Chapter Seven

And, God, he was good, because Louis-Cesare was always good. Even in a tub partially filled with soapy water, because the drain mostly didn’t. But you couldn’t beat the size of the thing, which was six feet long and comfortably roomy, because the Victorians knew how to make ’em, yes they did.

Made you wonder what they got up to, all those upstanding citizens, when the curtains closed.

That, I thought, arching up.

If they were really lucky.

Oh, yes, just like that.

But good as it was, it wasn’t what I wanted tonight. Only I didn’t know what that was. I just knew there was something—

Something he seemed to understand, because he started kissing his way up my body a lot sooner than normal. Stopping at all his favorite spots until he paused at my neck, right over the pulse point. I swallowed, my heartbeat speeding up, but he didn’t bite. Just rested his lips against the hot, soapy skin under my hair, his own falling over my shoulder, his breath tickling my ear.

“What is it?” he murmured, because I’d tensed up, going rigid in his arms.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. Just gripped his shoulders, feeling the hard muscle underneath as he slid against me—and, God, yes, that’s what I needed like the air I wasn’t getting in panted breaths. My ribs protested, but I didn’t care. My ribs could go to hell.

And then he pulled away again.

I stifled a scream—just. “What?” I breathed.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, frowning. “Not now.”

“Oh, yes, we should.”

But he was getting that look again, that stubborn “I know best” look that drove me half-mad even when I wasn’t already there. He was hard against my thigh, hot and huge and insistent. And so ready he was shaking with it. Typical of the man to be noble, even when need had turned to agony, too gentle or polite to take what he wanted.

So I did it for him.

With a cry of pure frustration, I flipped us, throwing him onto his back again and straddling him with efficient grace. Wrapping one hand around the base of him and curling the other around the back of his neck, I sat down smoothly. And simultaneously pulled his mouth close enough to kiss, swallowing his protest.

Mine, I thought deliriously, and with a growl, I ground my hips down, setting a ruthless pace, latching on to his neck with my teeth and—

Louis-Cesare froze.

Suddenly, everything slowed down, from the wave of soapy water splashing over the side of the tub, to the shower curtains billowing out to show the bathroom in flashes, to the heart beating hard under my lips.

I told myself to let him go, to pull away, but I didn’t appear to be listening. I managed to get my fangs out of his skin before they had done more than dent it. But then I stopped, like I’d hit a wall.

I stared at that expanse of pale flesh and a tingling spread over my skin, like a fever had gripped me. I could feel how it would taste as I bit down. It would be firm and slightly resistant, warm, with faint traces of soap and Louis-Cesare. My fangs would slide in, slick as glass, pushing past his body’s defenses until the blood welled up, hot and thick and alive in my mouth.

It was an insane thought to have. I didn’t have the bloodlust of a vampire; I never had. Blood did nothing for me: I couldn’t use it, didn’t need it. But suddenly I could taste it, wanted to, with a craving beyond any I’d ever had—for anything.

I wanted to bite deep into that vulnerable spot where shoulder met neck, not to harm but to mark. To leave an unmistakable brand to everyone who saw him that this one was taken. This one was mine.

I heard him swallow, felt the chest beneath me rise and fall faster, as if some of my intent had leaked over. But he didn’t draw back, even when my lips ghosted over that exact spot again, when the faintest edge of my teeth grazed him. A shudder rippled through him and into me, and his hands clenched on my body, but to draw me closer, not to shove me away.

His hand moved to my nape, sliding under the hot, wet strands of my hair, pulling me close. My tongue flicked out, laving the warm surface, his pulse beating hot and fast under my lips. His neck was smooth, free of any marks, an unbroken pale expanse that no one had ever dared to claim, because that wasn’t how this worked.

The more powerful vamp made the mark, and I didn’t know too many more powerful than Louis-Cesare. The damned vamp had held another first-level master, the highest rank of all, in thrall for a century, so I was thinking power wasn’t really a problem for him. So, technically, it should have been him marking me, only he wasn’t moving.

But he wasn’t moving away, either, and I didn’t know what that meant.

I also didn’t know that I could even do it. I wasn’t a vampire; I’d never marked anyone in my life, not like that. But somehow I knew it would work, knew I could leave an indelible trace of our connection on his body, something no amount of time would erase. The urge was so overwhelming that, for a moment, I just clung to him, vibrating, my nails digging into his hip, his shoulder, deep enough that they threatened to leave marks of their own.

“Dory—”

“Don’t.” I growled, my voice low. “Don’t talk.”

I turned my head to the side, and gulped in a breath, almost dizzy with the desire to finish this. And knowing I couldn’t. Vampires bit often, but they marked oh so rarely. To do so was to make a final claim, an eternal commitment. A formal declaration of alliance that joined houses, bloodlines, and fortunes in a way that made a mockery of human marriage.

And once done, it could never be undone.

Not to have one at your side whom you had marked was one of the biggest signs of weakness possible. It could open him up to attack, to challenge, by those who didn’t understand that the one who had marked him wasn’t a vampire, wasn’t someone who had the right. Wasn’t someone who had anything to offer.

Not even herself, since half of me was owned by someone else.

This was another one of those things I couldn’t have; I knew that. But it’s hard to think when your body is full and tingling, your nipple still throbs from his lips, and the rush of lust has made you light-headed. Yet I was trying. Trying to push back against the tide of instinct or desire or whatever the hell was wrong with me and remember all the reasons this would be a Very Bad Idea.

It wasn’t working.

I growled again, and felt him shift inside me; clamped down, and heard him cry out. Felt him begin to thrust in thick, stuttering strokes, so unlike his usual easy dominance, as my fangs started to dent that perfect skin again. And it was sweet, sweet, oh God, it was so fucking—

Someone started pounding on the door.

It was loud enough to cause my head to shoot up, my heart hammering, but it wasn’t the bathroom door. That was just as Louis-Cesare had left it, still partly open to the next room. It was the one to the hall, where the rapping was loud and insistent enough to count as banging. One of the troll twins, I thought, because Sven and Ymsi had a different definition of a soft knock than everybody else.

Only I guess I was wrong, because a second later I heard a female voice. “Dory?”

My roommate, Claire, with her famously bad timing.

“I made some soup,” she called. “If you feel up to it?”

I didn’t answer. I’d never been so happy, and so furious, to hear her in my life. But, apparently, Louis-Cesare did not have the same conflict of emotions.

“I think,” he told me, breathing hard, “there is a chance . . . that I hate your roommate.”

“It’s okay,” I told him, grabbing a towel. “I kind of think she hates you, too.”

“So it would appear.”

He lay back against the tub, looking martyred, with a forearm thrown across his eyes while I disentangled us.

“She’s just trying to be protective.”

“I keep telling myself that,” he said grimly, as I started to get out of the tub.

And tripped. Which was not a good sign, since I’m supposed to have better reflexes than that, even on soggy rug- and suds-strewn floors. But today, it seemed like I was off-balance in every way.

Not that it mattered, since I was caught before I hit down, and spun against the wall.

“You’re going back to bed,” Louis-Cesare informed me flatly, somehow on his feet and in front of me, having moved with that liquid speed all vamps have, but which was somehow so much sexier with him.

“Okay.” I perked up.

“Alone,” he said severely.

I sighed.

“So you can heal.” It was savage. I blinked. “Properly, finally. So that I may take you away, somewhere very far from this place, and make love to you until neither of us can see straight!”

Sounded like a plan.

So, instead of getting vamp married, I got a trip back to la-la land. Which sucked as a runner-up prize, but my body didn’t seem to agree. Louis-Cesare went to piss off Claire, and my stiff and sore muscles relaxed back into the familiar softness of my bed: old, well-laundered sheets; a soft, threadbare duvet; and a comforter that I’d finally managed to bunch up in exactly the way I liked. It was heaven.

I was out before my head hit the pillow.

---

Mircea, Venice, 1458

Mircea knew before he reached home, before he even reached his street, that something was wrong. He broke into a run, one too fast for wet cobblestones, or for the human his neighbors believed him to be, but they’d gone to bed by now. And he wouldn’t have cared if they hadn’t.

He could feel her agony in his mind.

He burst through the front door, tripping a little on the warped boards, into the tiny main room of their house. And immediately saw her. She wasn’t in her room, in her bed, as she should have been. She was writhing on the floor, screaming loudly enough to wake the whole street, if the rain hadn’t been bucketing down tonight.

It was what had made him leave off his pursuit, for not even hunters could hunt in this, and when the storm clouds broke, the strange duo he’d been following had disappeared, along with their prey. He’d turned for home, cursing the November weather, when it felt like it rained all the time. But now he was glad for it, because his old servant clearly didn’t know what to do.

Of course, neither did Mircea.

“It started a few moments ago. She was fine at dinner,” Horatiu told him, fluttering about.

The kindly old face was splashed on one side with light from the adjacent kitchen. It wasn’t much; the coals had been banked for the night, with just a few glimmers of red peeking through the ash. But, for a vampire’s eyes, it was enough.

To see the fear in Horatiu’s clouded gaze, to see the blood staining his worn nightshirt, to see it ringing Dorina’s mouth and glinting redly on her teeth. The ones she shouldn’t have had, because she wasn’t a vampire. But which protruded past her lips anyway when she had her fits.

Because she wasn’t human, either.

“You’re hurt,” Mircea said, focusing on the old man’s shoulder, where the stain was darkest.

“She wanted to leave; I tried to stop her. She didn’t like that.”

“Here.” Mircea reached for him, but Horatiu shook his head. “Her first. After our tussle, she collapsed. I was afraid she’d choke.”

Mircea noticed a small piece of leather, from an old belt he’d broken and hadn’t yet had repaired, on the floor.

Bitten clean through.

“Go wash yourself,” he told Horatiu. “It’s easier to heal if I can see the wound.”

Horatiu made a disgusted sound. “It’s a little thing. She didn’t mean it—”

“I know that.”

“She was in pain, still is—”

“I know that, too.”

“Then help her! Or are you afraid, boy?”

No one else ever spoke to Mircea like that. But Horatiu wasn’t just a servant. The old man had been his tutor once, and more, since Mircea had rarely seen his parents while growing up. They were always busy with their own affairs, their own ambitions. Ambitions that had eventually gotten them killed. But Horatiu had made a fine enough substitute, and that was before the curse, and the butchering of Mircea’s family that followed it. When everyone else had attacked or deserted him; when his own nobles had tried to kill him and mobs of his people had chased him through the woods; when he was at his lowest, half-mad and starving, unsure who or even what he was anymore, only one person had been at his side.

The one glaring at him now.

For, as much as the old man loved him—although he’d never admit it—he loved Dorina more. Had done, ever since he first set eyes on her. He didn’t make a splash of it, but Mircea saw: the extra meat he pulled from his plate to give to the child, who always ate like she was starving; the vociferous haggling he did in the marketplace, shaving a few coins off the price of staples, here and there, to buy Dorina the sweets she loved; the way he painstakingly taught her to read, determined that the scion of the Basarabs would be no ignorant street child, no matter how much she seemed to prefer it.

The way he was looking at her now, the rheumy old eyes shifting from her tortured face to Mircea’s and back again, clearly saying: fix this.

Mircea knelt on the boards and gathered his daughter into his arms. It was easy for him to contain the thrashings that had almost overwhelmed his servant. And to cradle her head without danger, even as she gnashed her teeth and fought him. But while that might keep her from injuring her body, it wouldn’t help her mind.

Only one thing would do that.

The next moment, he was sinking inside the tortured brain, into darkness and odd flashes of light, and the vastness of her mental landscape—

And almost getting blown away.

Because he’d broken through into what felt like a hurricane. Exactly like, Mircea thought, as the winds picked him up and flung him what felt like a mile before he hit down, rolling. While overhead, a tempest raged, one as strong as the one he’d encountered on the voyage home—

No, Mircea thought, shoving the memory away. No!

But he wasn’t quick enough.

She ripped the images from his mind, as easily as he could call them up himself. And the next moment, Mircea found himself slammed onto the deck of a ship lost in mountain-sized waves. They loomed on all sides, massive things that dwarfed the vessel that had once seemed so large, and now looked like a child’s toy.

One about to sink.

A wave slammed into him from over the side of the ship, washing him into the mainmast and threatening to crack his skull. He hung on nonetheless, trying to think, to concentrate, with waves lashing and winds tearing at him, trying to pull him away from his only support. And almost succeeding, but not because of the environment.

But because Horatiu had been right: Mircea was afraid.

Not for himself; he could leave whenever he chose. But for his daughter, who couldn’t. She was trapped here, in this hellish place, until the fit passed, assuming that it did this time.

But what if it didn’t? The fits were coming closer together now, and were lasting longer. Yet six months after they’d first started, he still didn’t know what they were, or why they were happening. Or how to stop them.

Other than the obvious, of course.

Mircea slid down the mast, while the winds howled and the storm clouds flashed, unleashing lightning bolts that illuminated the rain-washed boards beneath his hands. The storm was worse now, like it knew what he was going to do, and maybe it did. Because the storm was her, the other part of her, who didn’t like being caged in this little body.

The one who wanted out.

But out of where?

It’s your body, he wanted to yell, to scream at the skies. There is nothing to escape from. What are you trying to do?

He’d never received an answer. He wasn’t sure that she had one, this other side of his daughter, the one he barely knew. She raged like a trapped god, like a force of nature entombed in flesh, who wanted nothing more than to rip her prison to shreds and break free.

He was terribly afraid that, one day, she would manage it.

But not this day.

Mircea gripped the boards, hard enough to feel splinters biting into his hands. He ignored them. They weren’t real, any more than the wind or the waves or the salt that burned his eyes was real. Just manifestations of her power, power that was overflowing her human body, but had nowhere else to go.

Until he gave it one.

The boards under his touch began to glow, first a faint luminescence barely limning his fingers in light. And then spreading outward, brighter and farther, lighting up the bones in his hands and the frayed edges of his sleeves, while he fought to stay in place. Because, yes, she knew what he was doing.

But she couldn’t stop him—not yet. They had a connection, the two of them, because of his mental gifts, or because he was both father and Sire in one, or for some other reason he didn’t know because he didn’t know anything. No one did, not about dhampirs. He’d learned that the hard way, these last months.

The same way he’d learned everything, he thought, as the ship suddenly turned almost perpendicular.

It threw him against the side, where the sea tried its best to drown him and debris to impale him, and a lightning burst almost succeeded in incinerating him but hit a flying barrel instead.

Shards of burning wood fell all around him as the ship slammed back down and rocked to the other side, and half the items on deck went airborne. But not Mircea. Because he’d wrapped his leg in a rope and braced, one arm on a railing and one on the deck. And, once more, the light under his hand began to spread.

He watched it creep outward, illuminating the stains and nails in the boards and the banding on casks and barrels, while the winds shrieked and the waves pounded the little craft, as if in anger. But the light flickered on, across the deck and up webs of rigging above tightly furled sails, turning them white-hot and gleaming. Until the vessel was covered in light, until it looked like he was kneeling on a ghost ship. And the farther the light reached, the more the waves lessened, the quieter the winds blew, and the more Mircea’s hand felt like it was about to combust.

And then did so along with the rest of his body when a lightning strike took him, the bolt coming out of nowhere and landing with a ferocity that tore him off the boards and sent him hurtling backward over the side, screaming—

And hitting something with his whole body, hard enough to bruise.

It took him a moment to realize that the hard object was his own front door, and that the soggy boards he’d landed on were his floor, where the wet had blown in. And that Dorina was quiet, lying exhausted in his arms as he fought for breath he didn’t need, and stared at Horatiu, still standing nearby. Who looked back at him with pride in the old eyes.

“It worked.”

“This time,” Mircea rasped, the power he’d drawn off his daughter thickening his voice and spilling through his skin, lighting the dim room as if someone had decided to burn a hundred candles.

She was getting stronger.

But he was not, at least not fast enough. There was going to come a time when he couldn’t drain her sufficiently, and he was desperately afraid that that day would be soon. He had to have help.

And there was only one way to get it.