by Karen Chance
That it was over open air.
“Shit!” I yelled, and shifted—at the same time that Mircea did. The two shifts, which must have been in opposite directions, counteracted each other, and we went nowhere. Except straight down, because gravity doesn’t care about magic.
We plummeted, I screamed again, because I do not intend to die with dignity, and Mircea snagged a small tree. It was part of a patch of firs poking out of the cliffside and did not seem to have a great root system, because it immediately toppled over along with us. But it bought me a couple of seconds to get my shit together, and I finally managed to shift us to the river bank, far below.
Or close enough.
We fell the last six feet or so, because judging distance under those circumstances is not easy. But six feet beats sixty, or whatever the hell. I hit down hard on top of Mircea, rolled off, and then just lay there, gasping and panting and staring at the relentlessly cheerful blue sky.
One where a tiny swirl of storm clouds moved overhead, looking about the size of my fist, before suddenly contracting even more.
And winking out altogether, while a master vampire stood on the riverbank and screamed his rage at the sky.
Chapter Three
“She didn’t die, Mircea!” My hand hit the desktop in Mircea’s beautiful study, possibly a little harder than necessary, but nothing else was getting through. “I can’t rescue someone who didn’t die!”
“Didn’t die where and when we thought,” he corrected. “But the fey—”
“Don’t try it.” I crossed my arms so I wouldn’t be tempted to hit anything—or anyone—else. “Those were Svarestri warriors. The Black Fey don’t steal human women.”
“Well, they damned well stole this one!” Mircea snarled, and flung the heavy whiskey glass he’d been holding across the room.
I heard a yelp and a crash, and vaguely registered that a servant had come in at exactly the wrong moment holding a tea tray, which had just been knocked out of his hands. I didn’t care. I didn’t need tea. I needed a bottle of Glenfiddich or a six-week vacation, but neither was on offer so I returned to the point at hand.
“You need to accept this,” I told Mircea flatly.
“Accept what?” he demanded. “That the damned fey kidnapped her—"
“For the second time, they didn’t—”
“—took her away and did God knows what with her? Murderous bastards, every single one, especially those bastard Svarestri! We have to help her—”
“Okay, that’s it!” I had been trying to be the voice of reason, but I’d officially had enough, not to mention that it wasn’t working anyway. If he wanted a shouting match, he’d get one.
“That’s it when we get her back!” Mircea told me savagely.
“That’s it when I say it is!” I snapped back, furious. “You almost got us both killed, and for what? An entire line of Pythias told you the same thing! No! No, we’re not going to take you back in time; no, we’re not going to help you rescue your wife. No, no, no! But the great Mircea Basarab always knows what’s right, doesn’t he? He always knows better than anyone, including people who can see the goddamned future!”
“And I was right! She’s in danger—”
“You were not right! She lived—”
“We don’t know that. We only know that Vlad didn’t kill her—”
“And you think the Svarestri did?” I stared at him, wondering which of us was crazy, him or me. Because somebody wasn’t making sense here. “If they wanted her dead, they could have just left her where she was! Your crazy brother was about to take care of that for them! They took her away, meaning that they wanted something from her—”
“Yes, what they want from every woman they steal,” he said viciously. “They keep human women as brood mares, treat them little better than cattle, and then they—” he stopped, his jaw clenched as tightly as his fist, his cheeks burning, and the fabled Basarab calm absolutely nowhere in existence.
Right before he swept the entire contents of the desk off onto the floor.
The servant, who’d been picking up spilled tea things, finally had enough and fled in terror. I barely noticed. Because I’d figured out which of us was off our head, and it wasn’t me.
I moved away from the desk and sat in one of the two red leather, wingback chairs by the fireplace. Mircea’s mansion in the Catskills was high enough that, in late October, it was seriously chilly. But vampires don’t suffer much from cold, so the fire was out.
I pulled a fur throw around my shoulders, feeling like a grandma, and probably looking like one, too, in my bloody peasant garb. But I didn’t have anything else. I’d never lived here, not even for a single night, despite the fact that, technically, Mircea and I were married.
My hand instinctively went to the two little scars on my neck, fang marks that he’d given me once when a malignant spell was riding him and he hadn’t fully known what he was doing. But it didn’t matter. By vampire law, he’d marked me, and that was an unbreakable bond.
Since I hadn’t agreed to said bond, or even understood what was happening at the time, I hadn’t counted it as a marriage, although we’d dated for a while afterward to give it a chance. But while there was love there, even now, there hadn’t been the trust needed to build a relationship. As demonstrated by the current situation.
“Cassie, you must understand,” Mircea said, taking the chair opposite me. He was on the edge of his seat, sitting forward, catching and then holding my hands. The charisma that had been missing a moment ago was back in full measure, and for once, I didn’t think it was fake. I’d started to be able to tell the difference, and the honesty in his eyes was really compelling.
“I do understand,” I said. “I just don’t think that you do.”
“Why?” The brown eyes burned. “What is the harm in going back a little earlier, and snatching her away before the fey even arrive?”
I looked at him steadily. “Other than damaging the fey time line—”
“We don’t know that—"
“—and possibly ours as well, because the fey interact with us on a regular basis?”
“She’s one woman!”
“One woman we know nothing about.”
I got up, feeling the need to pace, and to my surprise, he let me go. He flopped back onto the chair with his hair unusually disheveled and his old Romanian costume still half on. The gorgeous surcoat had been flung over a chair, but the tunic was in place and unlaced halfway down a sun bronzed chest.
I assumed he’d adopted the glowing skin color for the disguise, as too many people in old Romania might have recognized vampire paleness when they saw it. But it looked good on him. Like the claret he’d gotten to replace the whiskey, which had stained his lips a deep red. They matched the threads of auburn in that mahogany mane and the discreet embroidery around the deep V-neck of the tunic.
He ought to have been the lead in some Gothic movie, a better-looking Heathcliff brooding over fate.
But he wasn’t.
He was a master vampire with power to burn, even when he wasn’t stealing mine. It was in the crackling energy that permeated the air around him, and the cinnamon amber glow lighting up those brown eyes. It was in the way he watched me as I paced, calculating, shrewd, even in the midst of his pain, wondering which tactic would work.
I could have told him: none of them.
Instead, I told him something else. “The Alorestri, the so-called Green Fey, have kidnapped human women for years, to help make more little soldiers for their perpetual wars. Their kingdom is on the border with the Dark Fey lands, and they lose more people to combat than any other group. Yet their birth rate is too low to bridge the gap, so they look for outside help.
“The Svarestri, on the other hand, think of humans as little better than animals, and refuse to sully their bloodlines. They don’t even buy human slaves in Faerie, much less going into a world they know little about in order to steal any. Your wife wasn’t taken by them for tha
t reason.”
Mircea gave me an impatient look, maybe because none of this should have been news to him. “And your power told you this?”
“Common sense told me this. I can’t see into Faerie. You know that.”
“Then you can’t be sure. You can’t tell me she was all right. That she was happy—”
“Is that the criteria now?” I demanded. I’d ended up back by the desk, but at that I turned to face him again, only to find that he’d joined me. “I thought it was to save her life.”
“It was. It is. But I have to know—I have to be certain—that she did not suffer. That I did not leave her to a hideous fate on an alien world—”
“Alien?” I stared at him. “You saw what she did to those guards—”
“Yes. She must have had some latent magical blood I didn’t know about. Possibly she didn’t either, but it came out under duress—”
“Mircea, she didn’t throw a spell! She savaged them—”
The beautiful eyes flashed. “And you wouldn’t have done the same? They were going to kill her—”
“I wouldn’t have been able to do the same! Not without the Pythian power—”
“Which she didn’t have!”
“—no human would!”
He frowned at me. “What are you saying?”
“The obvious.” I spread my hands. “She killed a couple dozen of Vlad’s guards almost faster than it takes me to say it, ran off at lightning speed, and was later screaming at the fey in some alien language. Or am I wrong?”
The frown tipped into a scowl, and he went to a small bar under a window. “I didn’t hear her.”
“But I did. I don’t speak fey, any variety of it—”
“Then you don’t know what it was, do you?”
“—but it wasn’t Romanian!”
“I wasn’t aware that you were so familiar with my native tongue.” He was busy fixing himself a replacement drink, so I couldn’t see his face, but the tone was acid.
I stared at him some more. He was obviously agitated, walking back to the fireplace and putting a snifter of what looked like claret down on the mantle, before picking it up again. Then draining its contents and setting it down once more, hard enough to crack the delicate glass stem.
The sharpened edge nicked his hand, causing a single drop of blood to drip through his fingers, gleaming in the low light like a ruby. He didn’t even seem to notice, which was impossible. Blood was the one thing that always got a vamp’s attention.
But not this time.
He strode toward the bathroom suddenly, ripping off the tunic in the process—literally. I looked at the shredded halves of the once fine garment in concern. Mircea was nothing if not meticulous about his person and possessions. If I’d gone to the closet in the bedroom next door, I’d have found military precision in the folded items, and all the hangers turned the same way. I didn’t even have to check to know that.
Yet an expensive piece of silk was now a rag.
I walked to the bar and poured myself a drink. The whiskey was good, but I hardly tasted it, and barely noticed the view outside the window. Autumn in the Catskills was beautiful, a cascade of leaves in every shade from bright green through deepest purple, with yellows, oranges and reds the most predominate. It wasn’t snowing, not yet, but there was a crispness in the air, a promise of winter being right around the corner.
I wondered if it would be our last, and then told myself not to be maudlin and drank my drink.
The mountains reminded me of those we’d just left, although these were more brightly colored, and a lot quieter. It was peaceful here, remote. I wondered if that was why Mircea liked it, as a refuge from the intrigue, court politics and backstabbing of his life elsewhere. I wondered if that was why he missed her, as a reminder of a youthful, less complicated time. Or if there was something more.
The thought hurt, even though that was stupid. We’d been broken up for going on two months now, and I had already moved on. For all I knew, Mircea had done the same; he certainly hadn’t believed in a solitary existence before he met me. If he wasn’t already seeing someone, it probably wouldn’t be long.
Or maybe it would, because I’d never seen him act like this about anybody but Elena.
I’d never seen him act like this about me.
I threw back the rest of my drink, choking a little because I wasn’t bad ass enough to get away with that, and started to return to the nonexistent fire. Only to stop in surprise because one was actually in the process of being laid, by a white-haired old vampire. He was dressed in a suit that looked vaguely Victorian, probably because that was when he’d bought it, and appeared to eb about a hundred, because that was around the age that he’d been changed.
Shit, I thought, recognizing Horatiu, Mircea’s oldest servant and former tutor.
He’d helped Mircea to escape Wallachia after that fateful run in with the nobles, and had stayed with him through the terrible years that followed, as his former pupil struggled to figure out his undead life. Mircea had finally changed the old man—at Horatiu’s request—on his deathbed, despite the fact that that sort of thing rarely turns out well. But I guess he hadn’t felt like he could say no.
And to be fair, Horatiu didn’t seem all that bothered by the crappy eyesight and dubious hearing that had followed him into his new existence. Everybody else, on the other hand, were very much so, mainly because he almost burned the house down on a daily basis. Usually, a servant followed him around on the duties he still insisted on performing, to make sure that a conflagration didn’t kill them all, only today, I didn’t see one.
I did see Horatiu about to set one of the wingbacks on fire, however, and grabbed the narrow shoulders, turning them toward the hearth.
“Mircea?” he paused, the quavering old man voice startled but quiescent. Then he sniffed, and unlike his other senses, his nose seemed to be just fine, because it wrinkled up at me. “You’re not Mircea.”
“Cassie,” I said, taking the long lighter away from him.
Horatiu did not object. He’d put a bundle of wood and newspaper on the floor, and now he proceeded to crumple up a few paper balls to get the fire started. Since he managed to lob them more or less in the actual fireplace this time, I just sat on the edge of the hearth and watched him. He looked strangely fragile for a vampire, I thought, noticing the thinness of the white hair, the age spotted skull clearly visible underneath, and the heavily veined hands.
Not that appearances necessarily meant anything, but still. It made me want to help him. I fed kindling into his hands so that he didn’t have to search for it, and won myself a smile in return. “There’s a good girl,” he told me. “And now, a couple of nice, fat ones.”
I handed over a few of the larger pieces of wood and he arranged them in a pretty good stack, well balanced and leaving plenty of room underneath for air. I idly watched him, marveling at how sure and swift the movements were, now that he knew where he was, because he’d probably built thousands of fires in his day. But I didn’t really see him. I was seeing something else, namely Mircea disappearing from my side earlier, because he’d correctly assumed that he’d never catch the fey by any other means than the Pythian power.
So, he’d used it, immediately and decisively, without any hesitation at all.
The question was: would he do it again?
Or, no, that wasn’t the question, I thought cynically. Knowing Mircea, the question was: when would he do it again? And how far would he push it next time? And was there anything short of killing him that I could do to stop it?
Because I couldn’t kill him. That was what I was supposed to do as Pythia, to anyone who threatened the time line. The first real conversation I’d had with Agnes, my predecessor, had been while she stalked a time traveling weirdo, who turned out to be my father, through a dank cellar back in the 1600s. But she’d had a modern gun with her, and I’d had no doubt whatsoever that she’d have used it.
Mainly because she’d already d
one so, when she shot me in the butt.
She didn’t shoot dad—she’d ended up capturing him instead—but if that hadn’t been feasible? Yeah, she’d have nailed him right between the eyes. Agnes was kind of a bitch.
But that was the job sometimes, and right now, it was my job. But I still couldn’t do it. And not just because of sentiment.
Mircea wasn’t exactly crazy—I’d seen what that looked like, and this wasn’t it. But he wasn’t exactly sane right now, either. He was heading into the most dangerous part of a vampire’s life, the part that had tripped up even the most powerful, and explained why there were so few truly ancient vamps around.
Four, five, even six-hundred-year-old masters? Sure. They weren’t exactly a dime a dozen, but there were plenty of them to be found.
But a thousand years old? Two thousand? Even older?
Not so much.
It shouldn’t have mattered, of course. Vampires weren’t like humans—well, most vampires, I thought, checking out Horatiu. Who had found the lighter where I’d put it down, but was trying to light the fire using the wrong end.
I turned it around for him, and the newspaper caught, bringing a satisfied smile to the old face. Horatiu looked every one of his years, but that was because changing people who were sick or very, very old was not advised. It frequently caused complications. But as long as the change went well, most vamps increased in power with age, so why weren’t there plenty of very old vamps around?
Because of what Mircea was currently dealing with.
There was no word for it, because it was the elephant in the room in vamp society that no one talked about. The sort of thing they often didn’t admit even to themselves, much less to prospective recruits. That “eternity” really meant more like five hundred years or so, until the natural tendency of vampires toward obsession began to catch up with them, and they started to fixate on something, to the point that it took over their whole world.