by Karen Chance
And a couple utilitarian cabinets along the far wall.
A record scratched in my head.
I was still staring at them a moment later, when a fat little vamp with a bad black toupee came bustling in through the door carrying an incongruously modern-looking electronic pad. “Type of magic?” he asked without preamble.
Kit looked at Mircea. Mircea looked at me. Kit scowled again.
“Mircea. Is there something you want to tell me?” he demanded.
“Um,” I said, trying not to look at the cabinets, “that depends. What kind of magic did the gods use?”
“What?” Mircea asked sharply.
Kit scowled harder. “I said—”
“Not you,” Mircea told him brusquely.
And caused the curly-haired vampire to flush almost as red as his coat. “Mircea—”
“Well, what did you think it was?” I asked, a little defensively. Because Mircea wasn’t looking happy.
“An extension of your power, some new facet you were exploring. But you’re telling me the gods are involved?”
“The gods?” Kit asked, his voice going up. “Mircea, what the hell—”
“It—it was mostly demons,” I said, hoping to defuse the situation.
Annnnnnd made it worse.
“Demons?” Mircea repeated, frowning.
“Um—”
“What kind of demons?”
“Well, sort of . . . a little of all kinds. It was the demon council—”
“The council?”
Kit started to say something, but Mircea shushed him with a gesture. Kit did not look happy about that. Mircea looked even less so. But it wasn’t like he was going to be able to help me if he didn’t know the truth.
“My mother wanted to talk to the council,” I explained. “And she used this seiðr spell to do it—”
“Your mother is dead.”
“Yes, well, that’s why she needed a spell,” I said awkwardly.
In fact, she’d needed it to address the council on behalf of Pritkin. Not that she’d done much of that. In fact, she’d barely mentioned him. She’d mostly talked about the war, and how we needed to ally if we had any chance of winning this. Which was true, but not helpful, since nobody else seemed to agree.
“But the spell is on you,” Mircea pointed out. Because Mircea is not stupid.
“Yes, well, I was sort of . . . channeling . . . for her,” I explained, as little as possible.
He just looked at me.
I looked steadily back. Because, sure, Mircea, I was going to talk first. I’d lived with vampires for most of my life; give me credit for something.
“We don’t know the type. Possibly used by the gods,” Mircea told them, his eyes still on me.
“Ah yes,” the little vamp said, a smart pen going to town on the small screen, almost too fast to follow. “That does simplify . . . ah. Here it is. ‘Seiðr,’ meaning ‘a cord, string, or snare,’ a form of old Norse magic and shamanism concerned with making visionary journeys.”
“Is it dangerous?” Mircea demanded.
“To which party?”
“To either party!”
The fat little vamp blinked. He did not appear to be used to hearing that tone from the Senate’s senior diplomat. “One moment,” he said, and started stabbing about with the pen again.
I risked another glance at the cabinets.
They were ugly old things, steel gray and slightly beat up along the bottom where too many feet had closed them too hard. They were the sort of catchall pieces that could be found in any office—well, any office that didn’t care about impressing clients. Hell, they could have been found in plenty of garages, holding old paint cans and half-used bottles of motor oil.
But that wasn’t what they were holding at the moment.
I knew that because I’d raided them once.
At least, I was pretty sure I had. They looked the same, but the old ones had been at the Senate’s former headquarters. Which was currently little more than a scorch mark on the desert due to having been an early casualty of the war. And considering how that had gone down, I hadn’t expected anybody to have waited around to rescue some old metal cabinets.
But then, they hadn’t had to wait, had they? They hadn’t had to empty and then repack them like a human, because they weren’t human. All a vamp had to do was snatch one onto his shoulder and walk off with it, which made packing in a hurry a whole lot easier, didn’t it?
And left me with a dilemma.
Because, if they were the same ones, they contained stuff the Senate had been squirrelling away for centuries. Like potent weapons they’d confiscated from other people so they could use them themselves. And ancient relics with powers they thought might come in useful someday. And old enemies trapped in magical snares . . .
And a potion called the Tears of Apollo.
“Hm, it’s all very vague,” the little vamp was saying. “A good deal about altering the course of fate . . . traveling in spirit form throughout the Nine Worlds . . . seems to have originated with the Vanir, the old Norse fertility gods. They taught it to the Æsir, the gods of battle, who eventually communicated it to the Scandinavian covens . . .”
“Can it be removed?” Mircea asked.
“Oh, certainly. The caster would merely have to—”
“Not by the caster. By one of the other people involved in the spell.”
“Oh, well, then. No.”
“I beg your pardon?” Mircea said mildly, but the vamp flushed.
“I simply meant—that is to say—well, you did ask about dangers earlier—”
“And?”
“And, well, that is the main one. In fact, it is the only one, at least that I can find so far. I can check the Edda, and of course I will, although frankly it’s not likely to be very useful in this case. The Vanir weren’t well liked, you know, by the Christian scholars who wrote most of the accounts, long after the fact, of the old Norse religion. The Æsir were the strong, manly, warlike types that the scholars’ own culture valued. But the Vanir . . . well, their association with fertility was considered a bit . . . effeminate . . . and therefore their magic—of which seiðr was a prominent part—is not well documented. It was considered somewhat beyond the pale, if you follow me.”
“No.”
The vamp blinked. “No?”
“No.”
“I—well, that is to say, I thought I was being rather plain—”
“You were mistaken.”
“I—I merely meant—that is to say—”
“For Christ’s sake, man!” Marlowe exploded. “Stop saying ‘that is to say’ and just say it!”
“Well, I’m trying to!” The little guy had more backbone than I’d expected. “I am trying to point out that seiðr wasn’t named after a snare for nothing! It is said that the gods would establish a link with someone they didn’t like, and then . . . hang up the phone. So to speak. And leave that person forever in a dream world, all alone, to eventually wither away from starvation, thirst, or madness . . .” He trailed off.
“The gods were a lot of fun,” I said.
Mircea ignored that, but his lips tightened. “But that is not the case here,” he pointed out. “No one has ‘hung up’ anything. That is the problem.”
“It is?” I asked.
“It is?” the man repeated, without knowing it.
“Yes!” Mircea told him.
“Why is it?” I demanded.
“Why is that?” the man asked.
Mircea closed his eyes.
“You don’t like me being in your head, do you?” I asked, light dawning. I’d been so freaked out about the opposite, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might feel the same. And now that it did . . . “Why don’t you?”
“You didn’t seem ple
ased when the shoe was on the other foot,” he pointed out.
“This is getting surreal,” Marlowe murmured. “Even for this place.”
“Cassie is here—mentally,” Mircea told him.
“I’d gathered that.”
“She seems to find it difficult to understand why I do not wish to have her in my head, unannounced, at any time she pleases—”
Marlowe gave a bark of a laugh. “Oh, this should be fun.”
“It isn’t fun!” I said, looking at Mircea. “And I wasn’t happy because I thought you were doing it on purpose. I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t know I was doing it at all!”
“Yet here we are.”
I felt my brows draw together, which was stupid because I didn’t have brows right now. But it felt like I did, and it felt like they had just knitted. “You’re blaming me for this?”
“No. I am merely pointing out that it is a security risk—”
“How? I thought we were on the same side.”
“We are on the same side—”
“Then how is it a risk for me to be in your head?”
“It’s a privacy issue—”
“A minute ago it was a security issue.”
“It is possible for it to be both!” he snapped.
I blinked.
“I’m starting to wish I had popcorn,” Marlowe murmured.
“You can leave,” Mircea informed him.
A dark eyebrow raised. “This is my office. You already threw me out of yours.”
“This really has you freaked out, doesn’t it?” I stared at Mircea in amazement. I’d been pissed, sure, when I thought he was tiptoeing through my head. But he didn’t look pissed. He looked almost . . . “What are you afraid of?” I asked, hardly believing I was saying the words.
“I am not afraid. I simply think—”
“Yes, you are. I’ve seen you fight a whole squadron of dark mages, and look like you were enjoying yourself. I saw you be electrocuted and not lose your cool. And now you’re freaking out because—”
“I am not ‘freaking out’!”
“Well, what would you call it?”
“I—I should go,” the small vamp whispered, edging toward the door. But Mircea grabbed him by the front of his natty brown vest.
“You. Tell me how to remove this!”
“But—but I already—that is to say—”
“If you utter that phrase one more time—”
“God does exist, and he loves me,” Marlowe said, bright-eyed.
“Tell me how!” Mircea roared.
“Mircea!” I said, appalled.
He shot me an exasperated look. “I am not threatening him, Cassie! He is a second-level master and under the protection of a senator. And he is expected to know his business—”
“I do know my business!” the man said, brushing himself down huffily when Mircea released him. “But as I explained—in some detail, I might add—no one knows much about seiðr. It isn’t used anymore. It’s too expensive, magically speaking. The gods found it useful to communicate with one another, even across different worlds. But for humans—well, a phone call is rather easier!”
“A phone call is also voluntary,” Mircea pointed out.
He really did not look happy.
And I suddenly felt stupidly hurt. Or maybe not so stupidly. I wasn’t sure. This was my first big romance—my first romance period, really, unless you counted one night with a friend to complete a spell and keep from dying, and I somehow didn’t think you were supposed to count that. But this . . . this was supposed to count.
I felt my face crumple.
And Mircea suddenly sighed and ran a hand over his own face.
“You manage to make me forget all my training,” he told me ruefully.
“You’re not supposed to need training with me,” I whispered. And I wasn’t crying, damn it. I wasn’t!
Mircea came over and pulled me against his chest, a strong hand in my hair. “I’m not good at relationships,” I told him, sounding muffled.
“I hate to tell you, but it doesn’t get any easier,” he told me back.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” Marlowe said, sighing, and headed for the door, taking the wide-eyed little vamp along with him.
“I’ll—I’ll look for a solution,” the vamp threw over his shoulder as he was hustled out.
“Do that,” Mircea said dryly.
“Don’t step on the rugs,” Marlowe said, and then they were gone.
Chapter Twenty-nine
“What happens if we step on the rugs?” I asked.
“Probably nothing.” Mircea sat in Marlowe’s vacated chair and pulled me onto his lap, maybe because there weren’t any others. “It’s a running joke.”
“What is? That his rugs will kill you?”
“That everything in here will kill you. Kit has a reputation for having truly vicious wards, to the point that anything new that appears in his office is automatically suspect. He began to notice that people avoided even stepping on his rugs. And he . . . found it amusing.”
“So he bought more of them?”
Mircea nodded. “I think he enjoys seeing everyone have to wind their way through them.”
“But . . . you still don’t step on them,” I pointed out.
“With Kit, it is always best to err on the side of caution.”
Great.
I let my head rest on his shoulder.
We just stayed like that for a while.
I had a ton of questions, and he probably did, too. And there were so many things we needed to talk about that I’d lost count. But I didn’t want to do that right now. I didn’t want to do anything. Except sit here like this, just like this, because how often did we get downtime anymore? How often did we get a chance to be just us, just Mircea and Cassie, instead of senator and Pythia? How often did we get a chance to be together at all?
I realized that I’d missed him this last week, or whatever it had been. With time travel, I never knew exactly how much time had passed anymore. But I knew I’d missed the sound of his voice, the feel of his hands, the way he had of immediately making things seem easy, simple, right. The feeling of comfort and security that enveloped me like a warm blanket whenever we were together. I’d missed this, I thought, as he kissed my neck.
And then bent me backward over the chair arm to kiss my breast instead.
Sharp fangs scraped across the nipple, not enough to hurt, just enough to let me know he could. It furled tight, tight under his tongue, and a shiver of anticipation ran through me. He bit down, hard enough to draw blood this time, and I felt the room revolve around me. Like I was already light-headed from blood loss when I wasn’t, when I couldn’t be, when I wasn’t even here.
But it felt real anyway, like when he tugged the towel away and bent me over the desk, because there was no room on top. And entered me thickly, sweetly, less urgently than before but just as good. Oh God, so good.
He was big, intimidatingly so if I was watching him. It was easier this way, the sweet burn of him overriding everything else. I shivered and he kissed my back, tracing the spinal cord with his lips, and only caused me to tremble harder.
“I’ve dreamed of taking you like this,” he whispered, breath warm in my ear, like the body draped over top of me.
“Does Kit know?”
Mircea laughed, and it echoed down into me, making me gasp and squirm. “His office didn’t actually factor into it,” he clarified.
“And what will he say when he finds out what we used it for?”
“Nothing, if he knows what’s good for him.”
It was my turn to laugh, until he shifted position, sliding fully into me. And then pulled me suddenly back against him, claiming a final half inch I hadn’t even known I had. And before I could recove
r from that, his lips found the marks on my neck, the ones he’d left there, but he didn’t puncture the skin.
He didn’t have to.
The old wound, long since closed, to the point that there was hardly even a trace anymore, opened for him like it had been waiting for his return, his own private orifice. His fangs slid in, clean, painless, easy, and my blood welled up, his for the taking. Like my body, like everything.
He began to feed, something he hadn’t done in a long time, and my whole body stiffened in surprise. And then contracted, beginning to pulse in time to the suction of his mouth, to the throb of his length inside me, to the feel of his hand between my legs, clenching. He wasn’t doing anything yet, wasn’t even moving.
And yet I was shivering and shaking, on the brink of orgasm with barely a touch.
“I dreamed about bending you over a table,” he growled into my ear. “A chair, a desk—anything you please. And taking you until you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t walk, couldn’t remember your name.”
Halfway there, I thought, slightly hysterically.
“Careful,” I gasped. “You know what happens in our dreams lately.”
I’d been thinking, okay, fantasizing, a few nights ago about Mircea, and suddenly, there he’d been. Or there I’d been, because it had sort of felt like I was suddenly in his shower on the opposite side of the country. But I hadn’t tried to go there, much less to put a spell on him. And I still didn’t know how I had.
“That wasn’t a dream,” he murmured, warm tongue licking the blood from my neck. “I was pleasuring myself, thinking of you, and there you were. I thought I was going mad for a moment, in the best possible way.”
“But you didn’t say anything,” I said, trying to concentrate and mostly failing.
Full-body shivers will do that to you.
“No more did you,” he pointed out.
“I wasn’t . . . sure . . . I hadn’t imagined it,” I said, trying not to squirm. Because he still wasn’t moving. If there was any doubt that vampires were superhuman, this ought to cinch it. No human man could just stand there like that. Could be buried in my body, to the point that I could feel his heartbeat echo my own, deep inside my flesh. And then just stay there.
