by Karen Chance
“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, an
d 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.
Most vampires would have moved away or at least flinched. Mircea just looked up at me, eyes bright, but no longer with amusement. There was something dark in those depths, something fierce and possessive that made my breath come faster and my hand tighten over the pulse that beat strong and steady under my fingertips.
His heart didn’t need to beat, of course, but he knew I liked it, so he rarely forgot. Like he always remembered to breathe when I was around, to blink, to do all the things that made him seem human, even though he hadn’t technically held that title for five hundred years. But he was human to me.
He would always be human to me.
“You shouldn’t look at me like that when we are in public, dulceață,” he murmured, stroking his hand up and down my leg. “It makes me wish to cut the evening short.”
“How short?”
Those fingers suddenly tightened. “Very.”
And for a moment, that sounded like a really good idea. Really, really good. But if I left with Mircea now, I knew how the rest of the evening would go. And it wouldn’t involve a lot of talking.
I licked my lips and stepped away a few paces. “You were telling me about your mother?”
Mircea didn’t say anything for a moment, but when I looked back, he didn’t appear annoyed. If anything, his body seemed to have relaxed, and he was smiling. “Princess Cneajna of Moldavia,” he said easily. “Tall, with raven hair and green eyes. Radu took after her, not in coloring but in a certain delicacy of feature.”
“What about you?”
“They said I resembled her more in temperament, although I never saw it. She was more . . . fiery. More highly strung. I remember her as beautiful and passionate, proud and ambitious.”
I bit my lip. I thought that described Mircea perfectly.
“I always thought I was more like my father,” he told me.
“How so?”
Mircea’s head tilted. “He was a . . . prudent sort of man, a diplomat, for King Sigismund of Hungary. He was around your age when he was sent as a special envoy to Constantinople to discuss a possible merger between the Roman Catholic faith and the Orthodox. It never happened, of course, but he impressed the Holy Roman Emperor with his tact and judgment.” Mircea smiled. “Although probably not for his piety.”
“He wasn’t religious?”
“No more so than was politically expedient. My mother was the devout one in the family. Forced her poor sons into the care of the Dominicans for part of our education.” He shuddered.
I smiled. “You don’t like monks?”
“I always have suspicions of any man who can willingly turn his back on the finest of God’s creations.”
Brown velvet eyes met mine, and a shot of something warm and electric shot right through me, making my pulse pound harder in my throat—and other places. I decided I really wanted that drink now. Luckily, another of the ubiquitous floating trays was headed my way.
I moved forward and reached for a glass, at the same time as a man on the other side. My hand brushed the flute, toppling it and sending a splash of golden liquid onto his pristine white shirt. He looked down and I looked up, an apology on my lips. And that was where it stayed, as both of us froze in stunned recognition.
Because we knew each other, and neither one of us was supposed to be there.
Chapter Nine
I stared at the thin, vaguely horsey features and pale blue eyes of the mage in front of me, and hoped I was imagining things. He looked a little different in a well-fitted tux instead of seventeenth-century slops, his sandy blond hair slicked back instead of falling messily around his face. But it was him. The guy I’d once helped Agnes apprehend before he could blow history to kingdom come.
If I’d had any doubts, they were erased when he suddenly gave a screech, knocked the tray of drinks at me and bolted. A choking mass of thick, blue-black smoke boiled through the room as I stumbled back. Someone fired a gun and someone screamed. And then everything slowed down—literally.
The whole room suddenly looked like it was on slowmotion replay. I fell back into Mircea, my gown fluttering lazily around me, as the serving tray arced high in the air above. Glasses scattered, golden liquid sloshed and the silver surface flashed in the candlelight for a long moment....
And then sped back up and hit the floorboards with a crash. But it was barely audible over the sound of rapid-fire gunshots, breaking glass and the collective panic of a crowd unused to danger. Not that I was having much of a different reaction, and I was plenty used to it. I hit the ground instinctively, only to have Mircea grab me around the waist and jerk me back.
That was lucky, because the crowd took that moment to decide on the better part of valor, and there was a stampede. Ladies in fine gowns and men in tuxes forgot about elegance, threw away decorum and fought to be the first out the door. The place where I’d been kneeling a second ago was suddenly a mass of swirling hems and pounding feet.
“What happened?” Mircea asked, pushing me behind him.
“Agnes,” I gasped. The smoke burned at the back of my throat, making it hard to talk, hard to breathe. “She can manipulate time for short periods, stop it . . . slow it down . . . and she must have recognized him—”
“Recognized who?”
“The guy from the Guild,” I said, desperately trying to spot him in the crowd. But the smoke made it difficult to see anything, and most of the guests were taller than I was. I hiked up my skirts and scrambled onto a nearby table.
“What guild?” Mircea asked, but I didn’t answer. I could see over the crowd now, but not through the smoke. But there was something going on near the back of the room—spell fire lit up the haze in spots, like strobes on a dance floor. And most of the colors were in the red and orange range—offensive magic, war spells; not the soothing blues and greens of the protective end of the spectrum.
I hopped off the table and ran.
Mircea grabbed me before I’d gone a yard—and then flung us to the floor as a stray cu
rse blistered the air overhead. It crashed into the window behind us, shattering the glass and sending fire running up the brocade curtains. More smoke, thick and smothering, added to the mix, threatening what little air was left in the room.
“Let me go!” I choked. “He’ll kill her!”
“Kill who?”
“My mother!”
“Who will?”
“The asshole from the Guild!”
“Listen to me.” Warm hands framed my face and dark eyes met mine. I felt the usual reassurance Mircea’s presence caused ramp up a few notches, soothing my fears, calming my mind—and depriving me of my edge. “Whatever is going on, it doesn’t succeed,” he assured me. “Nothing of importance happened tonight. My men were told specifically—”
“Nothing did happen,” I said, furious because I no longer was. “But something is happening. And if you don’t listen—”
But Mircea wasn’t. He’d pulled me to my feet as we argued and slipped an arm around my waist. And now he started to push his way through the crowd toward the nearest exit.
And then, just as suddenly, started to back up again.
I found myself walking backward, too, unable to control my body’s movements despite the fact that they were the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. I tried to talk but I couldn’t do that, either, except for some garbled sounds that didn’t make sense. For a moment, I panicked, sure I was possessed again—until I caught sight of the drapes.
A minute before, the dark red damask had been a border of flame around the window, embroidered designs standing out harshly against the rapidly darkening fabric, fat tassels writhing as they were quickly consumed. Now the opposite was true. Clean, whole cloth blossomed out of flames that were shrinking, falling back, forming into a ball that flew through the air back to whoever had cast it.
The fleeing crowd was also moving the wrong way, panicked faces streaming away from me as I jumped on the table, jumped off, hit the floor and then was back on my feet, staring at a wide-eyed mage with champagne on his shirt. And then I was in Mircea’s arms, facing the window as if nothing had ever happened. Because it hadn’t yet.