I nodded. Mircea had been the target of an assassin, a traitor in the vampire ranks working for the other side, who had attacked him mentally. The plot had failed, but he’d been badly injured, only not badly enough from their perspective. The idea had been to finish the job during the attack on the consul’s home, but Lizzie had spilled the beans under questioning, and I’d pulled him out before they could reach him. And half a day later, he’d returned the favor, saving both my life and Rhea’s.
But neither of us had exactly emerged unscathed.
“Stop.” I captured his hands, which had moved to my temples. “You need your strength.”
“When you lead a family as large as ours, you recover quickly,” he told me. “Assassins would do well to remember that.”
I grinned, in spite of everything. “When you come at the king, you’d best not miss?”
He laughed. “Isn’t that what I just said?” He tapped my shoulder. “Turn over.”
I did, because it was easier than arguing. And because Mircea wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t drain himself too low at a time like this. And because it felt—
Oh God.
The tension of the last few weeks rolled out of me in waves, following the strokes of his hands. I lay there, groaning out loud after a while, because I couldn’t seem to stop, as he erased pain and stiffness from my back and arms and thighs and legs. And then he reached my feet, and I almost wept.
“Oh God.”
“What have you been doing?” he asked, sounding slightly horrified, probably at the collection of cuts and bruises I’d managed to amass on hard Welsh stones.
I didn’t answer, but not just because of the pain. But because moments like this were rare. Moments when it was just us, just Mircea and Cassie, without the rest of the world intruding. Without something—usually our jobs—getting in the way, screwing up our time together, and causing trouble.
Well, that and the thousand things we couldn’t say to each other.
Like about the woman I’d seen in his chambers, when I went to rescue him. He’d been sleeping, exhausted from the strain of fighting off the attack, but she’d been awake. And predatory, with nails that had dented the skin of his chest, and small fangs just visible over bloodred lips as she snarled at me. She’d looked exactly like a feral animal, guarding its prey.
If she hadn’t been naked, I might have thought she was there to eat him.
As it was, it was pretty obvious what she was there to do, and it had given me great satisfaction to send her and the sheet she was wearing to a particularly odorous cow pasture on Long Island. Tony had lent me out to one of his associates for a week there once, who had needed my Sight, but it had been my nose that had suffered. I could only hope the place had retained its charm.
But other than for a few seconds’ amusement, watching her and her sheet flounder around in the muck, it hadn’t solved anything. Except for getting her out of a war zone. Because I’d had to go back a few hours in time to rescue Mircea, so she’d gotten a free pass out of the hellhole the consul’s home was about to become.
In other words, I’d saved the life of my boyfriend’s lover, and I couldn’t even tell him about it.
Because I was afraid he’d ask me about mine.
Not that Pritkin and I were lovers in any normal sense of the word. Today was absolutely further than we’d ever gone, and it hadn’t exactly been by choice. Not once, in all the times I’d known him, had we touched when it wasn’t an emergency. But when your partner is a half-incubus war mage, who only heals from one thing, and you’re in the middle of a war . . . emergencies happen.
But I hadn’t talked to Mircea about them, because how could I? To explain how Pritkin healed was to explain what he was, and I couldn’t explain what he was. There had only been one half human, half incubus in recorded history, and Mircea had already shown way too much interest in Pritkin’s background as it was. It would take that lightning-fast brain maybe a second to put two and two together and end up with Merlin, and that was a name that could never be said.
Not when the magical community practically worshipped the guy, almost as much as Pritkin worshipped his privacy.
I couldn’t get him back only to ruin his life, so I couldn’t say anything. But that meant no absolution when anything happened, no chance to talk things out, no opportunity to explain. Or to ask about any of the women mentioned in connection with Mircea, who he said he had nothing to do with anymore, but then I find her in his room.
I watched my fingers clench in the sheets, and knew I had to say something this time. Had to find a way to talk about at least some of it, because I couldn’t do this anymore. It felt like I’d explode sometimes, with all the evasions, and secrets, and half-truths. I wanted things on the table for once, before this silence killed us.
“Mircea—”
“My lord, I do apologize.” That was the vamp who hadn’t budged from the doorway. “But they’re starting. We really must—”
The man cut off abruptly, with a slightly choked sound.
Because, yeah. You didn’t make a master tell you something twice. He must be new.
“I have to go,” Mircea murmured against my shoulder. “But I wanted to be the one to tell you, before you heard it from someone else.”
I rolled over. “Heard what?”
“The Circle fought off a dark mage assault this afternoon, at their main headquarters in Stratford.”
“Stratford?” I sat up, a little too abruptly.
Mircea steadied me. “There was a battle, but the Circle prevailed. Attacking the creators of the most vicious spells on earth at their home base is not the act of sane men.”
“The Black Circle isn’t sane.”
“No, but they aren’t usually this reckless, either. They wanted something—badly.”
“Lizzie.” It wasn’t even a question. “That’s why they attacked Dante’s. And if she was at Stratford—”
“She was, from what I understand. But they didn’t get her,” he said, holding me as I started to get off the bed. “They didn’t get her, Cassie. I was told that most definitely.”
I swallowed and stopped struggling. “Can I use your phone? I have—I might have a friend there.”
He handed me a sleek black rectangle, but the screen was dark. “The focal wards are up,” he explained. “It may be a while before you get a signal.”
I should have expected that, after everything. And after watching the light from the next room dance off the side of his face, because it wasn’t coming from electricity. The big boys were up, the kind of wards most places only brought online in emergencies because of the power drain, and because they really messed up any modern tech they came in contact with—phones included.
“I can try to find out about your friend,” Mircea offered.
“Caleb. Caleb Carter.”
He nodded, and started to get up. “Wait.” I caught his arm. “You haven’t told me . . . what’s going on. How are they doing this?”
“Doing . . . ?”
“This! All of this.” I gestured around at an amorphous enemy, because that’s what the Black Circle and their allies were starting to feel like—something that was always around, an unseen menace crouched in the dark, ready to strike. “How do they stay one step ahead? We fight off one attack, and there’s another, almost before we can draw a breath. They’re almost constant anymore—”