Ride the Storm

by Karen Chance

  “Is anything in there?” I asked breathlessly, unwilling to hope.

  “Of course there is. I said so, didn’t I?” Laura demanded.

  “I think so,” Mircea murmured, pulling out a decaying velvet bag.

  And spilling the contents onto his palm: tarnished silver and gleaming gold, and dark rubies flashing in the ghost light.

  And then more brilliantly, under the light of a dozen candles, because the storm had knocked the power out. But they lit my room well enough, as Mircea piled my hair on top of my head and clasped the best of the jewels around my neck. “There. What do you think?”

  I just stared. I’d never thought of myself as pretty before, never once in my life. As far as I knew, no one had. But now . . .

  He dropped his hands to my shoulders and kissed my cheek. “What a lovely woman you’re going to make someday.”

  And in that moment, watching him stand tall and strong and handsome behind me, I believed it.

  * * *

  “I wanted to bring you to my court so badly,” he told me, as I surfaced from my own memory. “But I didn’t dare. The fear was . . . debilitating. The thought of the Circle claiming you, of you going into the Pythian Court, of you becoming another of those smiling girls who only knew one word . . .

  “I left you with Tony, whose court was not watched as mine was, whose court was barely watched at all. I had the geis put on you, to keep you safe, until the power would pass . . . to someone.

  “It seemed a long shot. Lady Phemonoe had an heir, a capable girl, by all accounts. I had no reason to believe she would not inherit. But hope is not reasonable—hope is terrifying and exhilarating and devastating and, frankly, sometimes stupid. But I clung to it anyway. I lived in hope.

  “Lady Phemonoe died. The power passed. And it passed to you.”

  “Why not tell me all this then?” I rasped. “I’ve had it for months—”

  “And for months I’ve tried. I almost did, that night in London—do you remember? When I told you about my family?”

  I did. He’d rambled on and on, about how his parents had died, how he felt responsible, a hundred things. He’d finally gotten to a point: that he worried over me, perhaps excessively, because of others he had lost.

  But he never told me who.

  He never said her name.

  “I wanted to a dozen times,” he said now. “But I was afraid. Even hope can die, and I had clung to mine for so long it had become a comfort, a crutch, almost a friend. I had become used to telling myself: someday. Someday you will find the words. Someday your moment will come. Yet, once it did, I found that the charming words choked me—the easy smiles died on my lips. I wanted to ask, but once I did . . .”

  “Hope was gone.” My voice was hoarse.

  He nodded. “One way or another. And so I found excuses for saying nothing. And there were plenty of them, and none pretenses. The war, the consul’s demands, family business—a thousand things.”

  “Then why now?”

  “You know why. No one has ever waged a war like this, Cassie. No one ever thought to do so. But we have no choice, and so we will go. But before I do, I need an answer. Before I do, I need a yes.”

  “To what? What do you want, Mircea?” I already suspected—hell, I knew—but I needed to hear it. Needed to know I wasn’t going mad.

  “A simple thing. An easy thing. I caused the deaths of my family, but could not save them. Cannot, even with your help, for they were killed too publicly, in front of too many witnesses. I am not a fool; I know they are lost. And in fairness, my parents knew the risks when they took the throne. Someone else did not.”

  “You want me to save your mistress.” It wasn’t even a question. It was all over his face.

  * * *

  The woman had brown eyes and black hair that spread out over the pillow. He was looking down at her as they rocked together, moving inside her in a slow, smooth stroking, down, away, back, down, away, back. Her hands splayed across the small of his back, her dark eyes closed. Her lips parted as she rose to meet him, her throat and breasts glistening. He lowered his mouth to the hollow above her collarbone.

  And she whispered a single, devastating word.

  * * *

  “Not your mistress,” I said numbly. “Your wife.”

  “How did you—”

  “Your wife?”

  Mircea licked his lips, but he didn’t deny it. “We married very young, and in a time of constant conflict, when I was frequently gone. All in all, I doubt we spent a whole year together. But she will always be the mother of my child. My only child, Cassie,” he said, coming out of his chair, going to one knee in front of me. “The only one I will ever have, the one who has suffered so much, more than I can explain to you. The one who deserves to know the mother she lost—and she can.”

  “Mircea—”

  “My wife did not change history; my wife was a peasant girl who died a terrible, unfair, undeserved death. Taking her out of the timeline, bringing her here—what will it hurt? Who will it harm? How is it any different from her dying as she did? It will change nothing—”

  “You can’t know that!”

  “I can! We proved such a thing was possible, with Radu—”

  “That . . .” I stopped, chills breaking out on my skin. “That . . . was a dress rehearsal?”

  “No.” Mircea’s eyes widened. “My brother was . . . We were already going to the same place he was imprisoned, you and I, on that errand of the senate’s. It was the perfect opportunity, a chance that might never come again—”

  I got up. I couldn’t sit there anymore.

  Mircea caught my hands. “What would be the harm? Tell me! None of the others would say. They said no, no, no, but never a reason! How will the rescue of one woman, one innocent woman, make any difference? And I know how to find her now. Vlad wouldn’t tell me. He told me about the Pythias, that they had the power to save her, but would only tell me where she died if I helped him. But I couldn’t put that monster back in power, and he wouldn’t help me until the crown was back on his head—”

  “I understand.”

  “Yes, you do.” Mircea nodded. “You saw how I kept him alive for so long, waiting him out, yet he was implacable. He knew I needed a day, a place, a time, and he wouldn’t give it to me. Wanted to force me to kill him without it, a final victory. A way to punish me for refusing him the crown. But with your help—”

  I pulled away and walked a few feet, dazed. I had nowhere to go, but I needed some space. And some air; the room was stifling.

  I felt him come up behind me, but I didn’t turn around. “You told me once that Radu was your only family,” I said. “Yet you had a daughter—”

  “A daughter who was not part of my life. Who was more than half-mad, who despised me, and saw me as little as possible. Perhaps once a decade, and only when I forced the issue—”

  “But she existed.”

  “And still does. Don’t make her pay for my mistake. I should have told you about her, but I was afraid that would bring up a conversation about her mother, and I—every time I would think I should tell her, I have to tell her, I would also think, this is my last chance. If a girl I helped to bring up, who knows me, who—”

  He stopped, but not in time.

  “Who loves you,” I finished for him, turning around, my voice breaking. “And I do. Because you made sure I would. To get that yes.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, my feelings changed—”

  “And now I’m supposed to go get your wife?”

  “She isn’t my wife, Cassie! Till death do us part was quite literal in my case. But she is my only chance to atone for youthful stupidity that destroyed my entire family! She died a tragic death because of me. I can’t save my parents, I can’t put my family back together, but I can save her.”

  “An
d if I do this,” I said, my voice trembling with something I couldn’t name, “if I give you your yes, you’ll give me the potion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now? Right now?”

  “I will get it for you. I swear it—”

  “Then you don’t have it.”

  “Our contact in the Circle was purged with Jonas’ coup. And even had he not been, he said he would have no chance to get any more. But I will find—”

  I shifted.

  Chapter Forty-one

  I landed in a corridor somewhere. I wasn’t sure where. The pain of a shift I couldn’t afford was debilitating, sending me stumbling into a wall and dropping to my knees. Or maybe that was something else.

  I stayed there, in semidarkness, breathing hard. I felt stunned, sick, more than slightly nauseous. I’d heard that old saying, about words feeling like a strike to the gut, but had never really understood. How could emotion hit like a fist?

  Like this, I thought, just like this, fighting to breathe while scenes and images and clues I’d ignored or pushed away crowded in from all sides.

  Mircea visiting Tony’s when I was a kid, and staying for a year. A man with worldwide business interests, a huge family, responsibilities to the senate, yet he takes off a year to sit in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Even Marlowe hadn’t understood it.

  I’d overheard them talking while on a trip to the past. Jonas had wanted to ransack Tony’s office for something he hoped could help in the war. And while he was doing that, I’d overheard a conversation between Mircea and Marlowe, the latter having shown up after his friend had lingered at his disreputable child’s house for months.

  Marlowe hadn’t been happy to discover that I was there, or that my mother had once been heir to the Pythian throne. It had sounded like he thought Mircea was holding out on him, and hiding me in the boonies to avoid sharing a potential Pythia with the rest of the senate. There’d also been something about all those Pythias Mircea had visited, but I’d had to make a run for it before I heard the whole story.

  Well, I had it now.

  A pretty little thing, I thought, remembering what he’d said about Eudoxia. Like he’d called Isabeau an auburn-haired beauty. Had he charmed them, too? Had he spent time with them, talked to them, held them? Had he—

  Of course he had. Like he’d spent a year at Tony’s, charming a lonely little girl. God, it must have been so easy! Nobody had ever spent time with me before; most scarcely seemed to notice me. My friends were Rafe, one of Tony’s vampires who was rarely there; my governess, Eugenie; and Laura, a little ghost girl I used to talk to when she showed herself; because there was no one else.

  Until suddenly, there was. A handsome, charismatic stranger, with laughing dark eyes and a kind face, and—and I was panting again, holding on to the wall, fingers curling into my palms because I’d loved him, God, I had! From the start, from the first moment he’d smiled at me; he’d changed everything.

  Anyone else would have been grooming me, with an eye on the future, but not Mircea. He wasn’t stupid. It’s a little hard to tell someone in love with you that you want her to go retrieve your wife.

  No, he’d wanted me to think well of him, to remember him fondly, to be willing to do him a hell of a favor someday. He’d never realized that the affection-starved child had fallen in love with him. If he had, he wouldn’t have used the geis, which thrives on emotion, as a protection spell. Not when it can magnify, if something goes wrong, binding two people into a permanent master-and-slave arrangement, with the “master” being whoever had the most power.

  Mircea had backed off quickly when he discovered that, years later, after I was an adult. Because, with the Pythian power on my side, who would be master and who slave? But that was after the spell had been doubled, and was close to driving him mad. He’d been glad to cooperate with me to get it lifted, to find a way out of the trap he’d inadvertently laid for himself. But by then the damage had been done, hadn’t it?

  By then I was wearing his mark.

  My fingers found it again, the two little bumps. Just two tiny marks that, to a human, would barely even be visible, but to a vampire were as good as a wedding ring. But he hadn’t meant to give them to me, had he? I didn’t need to guess about that; I knew.

  The Pythian Court had modernized in a lot of ways, but it had holdovers, too, sacred rituals, ancient magic. The Pythias were the brides of Apollo, and the ritual for the passing of the power included an avatar in the form of an acceptable man. One who stood in for the god at the wedding—and bedding—ceremony.

  And Mircea had chosen someone else.

  Of course he had. He was playing the part of the avuncular uncle, my childhood protector, my friend. So Tomas had been selected, a vampire I knew and liked, and Mircea had stepped gracefully aside. Until the geis kicked in, binding us in a marriage that he’d never worked for, never wanted, because he wanted someone else.

  He wanted her.

  I swallowed, trying to deny it, but how could I? I’d been so flattered, but I’d always wondered, even as a child: what did he see in me? Just a skinny thing with scraped knees and bruised elbows, because I couldn’t walk across a room without falling down. A crazy thing, who talked to ghosts more than people, because people didn’t seem to like me so much, did they? Except for Mircea . . .

  I sobbed; I couldn’t help it. My heart hurt—God, it hurt. I’d loved him, I loved him still, and he’d never cared about me. It had been an act, to get back some woman who’d been dead five centuries, while I was here, right now, and—

  A phone rang. It took me a moment to realize that it was coming from me, since the ring tone was wrong. Because it wasn’t mine.

  It was Mircea’s.

  The one he’d lent me to call Caleb, but I couldn’t call Caleb, and then I couldn’t call anyone, because it was shattering in a million pieces on the opposite wall. I looked at it for a moment, broken into shards, and then I crawled over and gathered up the pieces, cradling them to me, I didn’t know why. I couldn’t put them back together, any more than I could fix this. Any more than I could fix anything.

  “Cassie.”

  I looked up, and only saw a blur. But it was a blur with a woman’s voice—a familiar one. Rian.

  For a moment, I couldn’t understand what she was doing in New York. And then I realized: she wasn’t. She was where she’d been for the last few days, ever since Caleb had had to go back to work: guarding Pritkin’s body. I’d shifted back to Dante’s but hadn’t realized it because the corridor was so dark.

  Trust Casanova to save on lighting, I thought, and laughed harshly.

  “Are you all right?” Rian, who was in bodily form, crouched awkwardly beside me. She moved so gracefully in spirit, but she hadn’t had a body for that long, and she wasn’t so good with it yet. It was like a teenager trying to learn to drive and bumping into a curb, or in her case, the floor, when she abruptly sat down, taking the last foot or so all at once. And looking surprised.

  But her soft, dark eyes and expressive face were the same as ever as she gazed at me.

  I didn’t have an answer. There wasn’t one she wanted to hear.

  She took the phone from my hand. There was a text frozen on the screen. I didn’t know what it said, but I guessed it was enough.

  “Oh, Cassie,” she whispered.

  “He intended to ask me to go back for her,” I said dully. “Probably right after Radu. I didn’t know what I was doing then, what being Pythia even meant. It would have been easy to talk me into it. But he didn’t get the chance before the geis complicated things. And later, after everything we’d gone through, the pain and the triumph and . . . everything, how could he ask me then? How could he ask me to retrieve his wife?”

  Rian didn’t say anything. I was oddly grateful for that.

  “Then the consul got involved, separating us, because of her paranoia, and g
iving him no chance to lock me down. And he needed that, didn’t he? Had to be sure of me, sure I’d do anything for him, and he wasn’t sure. That’s why he was so upset over that army. Not just because the senate wanted it, but because it was the first time I’d ever said it. It was the first time I ever told him no.”

  There was more silence for a while, long enough for me to start to feel ashamed. I couldn’t afford to just sit here. I had—God, so much to do. But I didn’t know how to do any of it, and for the first time in all this, for the first time since the whole crazy journey began, I was starting to think the words. The ones I’d never allowed myself to say.

  The ones that seemed more likely every minute.

  “They get obsessed, the older ones,” Rian said softly.

  I lifted my head. “What?”

  “I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen it in Carlos, although he won’t admit it. But it’s there, a burning need for the respect he never had in life. It’s the root of almost all he does, even how he dresses. The nobles of his youth, the caballeros he grew up with—you could tell them by their dress. They were so flashy. . . .”

  I wondered what the hell she was talking about.

  “It’s why he so wants this hotel to work,” she continued. “Not for the money, but for what it represents. When he was young, you were only important if you were a landholder, someone of means. You were looked up to, almost worshipped by the small folk, and envied by the impoverished gentry, of which his family was a part. Now it’s prosperous businessmen who hold that position, and he so wants to be one, Cassie! And needs to be, in truth.”

  “Needs to be?”

  She nodded. “It’s as I said: they get obsessed, the older ones. It’s something different with each of them, each one I’ve known, at least: wealth, beauty, fame, power. . . . But it’s always something that eluded them in life, something that caused them great pain, something they feel they must overcome.”