by Karen Chance
It didn’t seem to be bothering him right now, though.
The lips on my skin were warm and soft and pliable, unlike the prick of fangs behind them. But he didn’t bite down, he just scraped them lightly over sensitive flesh, until I was hard and peaked and desperate. “It has been a while, so I cannot be certain,” he murmured. “But I believe I may be drunk.”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“The blood of those creatures. It was . . . intoxicating.”
“You mean the mages?”
“Mmm-hmm.” He rolled a nipple between tongue and teeth, making my hands fist in his shirt.
“But . . . but they were human.”
“Mmm, no,” he said thoughtfully. And then he bit down.
I gasped and clutched his head between my hands, holding him as he drank from me. The sensation of warm lips, sharp, sharp teeth and deep, intimate pulls had my body tightening, my skin flushing and my pulse pounding in my ears. I felt my grip on the moment slipping away.
“Then what were they?” I asked breathlessly, before I forgot what the hell we were talking about.
“They were human, but stronger,” he told me, sitting back on his heels. “Like you.”
“Like me?”
“Your blood is richer than normal, due to the power of your office,” he explained, tossing the tie aside.
“Why does that matter?”
“It matters because your power used to belong to a god.” He started to pull off the shirt, but I put out a hand.
“Leave it,” I said huskily. He wasn’t the only one who liked a contrast. And the white, white fabric against the honey-drenched skin was . . . pleasing.
He quirked an eyebrow, but did as I asked. Then he slid back over me, grinning wickedly. “Perhaps that is why you taste divine.”
“You’re saying those mages were—were some kind of demigods?” I asked as he nuzzled my neck.
“I do not know, having never before had the opportunity to sample a god. But their blood was like yours—thick, rich, like old cognac.”
I had another question, but then his head dipped and his mouth closed over me again and I forgot what it was. I pretty much forgot everything as his tongue laved the small puncture wounds he’d made, the gentle, tender probing sending shudders through my whole body. I arched up mindlessly and he sat up, pulling me, naked, onto his lap.
My lips opened to protest, because if I’d been visible before it was nothing compared to now. But then strong hands grasped me and a magnificent hardness pressed against me and he started to suck not so gently. And my protest turned into a moan as my legs tightened around him, my skin flushed a deeper shade of pink, and my body squirmed, craving friction, craving more. I buried my fingers in the raw silk of his hair and forgot the passing cars and the curious driver and everything except the pull of that mouth and the feel of those hands, smoothing up and down my back and clenching—
And, okay, I thought dizzily, maybe this could work, after all.
But the next second Mircea was drawing back. “You’re hungry,” he announced, as if this were news.
“What? Do I have low blood sugar?” I asked facetiously.
“Yes.” He rapped smartly on the partition, which lowered so fast I barely had time to snatch up the mink. The vampire driver wasn’t a family member or a high-level master, so Mircea had to talk to him directly. “The Club,” he said succinctly.
“We are already there, my lord,” the driver said softly. “I took the liberty of anticipating your wishes.”
“Good man,” Mircea said, and before I quite knew what was happening, he’d pulled me out into the snow.
Even with the mink, the shock of cold air was a little stunning after the cozy warmth of the limo. But we weren’t out in it for long. My toes barely had time to register the frozen sidewalk before Mircea swung me up and ran with me up the stairs of a beautiful old row house.
A plain red door, like a dozen others on the street, gave way to a narrow little hallway boasting a priceless chandelier, a mahogany welcome desk and what looked suspiciously like a Cézanne, its bright colors glowing against the dark wood paneling.
A rotund little vampire bustled around the side of the desk and then disappeared. It took me a second to realize that he’d bowed, so low that even peering over the edge of the mink, all I could see were the lights gleaming off his shiny bald head. He bobbed back up after a minute, and then he did it again, like one of those drinking bird toys that just can’t stay upright.
But eventually he did, leading the way up the stairs. And I guessed he must have been a lot older than the driver, because not a word was said until his slightly shaking hands had opened the door to a magnificent suite. It was saffron and coral and deep chocolate brown, with a fireplace in caramel-colored marble and a huge window overlooking the city lights.
“I—I hope it is to your liking, my lord,” he murmured, and turned pink-cheeked with delight when Mircea casually nodded.
“Yes, it’s fine. We’ll eat up here.”
“Of course, of course. Right away.” The little vamp bowed himself out—literally—bobbing three times as he withdrew backward into the hall. And then Mircea finally let me down, only to get his hands inside the coat and push me against the wall.
“I’m dirty,” I protested.
He waggled his eyebrows. “Promise?”
“Mircea!” I laughed in spite of myself. “I want a bath before we eat!”
His eyes, glinting in the discreet light of the suite, met mine. “If you’ll indulge me.”
“I’m not bathing with you,” I told him firmly. I’d never get any dinner that way.
“Of course not,” he said, in pretend shock.
“Then what?”
He let a single finger trace down my cheek to my jaw, to my neck, to my . . . necklace? “Is your ghost in residence?”
“No.” I hadn’t felt the need for a chaperone. “Why?”
“Because I have a recurring fantasy of you dining with me wearing this.” That warm finger slowly traced the outline of the baroque monstrosity. “And only this.”
I made a small sound and closed my eyes.
Goddamnit.
Despite appearances, I was trying, I was really, really trying, to have a relationship with Mircea, not just to jump his bones every time we had five minutes alone together. And I’d been doing pretty well lately, mainly because he’d been in New York and I’d been in Vegas and my plans always sounded a lot more doable when he wasn’t pressed up against me and—
“Stop that,” I told him, as he rotated his hips sinuously, because the damn man had no shame at all.
“Then give me an answer,” he said, laughter in his voice.
I looked up, intending to say no, but those dark eyes had an unmistakable glint of challenge sparkling in their depths. As if he thought I wouldn’t do it. As if he was sure I wouldn’t do it. Because I wasn’t a vampire, wasn’t adventurous like . . . certain other people. Who probably didn’t have a problem sashaying around covered in nothing but that long, silky black hair, those almond-shaped, dark eyes peeking coyly back over her dainty shoulder as she—
Goddamnit!
But it wasn’t that easy for me. Not because I had a problem indulging him, although nudity wasn’t my favorite thing. But because I was human. And Mircea, like a lot of vampires, had the bad habit of assuming that whatever he wanted from a human, he would get.
It didn’t help that he was usually right.
And centuries of that sort of thing had messed with his head, to the point that he rarely saw the need for debate with said human, or compromise or negotiation or any of the sort of things he would do with one of his own kind. He’d claimed me; therefore I was his. End of discussion, had there been a discussion, which there hadn’t been because I was human and some days, most days, that attitude just really made me want to tear my hair out.
So here I was, trying to see if a relationship would maybe, possibly, in some sort of way work d
espite the fact that the mages were absolutely going to hate it and the Weres weren’t going to love it and I was also going to take flak from the vampires after they realized that “relationship” didn’t mean “ownership” in my vocabulary, and what was Mircea doing?
Acting like there was nothing to discuss, of course.
Only there was. There so very definitely was, like five hundred years of history I knew next to nothing about. Like the fact that almost all I did know was that he was fiercely loyal to his family, had a horrible sense of humor, and when he walked into a room, he made my breath catch.
And, yeah, that was definitely something, but was it enough to base a lifetime on? I didn’t know yet. All I did know was that if I kept giving in, kept doing what he wanted, kept acting like we were already together and the decision had been made . . . then pretty soon, it would be.
And I didn’t know yet if it was one I could live with.
“Cassie?”
I looked up to find him regarding me with exasperated eyes. “Do you really have to think so hard about this?”
“It’s . . . complicated,” I said fretfully.
“No, it really isn’t.”
“Yes, it is! It really, really is, and you know it is and—”
He stopped me with a hand on either side of my face. “When are we?”
“What?”
“The year.”
I frowned. And my power sluggishly called up the date: “Nineteen sixty-nine.”
“And that means you haven’t been born yet, doesn’t it?”
I nodded.
“We haven’t met yet—am I right?”
“Well, not unless you count that time in—”
“Cassie.”
“No. Not . . . technically. But I don’t get what you’re—”
“I’m saying that nothing that happens, or doesn’t happen, tonight will have any bearing on our relationship once we return. No implications. No consequences. Think of this as . . . a night out of time.”
“A night out of time?” I repeated doubtfully, because I didn’t get those. Time caused me problems; it didn’t solve them. Not even for one night.
His forehead came to rest against mine. “A night out of time.”
I licked my lips and thought it over. “The servers will see.”
“And if I arrange it so they won’t?”
I looked up at him, and it was a mistake, because he was grinning that little-boy grin, the one he never showed in public because it would completely trash his image as big, bad Vampire Senate member. But I got to see it every once in a while. And it never failed to be devastating.
“Just dinner,” I heard myself say, before I could bite my tongue.
“Just dinner,” he agreed softly, stroking the lines of my cheekbones with his thumbs.
And then he let me go.
Chapter Thirteen
The bathroom of the suite turned out to be as impressive as the rest. Golden marble with thin veins of burnt umber running through it covered everything from the floors to the ceiling to the double sinks to the spa-like tub, all polished to a high gloss. There was a plush dark orange rug, matching towels, and a basket of expensive toiletries all done up in cellophane like the Easter bunny had just delivered it.
And there were mirrors, lots and lots of mirrors.
Almost every surface that wasn’t covered in marble had one, and all of them informed me that I looked like hell. My makeup was long gone, my hair was a freaking disaster, and my body was smeared with mud and various other substances I didn’t want to think too hard about. I sighed and peeled the laddered foot of what had been an expensive pair of stockings off my filthy feet. My polish was chipped and my toes . . . well, they looked like you’d expect after being dragged across cobblestones.
I contemplated my shredded toes and sighed. One day, one fine, fine day, I was going to be in peril in a damn pair of sneakers. Of course, I’d settle for not being in peril at all.
Not being in peril at all would be good.
I grabbed a couple of sinfully plush towels and got my beat-up, grimy self into the nice, clean shower. I didn’t even try for a bath, because I’d immediately turn the water black. Kind of like the evening’s entertainment had done to me.
After I got clean enough to be fairly sure that whatever was left wasn’t dirt, I took stock. I had a swelling bruise on my ankle, another on my hip and a third, long and horizontal and rapidly darkening, on my lower stomach, probably where I’d hit down on the damn carriage ride from hell. Add that to the bruises I was still carrying from the bathtub incident and, oh yeah, I looked sexy.
Not that I wasn’t happy to be alive in any shape. I just didn’t understand why I was. Particularly not if Mircea’s theory was correct about what we’d been fighting.
It had seemed crazy when he said it, because demigods weren’t exactly thick on the ground. The gods, or the creatures calling themselves that, had been banished a long time from Earth, and most of their by-blows had either gone with them or been rounded up by the Circle. And because I couldn’t imagine what a bunch of half gods could want with my mother.
But now that I had a chance to think, it did explain a lot. Like how resilient the mages had been, not bothering with shields but bouncing back from blows that should have left them a smear on the concrete without them. And why they’d seemed so damn strong.
Pritkin had once told me that war mages never used a hundred percent of their power for attack. In battle, the standard ratio was seventy-thirty, meaning that seventy percent of a mage’s power went to defense—to the shields and wards needed to keep him or her alive—with maybe thirty percent leftover for offensive stuff. Particularly powerful magic users could hedge on that a bit, maybe taking the total needed for defense down to sixty-five or even sixty percent, because their excess power made up for it. But nobody went completely unprotected. If they did, the first spell to so much as nick them might take them out of the fight—permanently.
Pritkin himself regularly used only about a quarter of his power for defense, although he didn’t admit as much to the Circle. But what if someone could shrug off being trampled under horses or slung against buildings or dragged half the length of a street, despite not using shields? Being able to put everything toward attack would make even a low-level mage look pretty damn impressive. And if he or she was already extra-strong to begin with . . .
Well, that mage might look something like what I’d just seen. But as reasonable as that sounded, it couldn’t be right. Because my mother couldn’t have fought off four demigods and a crazy-ass kidnapper all by herself.
Could she?
It seemed ridiculous. But, then, if the answer was no, why was I still here? If the mages had killed her or the kidnapper had carted her off, or anything had happened to keep her from meeting my infamous father, then I should have vanished. And other than for the rather large amount of skin I’d left in the road, I hadn’t.
And that was . . . well, that was kind of an epiphany. The whole damn night had been, really. Because I’d never seen the Pythian power used like that. In fact, I’d rarely seen it used at all, which was one of the reasons I’d been having so much trouble mastering it.
Jonas did his best to help me, but he wasn’t a Pythia. He’d overheard some of the stuff Agnes had said when training her heirs, and he’d seen a lot of what she could do. But trying to harness time with his help had been like building a car from a set of oral instructions when you’ve never seen one and the guy giving them has only a vague idea of what one is supposed look like.
It had been the blind leading the blind all month.
It had gotten frustrating enough that I’d actually thought of going to the Pythian Court for help. But I hadn’t, and not just because one of their number had already tried to kill me. They probably weren’t all homicidal maniacs, but I doubted I was real popular with a group who had zero chance of advancement as long as I lived.
Which might explain why I hadn’t heard from
them all month. Not a “congrats,” however insincere; not a “fuck you”; not a peep of any kind. I didn’t know what that meant, but it was more than a little ominous. And Jonas sure as hell hadn’t suggested stopping by for a chat.
So I’d been on my own.
And being on my own sucked ass.
But then had come tonight. And . . . damn.
Somehow, I’d gotten into the habit of thinking about my power as defensive—shifting to get out of a tight spot, throwing time bubbles to ward off attackers, stopping time to give me a chance to run like hell. Maybe because that was mostly how I’d been using it. But my mother . . . she hadn’t been real big on defense. She’d been real big on kicking some demigod butt.
The war mages might have been running a full-on offensive, but she’d been right there with them. She’d sent them screaming in terror. She’d imprisoned one like a bug under glass. She’d run one the hell down.
Mom, I realized in shock, had been kind of a badass.
And so was the Pythian power in the hands of somebody who actually knew how to use it. And while I didn’t realistically think I’d ever be anywhere near that good . . . still. It gave me a lot to think about.
Only this wasn’t the place, because I was going all pruney. I hadn’t known a shower could do that, but this one was hard and hot and enthusiastic, to the point that my fingers and what was left of my toes were wrinkling up. I got out of the shower, dried my hair, and swiped a hand over the nearest mirror.
It showed me what I’d expected: a thin, pale girl with scraggly blond hair, dark circles under her eyes and a bruise in her hairline. I leaned in, pulling my hair back, searching my own face. I had a lot more to go on now than a grainy photo taken at a distance. I’d stared her right in the face from barely a foot away. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t see even a distant echo in me.
My eyes were blue, but they were just blue. My hair was reddish, sort of, in the right light, but nothing like that beautiful bronze color. And my face was . . . just a face.
It looked back at me now, too-round cheekbones, a toostubborn chin and a scattering of unfashionable freckles over a tip-tilted nose. It wasn’t a bad face, as faces go, but it wasn’t going to be launching a thousand ships anytime soon. I stood there, searching it anyway, desperate to find some trace of that ethereal beauty.... And it suddenly hit me. If I hadn’t taken after my mother, then I must look like—
