I didn’t know this place.
I didn’t know any of it.
But the vampire who walked through the door a moment later was another story.
I scrambled back to my feet, but he didn’t appear to see me. Which was the first thing that had made any sense. Because his name was Horatiu and he couldn’t see anybody.
He was Mircea’s old tutor—very old. He’d been middle-aged or more when he’d been trying to drum some Latin through his charge’s young skull. But that meant Mircea hadn’t reached master status—the level needed to make new vamps—until Horatiu was on his deathbed. And that sort of thing tends to mess with the formula. The end result was a doddering, half-blind, mostly deaf vampire who nonetheless insisted on earning his keep. As a butler, since I guess that was the safest job Mircea had been able to come up with.
Well, sort of safe, I thought, as the white-haired old vamp set a tray down precariously on the edge of a chair instead of on the adjacent table. A chair just above the overturned teapot, which I was starting to understand better now. But Horatiu didn’t seem to notice it, either.
Maybe because he was busy gathering the clothes off the bed and throwing them out the window beside a laundry chute. And watering a silk potted plant. And starting to do something to a bookshelf adjacent to the fireplace right before another vamp came in.
“Goddamnit!” The vamp was Kit Marlowe, the Senate’s curly-haired, goateed, impossible-to-ruffle chief spy. Well, make that normally impossible because he was looking a little ruffled now.
Maybe because the bookshelf had just caught on fire.
“Lord Marlowe,” Horatiu said, in his quavering old man’s voice. “Did you wish to join the master for breakfast?”
“No!” Marlowe said, rushing past the stooped figure to the adjoining bathroom.
“There’s plenty of kippers,” Horatiu called after him. “But not enough toast. I wish the master had said something—”
“Damn it, I don’t want breakfast!” Marlowe said, running back in with a wastebasket full of water. Which he proceeded to use to save the bedroom and destroy a bunch of probably expensive old volumes.
“I can make more, of course,” Horatiu offered querulously. “But I do believe we’re out of rye.”
He tottered out, doubtless off to find more trouble to get into, and left a fuming, damp, and cursing Marlowe behind him. Who hadn’t seemed to notice the chick in the towel yet. I opened my mouth to ask what the hell, only to shut it again abruptly when Marlowe strode out through the room’s only other door.
And right through the middle of me.
There was this weird sense of disorientation as our bodies merged, the same kind I got when Billy stepped inside my skin for an energy draw. Only there was no missing energy here. Just the skin-tingling sensation of someone occupying the same space as me for a split second, before he was gone.
I spun around, clutching my towel and breathing hard, because vamps don’t leave ghosts. And even if they did, I doubted one would be able to argue with Horatiu. Or to put out a fire quite so effortlessly.
But it sure as hell had felt like he’d been a ghost.
Or . . . or that I was, I realized, with growing horror.
I stood there for a second, wondering if one of the many attempts on my life had somehow made good, and if so, why I hadn’t heard the blast or seen the shooter or felt the pain before I ended up here.
But I couldn’t be a ghost—I couldn’t be. My guards would have sensed an assassin. So something else was going on, and vampire senses were the most likely to help me figure out what. As long as I didn’t lose him.
Only it seemed like I already had, because Marlowe had disappeared through the door on the other side of a sitting room. One that started to close even as I ran after him. And when I flung myself through the narrow opening, barely making it before the door clicked shut, I saw—
An empty room.
It looked like an atrium, or one of those weird cubbyholes where several hallways meet and then branch off. There was another nice rug on the floor, a potted plant in a tub, and a fireplace with a mantel but no chairs in front of it because this wasn’t a room you hung out in. It was a room designed to do nothing and be nothing, besides a way to get from one place to another.
Except in this case, because there weren’t any other doors.
It would have freaked me out, but I’d seen this before. It was a popular security feature in vampire residences, meant to slow down intruders by forcing them to play find the exit. But I didn’t look for one.
Because I’d already found something else.
Something that cast a bright splash of color against the old-world paneling on the opposite wall. Something that made me momentarily forget about Marlowe and Horatiu and even my own predicament. Something that drew me forward like a magnet.
Something beautiful.
I couldn’t see it as well as I wanted, because the only illumination was a couple of recessed lights set on low up in the ceiling. And a candle burning on the mantel for some reason, so I grabbed it. And illuminated a painting.
A large one, judging by the way the light only reached the bottom half of a gown. I lifted the candlestick higher, and the golden haze gleamed off a surface cracked from age, but still vibrant with jewel-like colors: rich cream, salmon pink, dusky coral, and pale aquamarine. They formed a sumptuous gown in satin, a hand wearing a huge pearl ring, a gold-and-pearl snood over a bun of sleek dark hair, and . . .
And a face I’d seen before.
Not in painted form but in photographs, a whole book of them that I’d found by accident in another of Mircea’s many residences. I hadn’t known who it was then; still didn’t, because Mircea didn’t like to talk about his past, much less the women who populated it. Whenever I brought the subject up, he went into evasion mode.
And nobody evaded like Mircea.
I wasn’t completely naive. I knew he’d had other lovers; how could he not in five hundred years? But I hadn’t found photograph books stuffed to the brim with them. Hadn’t stumbled across a painting that must have cost a fortune of any of them. Hadn’t seen evidence that any of them were more than a passing fling.
I stared at the high cheekbones, the full red lips, the sparkling dark eyes. And felt my hand clench on the candlestick. Because this woman didn’t look like a fling to me.
The photos I’d seen had been modern, but the dress was Renaissance-era Italian; at least it was if you had pots of money. I’d seen ones like it occasionally, in some of the paintings that Rafe, Tony’s resident artist, had scattered around. It had a low-cut bodice over a delicate chemise, a high waist, and long, fitted sleeves that tied onto the shoulders with little bows. The cross draped around the wearer’s slender neck was heavy gold, and the fat, lustrous pearls that dangled from her ears might have come from a sultan’s treasure.
And it wasn’t just her clothes that were costly.
I held the light closer, because I wanted to be sure. And yes. Her jewelry glinted dull gold by candlelight because it was gold, made with applied gold leaf. Likewise, the red on her lips and cheeks wasn’t ochre but outrageously expensive vermilion. And the sea gleaming behind her . . . well, that wasn’t indigo.
That pure, intense color could only be ultramarine. Imported all the way from mines in Afghanistan, it was extracted through a very laborious process from genuine lapis lazuli. Rafe had told me about it while he mixed up some for his own use one day. How it might not be especially dear in modern times, but had once been the most expensive pigment in all Renaissance art. Literally worth more than its weight in gold.
Yet it was splashed around everywhere here, from the sky to the sea to the bright blue in the embroidery on the woman’s gown. A gown that must have cost a fortune yet wasn’t half as lovely as the woman wearing it. A woman who occupied not only an album full of photographs, but a canv
as that took up an entire freaking wall—
Only no. Not a wall, I realized a moment later, when I reached out to touch the shiny surface. And fell through that doorway I hadn’t been looking for instead. And into a vortex of light and sound and oh-holy-shit that ended abruptly with me on my hands and knees in another room with another fireplace and another master vampire.
But this one wasn’t Marlowe.
Mircea sat in a big leather chair behind a bigger mahogany desk. It looked a little incongruous, because he was wearing only a pair of deep plum sleep pants. His chest and feet were bare, and his dark, shoulder-length hair, which was almost always pulled back in a clip, was loose.
He looked like he’d just gotten up, but then decided to nap in his . . . office?
It looked like one, if a somewhat generic version. The rest of the house had been an eclectic mix of old-world charm and expensive modern chic—kind of like its owner. But in here, that had given way to upscale hotel bland in beiges and browns, if hotels were regularly lit by candles: a highly polished desk, a Kerman rug on the floor, and a wall of expensive-looking books. It said upmarket accountant or big shot lawyer. It did not say Mircea.
Except for a broken Chinese figurine, a happy potbellied guy with a tambourine who was serving as a pen cup.
And, of course, the man himself, seated behind the desk, slowly caressing the chair arms.
He really liked that chair, didn’t he? I thought blankly. For a moment. Until I felt another not-so-surreptitious stroke down my naked backside. A stroke that matched the movement of Mircea’s hand on the slick leather.
Exactly matched, I realized, as he smoothed down to the end of the arm, and then swept back up, completing the circuit. And a simultaneous caress swirled around my left butt cheek. It was one of his favorite moves, and it normally would have gotten me all hot and bothered.
Except that I was already hot, and not in a good way.
And then Marlowe walked through me again.
“You might want to check in before we leave,” he said as I choked and flailed and fell back. “Horatiu is trying to burn the house down.”
“He doesn’t have to try,” Mircea murmured, without opening his eyes. “It comes naturally.”
“He needs a keeper!”
“We tried that. But he noticed their presence.” Mircea’s mouth quirked. “And complained that he was too old to be training all the new arrivals.”
“Better that than a raging inferno!”
“We’ve all become rather good at discerning the smell of smoke.”
Marlowe snorted. “No doubt. And why aren’t you dressed?”
The chief spy was, if you could call it that, in a rumpled burgundy suit and a shirt Mircea wouldn’t have used to shine his shoes. Not that he shined his own shoes. And not that Marlowe was known for sartorial splendor. Or for giving a damn about impressing anyone.
That was Mircea’s job.
“It isn’t even dark yet,” Mircea commented mildly. “And the portal to the city is virtually instantaneous. What purpose would it serve to get there hours before everyone else?”
“So what do you intend to do? Nap?”
“No. But it would appear that you could use one.”
Kit glared at him. And then flung himself into a green club chair in front of the desk. And sat there, pretending to relax, while practically quivering with repressed energy.
I’d have been more curious as to why, if I’d been slightly less furious.
Because Mircea kept doing it. The phantom touches kept gliding over my skin, and I kept getting steamier and steamier. Because he was playing with me while killing time and chatting to his buddy, and because he was in my head.
He had to be, to do this, whatever the hell this was. Some new vampire power, something I’d never heard of, something that went a lot further than just picking up a stray surface thought once in a while like some masters could do. Something he hadn’t told me about because this wasn’t surface, this wasn’t passive, this was in my freaking head.
Son of a bitch.
And then he goosed me.
I saw it before it landed, a quick contraction of his fingertips on the chair arm. A subtle pinch of the smooth leather. Only it didn’t feel subtle. It felt hard, a sharp sting that, okay, under the right circumstances might have been welcome, but these were not those. These weren’t even close to those, and—
And then he did it again.
I looked up to see a small smile curving the perfect lips, just a little smirk, which would have been enough on its own. But it wasn’t on its own. It was hanging out with a couple of whiskey-dark eyes that were sharp and amused—and open.
And fixed on mine.
And steamy abruptly went nuclear.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“You’re too damned calm,” Kit said, getting up to pour himself a drink. “It’s annoying at the best of times, but right now it’s verging on the obscene.”
“You would prefer me to panic?” Mircea asked, his eyes on me as I slowly got up off the floor.
“I’d prefer you to act human—”
“That would be difficult.”
“You know what I mean,” Kit snapped, sloshing something into a glass. “Show a nerve for once!”
“You needn’t be concerned,” Mircea said, watching me walk toward him. “We’ve put together an excellent team.”
“It’s not the team I’m worried about. It’s the damned fey!” Kit swept out a hand. Which went right through me, like I wasn’t even there.
Because I wasn’t. Not for him. I was in Mircea’s head, or he was in mine; I didn’t know which.
But I knew one thing.
Two could play this game.
“If any fey are injured tonight, it will be on their own heads,” Mircea said, one eyebrow going up as I rounded the desk. “They are acting illegally, in violation of treaty—”
“Yes, and the treaty matters so much to them!” Kit said bitterly. “They’ve never followed it, never had any intention of doing so. The Green still farm us for slaves, the Dark are constantly trying to slip past the border, and the so-called Blue Elves—”
“They prefer ‘fey,’” Mircea murmured as I stopped in front of him. “‘Elf’ is considered pejorative.”
“Like I give a damn what they prefer!”
Mircea didn’t comment. He also didn’t move. He just sat there, looking up at me, eyes glinting wickedly.
Because he thought I was bluffing.
No, I thought grimly; he knew I was. He played these games with me all the time. Like in those dreams I’d been having lately, which I was now sure had been him. Like all those times he’d evaded questions, ignored hints, dodged open-ended comments. And he always got away with it. Because how do you tie down a master vampire? How do you get his attention? How do you make him listen?
I decided I might have just figured it out.
I watched his eyes widen slightly as I dropped the towel and straddled him.
“At least the Green are up front about it,” Kit said, glaring at a map on the wall. I assumed it was of faerie, since that’s what he was talking about, but I didn’t more than glimpse it. Because Mircea had already recovered.
Strong arms pulled me abruptly against him, the height difference assuring that, even with me kneeling on the chair, we were face-to-face.
“They look down those long noses of theirs and tell us to mind our own business,” Kit said. “But the damned Blue Fey, oh, they’re our good friends, our staunch allies—and they smuggle more than the rest combined!”
“It’s unfortunate,” Mircea murmured, dark eyes gleaming into mine. “But some friendships outlive their usefulness, and have to be discarded.”
“You don’t get to choose my friends,” I told him. “Any more than you get to play around in my head!”
“I’m not playing.”
“Neither am I!”
“Well, I’d like to know what you call it, then,” Marlowe grumbled. “You know we can’t drop the Blarestri. We have to have allies, particularly now.”
“Indeed?” Mircea asked me. “Then what are we doing here?”
“Wasting our time!” Kit snapped. “I’ve said it all along.”
“You tell me,” I gritted out as Mircea suddenly leaned back, taking the chair to a steep recline. And pulling me over him, onto the sweet spot where slim hips met thickly muscled thighs. And where the heavy weight of his sex was barely concealed by a thin layer of silk. It was more an enticement than a barrier, a soft, seductive caress as I fought to find purchase on the slick material.
“Some people specialize in trouble,” Mircea said, as warm hands curved around my hips, steadying me. And then pulled me up until his lips rested against my stomach.
Marlowe was still glaring at the map, his back to us, and Mircea took full advantage. Those wicked lips began to move, slowly, draggingly, openmouthed against my lower belly. Followed by a hint of tongue, sliding across my skin, tasting me. Making me shiver.
And who was supposed to be teaching who a lesson here? I thought dizzily.
“Some even seem to prefer it,” Mircea told me, sounding amused.
And then he made another sound as I shifted position slightly, deliberately dragging over him.
And suddenly, things weren’t so soft anymore.
“Like those triple damned Svarestri,” Marlowe agreed, freshening his drink. “They don’t mingle with us lesser beings, oh no. Except when that bastard Geminus offered them carte blanche, even bringing them in through the official portals, since who would suspect a senator of smuggling?” He made a disgusted sound. “Me, for one! I knew he was up to something, but I thought it was those illegal fights he’d been running for decades. Should have known he’d branch out sooner or later, with that many contacts. . . .”