had been a lengthy visit, even by vampire standards. At the time, I hadn’t thought much of it; Tony often had visitors, and it had made sense to me that his master would eventually be one of them. It was only later that I found out Mircea had an ulterior motive.
He’d discovered that the little clairvoyant Tony had at court was the daughter of the former heir to the Pythian throne. My mother had run away from her position and her responsibilities to marry a dark mage in Tony’s service. That effectively barred her from any chance of succeeding, but made no difference as far as my own odds were concerned.
“You hoped I’d become Pythia one day.”
Mircea didn’t bother to deny it. He was a vampire. Utilizing whatever resources were available within the family was considered a virtue in their culture, and a possible Pythia was a hell of a resource. “Yes, but you were also interesting in your own right.”
I snorted. “I was eleven. No eleven-year-old is interesting.”
“Most eleven-year-olds do not wander about talking with ghosts,” he said wryly. “Or pipe up at the dining table to casually mention that one of the guests is an assassin—”
“I think Tony would have had heart failure,” I said, remembering his face. “You know, if he had a heart.”
“—or lead me to a cache of Civil War jewelry hidden in a wall that no one else knew about.”
“The guy who put it there did.”
“My point is that you were a fascinating child, not least of which for the way you dealt with pain. Or, more accurately, the way you avoided dealing with it.”
“I deal with it fine.”
Mircea didn’t comment, but a hand covered the fist I’d bunched at my waist, finger pads resting on sharp knuckles. “I had been there perhaps a month,” he said softly, “when I chanced to be passing your room. It was late and you were supposed to
be asleep, but I heard you cry out. I went in to find you sitting in bed, your arms wrapped around your knees, staring at the wall. Do you recall what you told me when I asked what was wrong?”
“No.” I’d been watching images flickering on the wall and ceiling, like reflections of headlights on a road. Only there was no highway near Tony’s farmhouse, which was set well back from a two-lane dirt track in the Pennsylvania countryside. But the scenes had washed over the room nonetheless, like the stuttering frames of a silent movie.
They’d looked sort of like one, too, the colors mostly leached away by the night. Except for the blood. For some reason, it had been in bright, brilliant Technicolor, standing out starkly against the blacks and browns and dull, asphalt gray.
But as horrible as it had been, it hadn’t been particularly unusual. I’d had visions almost every day, until I grew up enough to learn to control them, until I learned how not to see. I probably wouldn’t even remember that one, except that Mircea had been there, jolting me out of it.
Tony’s people didn’t do that. They had standing orders not to interrupt, because I might see something he’d find profitable. So it had been the strangest of strange sensations, to suddenly feel a touch, human soft and blood warm, on my shoulder.
“It was just a nightmare,” I told him.
“You said you had seen a multicar accident. Or, as you described it, blood leaching into puddles of oil; broken bodies lying on shattered glass; and the smell of gasoline, burnt rubber and charred meat. The next morning, the news reported a ten-car pileup on the New Jersey Turnpike.”
“Did it?” I asked, suddenly wishing I had another drink.
“I wondered then what it would be like, to grow up as a child who saw things no child should ever see. Who, every time she closed her eyes, was surrounded by pain, by horror, by death—”
“That’s a serious exaggeration.”
“—by sights that kept her up at night, shivering in fear, and staring at a blank wall.”
“It wasn’t blank,” I said shortly. “Rafe drew things on it.”
Our resident artist at court had been none other than the Renaissance master Raphael, who had been turned after unwisely refusing a job for Florentine up-and-comer Antonio Gallina. It had been the last time he’d refused one of Tony’s commissions, not that he’d been given many. Appreciating art required a soul, something I was pretty sure Tony had been born without.
“Yes,” Mircea agreed. “Because I asked him to.”
I frowned. I hadn’t known that. “You asked him? Why?”
“I thought a child should have something to look at besides death.”
Dark eyes met mine in the window for an instant, until I looked away. “I want another drink,” I told him, but Mircea’s arms didn’t budge.
“Of course you do,” he said. “I wish to discuss your feelings about your mother, so naturally you become thirsty. Or hungry. Or suddenly recall an errand that you need to perform.”
I struggled, Mircea’s hold no longer feeling quite so comforting. “Let me go.”
“To get a drink, or to avoid the conversation?”
“I’m not avoiding it!” I snapped. I just hadn’t expected this to be so hard.
Mircea and I had crashed the party, if walking in escorted by a gushing butler can be termed such, because I’d wanted to see my mother. Not talk to, not interact with, not do anything that might possibly mess up the timeline. Just see.
Because I never had, other than in that one lousy photo. But now that I was here, seeing wasn’t enough. I wanted to get close. Wanted to find out if she still smelled like honey and lilac, with a hint of waxy lipstick.
Wanted her to see me, too.
But even more, I wanted to ask her things. Why she gave up a job most people would have killed for to marry a man most people would have liked to kill. Why she’d had me. Why she’d died and left me with fucking Tony.
If she’d ever loved me at all.
“Let me go,” I said unevenly. Mircea released me and I moved away, needing space, needing air.
I hugged my arms around myself and stared across the party, an almost physical ache gnawing at my insides. Her hair was dark, as I’d assumed from the photo, but it wasn’t brown. The lights were shining on it now, and it was a deep, rich, coppery bronze, as rare and striking as her sapphire eyes.
I wondered if that was where the red threads in my own hair came from, if maybe it ran in the family. I wondered if I had a family, distant cousins or something, floating around.... I’d never really thought about it before, maybe because I’d grown up surrounded by people who never mentioned theirs.
Vampires usually acted as if their lives started with the Change, instead of ending with it. And in a real sense, they were right. Most masters Changed an individual because they possessed a talent they needed, or strength or intellect or wealth they wanted, none of which included a human family. And few were willing to Change a bunch of hangers-on who could be of no real use and who might be a danger, since a master was responsible for the actions of his children.
As a result, most families got left behind when a baby vamp joined his or her new clan. And I guessed that, after a while, you must stop wondering about people long dead, whom you probably had nothing in common with anymore, anyway. After a while, you must stop missing them.
Only I didn’t think I was going to live that long.
“My mother was also quite beautiful.”
I’d been so lost in thought that it took me a moment to realize that Mircea had spoken.
And then another few seconds for what he’d said to sink in. “Your mother?”
He smiled slightly. “You look surprised.”
“I just . . . you never mention her.” In fact, I’d never thought about Mircea having a mother. Stupid; of course he had. But somehow I’d never imagined him as a boy.
It was surprisingly easy.
The mahogany hair had a faint wave to it that might once have been curls. The sculpted lips, so sensual in an adult, had probably been a cupid’s bow then. And the dark, liquid eyes must have been irresistible in a child’s face.
“I bet you got away with murder,” I said, and he laughed.
“Not at all. My parents were quite strict.”
“I don’t believe it.” I tried to be strict with Mircea, I really did, but somehow it never worked. And I doubted that anybody else had better luck.
“It’s true,” he insisted, settling us into chairs by the wall. I didn’t stay in mine more than a few seconds. I felt too antsy, too oddly keyed up.
Mircea started to get up when I did, but I pushed him back down. “A gentleman doesn’t sit while a lady is standing,” he admonished.
I put a knee on his leg to keep him in place. “And if the lady insists?”
“Hm. A quandary.” A strong hand clasped my thigh through the silk. “Since a gentleman always accedes to a lady’s wishes.”
“Always?” That could come in handy.
He laughed and kissed my hand. “Unfortunately, I am not always a gentleman.”
“Close enough,” I told him honestly, and slipped the clip out of his hair.
A dusky wave fell over his shoulders. He looked up at me, dark eyes amused. I’d always had this weird fetish about his hair, which we didn’t talk about. But he knew.
It felt like cool brown silk flowing over my fingers. And, as always, touching him felt more than good. It felt right, steadying. And right now, I could really use some of that.
“You were talking about when you were a boy.”
“Ah yes. The trials of childhood,” he mused, that hand slowly stroking my thigh. “One of my first memories is of being thrown out to play in the snow, completely naked.”
“Naked?”
“Hm. It was not too bad when the sun shone, but after dark—”
“After dark?”
“—it became somewhat . . . frigid.”
I stared at him. “How old were you?”
He
shrugged. “Three, perhaps four.”
“But . . . but why would anyone do that?”
“To demonstrate my fitness to the people. I was my father’s heir, and although he had no throne at that time to leave to me, he had absolute confidence that it would one day be his.”
“Yes, but to risk a child—”
“Life was about risk then. And there was no childhood, in the modern sense, when I was young. Not for peasant children, who started work in the fields by age seven. And certainly not for those of us in the nobility.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“Some of it was. There were puppet shows on feast days and sledding in the winter. And I could ride an unsaddled horse at age five at a full gallop, as could my brothers. Well, except for Radu,” he said, talking about his youngest brother. “He was deathly afraid of the creatures and took rather longer to come to terms with them. I should know; I taught them to ride.”
“Them?”
“He and Vlad,” Mircea said, his smile fading. I didn’t say anything, but inwardly I cursed. It was rare enough for Mircea to talk about his family, and that particular topic was almost certain to make him shut down. But to my surprise, this time it didn’t.
“Radu had absolutely no seat at all,” he said, after a moment.
“Neither do I,” I admitted. Rafe had tried to teach me, but had finally given up in despair.
“But you do not need to lead charges in battle, dulceață. He did! My father finally solved the problem by tying him onto the largest horse in the stable, and promising that he should remain there until he could ride it properly.”
“And did he?”
Mircea looked up at me, baring the long line of his throat as he leaned back against the chair. It exposed a vulnerable area, a traditional vampire sign of trust. “With amazing alacrity.”
I stared down into those velvety dark eyes, fascinated by the pleased humor on the handsome face, by the crinkle of the eyes, by the white, even teeth and the glimpse of tongue behind them. Without thinking, my hand stopped combing through the thick silk of his hair and dropped to his nape, before sliding forward to curve around his throat.
