I didn’t find the movies scary myself. When you live in a nest of vampires, Freddy and Jason and what’s-his-name from The Shining just don’t seem like that big a deal. But Alphonse still jumped.
“Are we almost there?” I looked back to see Mircea all hunched over, his nice suit getting wrinkled. That was too bad; I liked his suits, so elegant! And his gentle way of talking. And his laughter—I’d never seen a vampire who laughed so much!
Or anybody else around here, I thought grimly.
“Is it close?” I asked Laura, and she turned around to look at me. She wasn’t cramped; she was fine. Of course, she was littler than me now, although we’d once been the same size. But ghost kids don’t grow up, so I was taller. But not so much as Mircea.
“Is your boyfriend getting tired?” she asked slyly, and then laughed before I could answer.
“He isn’t my—” I began, and then bit my tongue before I said any more. Damn it, Laura!
She just laughed some more. “Yes, it’s close,” she said as the house shook from the wind and, finally, rain.
“It’s a bad one tonight,” Mircea said, looking around, although there was nothing to see. Nothing except dark, lightened by the greenish ghost light Laura shed. But he couldn’t see that. But his vampire eyes could probably make out the tunnel anyway, cut under the house by someone, long ago, Alphonse said for bootlegging. All I knew is it was dank and dark, and I hoped Laura was right. I wanted out of here!
“Stop.” She stuck her head clean through the wall, leaving me looking at the stump of her neck until she pulled back out. “Dig here.”
“It’s here,” I said to Mircea, who crawled up behind me, garden shovel in hand.
It didn’t take long. The box wasn’t buried deep, although a tree root had wound around it. I was practically vibrating with excitement by the time he finished and finally pulled it free. And then opened the old hinges.
“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—”