by Karen Chance
No, I didn’t suppose so. I could see him standing in front of the Senate, arrogantly informing them that his personal life was none of their concern. It would read like some torrid affair with a creature many of them viewed as only slightly better than Satan. Not too helpful.
“You begin to see,” Mircea murmured.
“Maybe. But what about Anthony and Jérôme? They already heard him be… indiscreet.”
“Fortunately they are also the ones who have the most reason to interpret anything badly. I will point out that you and Louis-Cesare battledsubrand together recently, and that he was concerned that the creature might be among us once again. He wanted your information, nothing more.”
“You know, sometimes you’re a little scary,” I told him frankly. “I was there, and that still sounds strangely believable.”
“Let us hope the Senate thinks so. But no matter what persuasive skills you believe me to possess, you must see that I cannot continue to come up with plausible explanations for other such incidents. This must—”
Someone tapped on the door, and a second later Marlowe’s curly head poked in. The timing made me narrow my eyes suspiciously, but the look on his face was not slyly knowing, but maddened and frustrated. “Unless you want to let Louis-Cesare handle his own defense, we have to go, Mircea!”
“That I do not want,” Mircea said, getting up. “Dorina—”
I stood up, too. “It was business,” I told him. “He stole from me; I returned the favor. That’s all.”
Mircea didn’t look as pleased by that sentiment as I’d have liked. “This isn’t—” He stopped, and again seemed to be trying to marshal his thoughts. I didn’t know why he was bothering; I’d already agreed to what he wanted. Not that it was much. Louis-Cesare had Christine back; I wasn’t likely to be seeing much more of him anyway.
“I want you to be happy, Dorina,” he said suddenly—and strangely. I searched his face, wondering what this new game was, what the hell he wanted from me now. Like always, it was the perfect, beautiful mask, and told me nothing.
His hand rose hesitantly toward my face, and I unconsciously flinched. Mircea had never hurt me, but a lifetime of fighting and killing his kind provides a person with certain instincts. A flash of some emotion crossed his eyes, but it was gone before I could name it, and his hand dropped again.
And something lanced through me, brief and sharp, like a needle’s bite.
Sunlight streamed in a small, glassless window, painting a watercolor wash over a wooden table. A woman stood beside it, her arms moving in a circular motion, kneading a pile of dough with an unbroken rhythm. Every few moments she looked out the window, over a crenellated ridge of mountains, their sheer faces lined with snow and backlit by the sun.
It was a rising sun, I concluded as I watched it swell, gleaming and red as it broke free of the landscape and drifted into the liquid blue sky. The cottage stood on the edge of the small village, near a road that ran through the trees. But the road was empty, the dust undisturbed except for a slight wind.
The air that flowed in from the mountains outside was crisp, ruffling her hair as she worked to braid the dough into a long ribbon and then form it into a loaf. She set it aside and started the process over again, while the wind died and the flour hung in the air like mist. It clung to her dark lashes and brows, to the soft down of hair on her arms, and gloved her hands in a dusting of gold.
Two arms went around her from behind, pulling her back against a warm, familiar body. “Stop that,” she admonished, her voice liquid with laughter. “No baking, no bread for your morning meal.”
“But I am hungry now,” he said, smiling as he lifted her gilded hand to his lips, tracing the calluses there with his tongue.
Her hand came up, smearing flour against his cheek, gritty and warm from the motion of her hands. “Husband,” she breathed against his neck. “My Mircea.” And the love and loss that welled up inside him was so sweet and so painful, it was literally staggering.
“Mircea!” Marlowe’s voice was starting to sound a little panic-stricken. “They are beginning now!”
The memory shattered and broke with his voice, and I stumbled back into the seat. I bent low, hands on my knees, and gulped air, my eyes stinging with tears. Loneliness, vast, echoing and cold, opened up around me, but it was the resignation that made a hole in me, that hollowed me out. And I wasn’t even sure if it was my emotion or his.
Oh, Mircea, I thought. Oh, my God.
A hand slipped onto my shoulder, pale and cool. I looked up at him, blank disbelief in my mind. I don’t know what was on my face, but he frowned and squatted down beside the chair. “Dorina, what—”
“You married her?”
He stopped, his face registering blank shock. He said nothing, but he didn’t deny it. And that was just—
“I have to go,” I told him, jumping up and stumbling away, my hand somehow finding the doorknob to the office. I pulled it open and slipped through, and put my back against the door. Thankfully he didn’t try follow me.
I stood there, staring into space, seeing nothing. Other than the face of a woman I’d never known, a peasant girl with no family, no money, nothing—except a prince for a husband.
It felt like the room lurched sideways. It wasn’t so much a physical movement as a sheering of the mind as my brain tried to wrap itself around an impossible idea. I’d assumed he never spoke of her out of indifference. But he’d been his father’s firstborn, heir to a disputed throne. He was the last person on earth who could afford to take chances with his choice of wife. And yet he’d married a girl who could do nothing to help him politically, who could seal no treaties, gain him no armies, never be anything other than a liability.
Because he had loved her.
CHAPTER 23
“Can we get out of here already?” someone said crossly.
I looked up, feeling more than a little dazed, to see my duffel sitting on the desk. Not-a-butler must have been busy, because the area had been cleared of dead vampire parts. Except for one.
Ray was still on the desk, perched beside the duffel like a grotesque paperweight. For a moment, I ignored him. The past was tugging at me, a thousand questions suddenly shuffling through my very rattled brain.
It could be a lie, a fabrication to achieve some hidden objective. Mircea was certainly capable of mental manipulation, as I knew better than anyone. He’d used it on me before, even admitted to it. Why should I believe this to be any different?
But that had been erasing memories, not planting them. And while some vamps could create illusions almost as well as a mage could, tricking the mind into thinking all kinds of things, I’d never heard of Mircea having that ability. Not that vampires were in the habit of revealing all their secrets. He probably had all sorts of skills I didn’t know about. But if he could do that, why hadn’t he years ago? Why leave me with blank spaces in my memory he had to know I’d be curious about, when he could have merely spackled over them?
I’d been the victim of illusions a time or two before, and some could be damn real. But that hadn’t been real; it had been perfect, down to the tiniest details: the smell of the yeast, the buzzing of insects outside the window, the grittiness of the stone-ground flour. If it was an illusion, it was the best damned one I’d ever seen.
All of a sudden, nothing made sense anymore. If I was being played, I couldn’t see how, and that made it dangerous. And if I wasn’t…
But I had to be. People don’t change. Not that much, not that fast. And that was even more true for vamps. They were what they were, and letting myself believe anything else just because I wanted it so damn badly was a fool’s errand.
I’d spent a lifetime fighting vampires; I knew them, understood them as well as anyone could who wasn’t one of them. They were selfish, self-centered, power obsessed, false. They’d say anything, do anything, to get what they wanted, and Mircea was no exception to that rule. If anything, he pretty much epitomized the vamp ideal: a cold,
calculating head of a powerful house who destroyed his enemies, rewarded his allies and never let something as useless as sentiment get in his way.
Of course, he hadn’t been a vamp then. That scene had taken place in broad daylight, with the sun filtering in the window like a haze. It would have been like standing in a rain of fire for a baby vamp. He should have incinerated immediately, yet he hadn’t even flinched. So he’d been human. It was the Mircea I’d never known—the man he had been before the curse took effect, before it warped him, changed him.
But those emotions hadn’t been part of the memory, had they? That had been a happy time, a stolen morning away from responsibilities. No reason for pain, for loss. Not when he had no way of knowing what was coming. And by the time he did know, he was vampire. But they didn’t, couldn’t feel that kind of—
“Hello? Anybody home?” Ray’s strident tones cut through the endless loop in my head. For once, I was almost grateful.
“I thought you were supposed to be a witness?” I said, pushing off the door. “Why are you still here?”
“They said they didn’t need me, after all. Something about having plenty of other stuff to talk about.”
“I bet.”
“So can we go? This place is giving me the creeps.”
“It is unsettling,” someone said from beside the hall door.
I looked over to see Christine sitting on a mountain of luggage. She’d been so quiet, I hadn’t even noticed her. “They left you, too, huh?” I asked, dropping Ray in the duffel. What the hell? He didn’t take up much room.
“They said my testimony would not be helpful,” she told me. “I did not see anything, and I am close to Louis-Cesare. I believe they think that I would lie for him.”
“So all that packing for nothing.”
“Oh, no. Not for nothing,” she said as I dug around beside Ray’s gory self. As always, the keys had migrated to the farthest reaches of the bag. “I have been informed that the family doesn’t want me here. They have… What is the term? Knocked me out.”
“Kicked you out,” I corrected. “So where to now?”
“I do not know. Where are we going?”
I hadn’t found the keys, but at that, I looked up. “Come again?”
“Louis-Cesare said that I should stay with you.”
“Oh, boy,” Ray muttered.
“He said what?” I asked, very carefully.
“I am sure he will come for me, when this trial is over.
Do you live far?”
“You can’t come with me,” I explained, my fist finally closing on the damn keys.
She frowned slightly, a small dent forming between those beautiful eyes. “But I must. Louis-Cesare said—”
“I don’t care what Louis-Cesare said. And neither should you. You’re three hundred years old, for God’s sake. Go out. Live a little.”
I grabbed the duffel and started for the door, but a delicate hand shot out, snaring my wrist in a motion too fast to see. It was the only indication I’d seen so far of what she really was. Well, that and the tensile strength of that grip.
But her face was lost, panic-stricken, and innocently distressed. “But… but I cannot fail him! Not on his first command in… I cannot!”
“You probably misunderstood,” I said, striving for patience.
“No, no! I know what he said! And dawn approaches, and I have nowhere else to go, and they will throw me out on the street!”
God, she was crying again.
“Louis-Cesare probably wanted me to drop you off at his place.” Not that the bastard had bothered to ask. Or to mention it.
“H-his place?”
“He’s staying at the Club. Come on; I’ll give you a lift.”
“Oh, thank you!” Christine looked so relieved, I felt a little guilty suddenly. What would it be like to live for a century being told every single thing to do and not to do? It had to erode a person’s self-confidence, after a while. And it wasn’t Christine’s fault that her master was a complete—
“What are you doing?” I demanded. Christine had jumped up and started to gather up some of that mountain of luggage. She looked at me blankly. “That’s not all going to fit in the car.”
She gazed at her cheerfully mismatched cases. “But… but what should I do?”
“Pick the stuff you need for today and Elyas’s people can send the rest on.”
“But they won’t. They’ve been horrid! What if they throw it out? What if they never…” Her lower lip began quivering.
“Oh, shit,” Ray said. “Squash it in! Squash it in!”
We squashed it in. After three trips, a lot of cursing, and no help at all from the family, we somehow got me, Ray, Ray’s body, Christine and her worldly possessions all inside the car. Fortunately, the Club wasn’t far, and they had porters.
Or make that had.
Fifteen minutes later I sat staring at the burned- out hulk of what had once been a luxury hotel, wondering why the universe hated me. I couldn’t see much, because there were still some emergency vehicles scattered around, although it appeared that most had trundled off. But the acrid, waterlogged smell in the air would have been enough.
“What is it?” Ray demanded.
“A curse,” I muttered. “It’s the only possible explanation.”
“The master burned it down, didn’t he?” he asked.
“He likes burning stuff.”
Now he told me.
“I’m going to have to take you to a hotel,” I told Christine.
Her eyes got wide. “A human hotel?” she asked, like I’d suggested throwing her in a snake pit.
“There’s some very nice ones in—”
“No!” she whispered, looking horrified.
“Plenty of vampires stay at human hotels,” I said, which was true for those who couldn’t afford the Club’s staggering rates.
“The sun—I can’t—I’ll die! I’ll die!” She grabbed me by the shoulder in a grip that threatened to crush bone. I pried her fingers off, and she just sat there, huddled in the passenger seat, looking devastated. And I began to worry about whether it was such a great idea, after all.
Vamps did use human hotels when up against it. But it was dangerous. Few hotel curtains were constructed to properly block all those dangerous daylight rays. And even sleeping in the bathroom, as uncomfortable as that was, might not be enough. All it would take was one careless maid ignoring a do-not-disturb sign, and Christine would be toast.
I could take her to vamp central and toss her out on the curb, and technically, that was exactly what I ought to do. But Louis-Cesare was there facing trial for murder, and he didn’t need another headache right now. And Radu had said there were no vampire- friendly rooms to be had in town, thanks to the damn races.
“I’ll be very quiet,” she whispered, as if she somehow knew I was weakening. “You’ll never know I’m there.”
“It’s not me we have to worry about,” I said, thinking of a certain half dragon with a serious vampire phobia.
I really hoped she wasn’t hungry.
CHAPTER 24
Forty-five minutes later, I pulled into my street. I was exhausted and cramped, and a bag or something had shifted when I had to stop for a red light suddenly, and it had been poking me in the back ever since. I wanted a drink or three and bed and I wanted them now.
Only that wasn’t looking too likely.
“Crap,” I said with feeling, almost standing on the brakes.
“What? What’s wrong now?” Ray demanded. His body was squashed in back between half a dozen suitcases, two garment bags, a trunk and five hatboxes, with the duffel on his lap.
“We have a welcoming committee.”
We were maybe a third of a block from the house, so I couldn’t see them very well. But someone was there, all right. Make that a lot of someones, I thought, as more shadows broke away from the house and drifted into the street, trying to get a look at us.
Ray’s body held his head up
so it could see, and the tiny eyes almost bugged out. “Shit. It’s the master.”
“Cheung?” I’d almost forgotten about him. Too bad the reverse didn’t appear to be true.
“What are you waiting for?” Ray asked, starting to sound a little frantic. “Go, go, go!”
“I can’t go,” I snapped. “Your master has a dozen guys across the driveway.”
“I didn’t mean go in,” Ray said, like I might be slow. “I meant, get us out of here.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“Why the hell not?”
“The wards have held so far, but there’s at least a couple hours to dawn.”
“Which is a good argument for not getting trapped in there!”
“There are already people trapped in there. And Cheung has to know that. His Hounds can smell them from here.”
“Life sucks,” Ray said callously.
“It’s going to suck more for you if he takes hostages.”
“You’d give me up?”
“In a nanosecond,” I said, switching gears.
“I thought we’d developed a bond here!”
I didn’t even bother to respond to that. “Get ready to run,” I told him, just as one of Cheung’s men got close enough to recognize me. And then decision time was over.
A dozen black streaks started our way, and I floored it, aiming for the driveway and the line of vamps stretched across it. I didn’t really think I’d make it through; playing red rover with a line of masters is not a good bet. But I didn’t need to get through. I just needed to get close enough to the wards to make it inside before they caught me.
A couple of the nearest vamps grabbed the passenger door, ripping it half off its hinges. Christine screamed, which didn’t help, and her heavy trunk tumbled out on top of them, which did. But the rest of Cheung’s boys figured out where I was going and surged that way, to bolster their buddies in the drive. So I swerved at the last minute and cut across the lawn, throwing up grass and mud in my wake, and fishtailed to a stop just inside the wards.
