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.