I snapped back to the present, stunned and breathless. It had been a long time since I’d had a vision, and I had forgotten how hard they hit. I’d just been reminded.
“A secret,” Mircea was saying, unaware. “Something he’d learned as a young man while serving as a page in Constantinople. Something I . . . did not know.”
He settled back into the chair, his eyes hooded and unreadable. “Did you know the Pythian Court wasn’t always in London?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes. It’s wherever the Pythia wants it to be.”
“When Vlad was a boy, it was in Constantinople. In a run-down house in an overgrown street that reflected the condition of the city. The second Rome had shrunk to almost nothing, its riches gone, its glory days long behind it. There was no reason for the Pythian Court to reside in such a place. But Berenice—the Pythia of the time—was stubborn, and no one could budge her.
“One day, the last emperor, Constantine XI, took his page on a clandestine late-night journey through the back alleys of the city—”
* * *
Starlight and moonlight and reflections off puddles in the broken street. Nothing else, nothing more, not even a lantern to light the way. At home there would have been torches accompanying such a procession, the common people lining the streets to see a great lord pass. But here, the lord might as well have been one of the beggars slumped in the doorways, reeking of alcohol and piss. This wasn’t how a king traveled, much less—
“Vlad! Keep up!”
“Apologies, Majesty.” He broke into an undignified jog. The emperor’s legs were longer than his, and he was practically running himself. At home, they had servants to run for them. At home, they moved with dignity, and left the running to lesser men. At home—
“Don’t apologize, just keep up! It’s too easy to get lost on these backstreets, young Vladimir.”
“It’s Vlad.”
“What?”
“My name. It is not Vladimir.”
“Isn’t it?” The emperor looked distracted, searching for the right run-down house on the run-down street. “What’s it short for, then?”
“Nothing. It’s just Vlad.”
“Really? I’ve not heard that one before.”
Someday you will, Vlad thought. Someday everyone will.
* * *
“—to see the doddering old woman in her decrepit house,” Mircea said as I jerked back to the present again. “Berenice never cared about money, and received them in her kitchen, while feeding dozens of stray dogs she’d adopted out of the back door. Vlad was not impressed, but the emperor didn’t seem to care.
“He was there to beg for aid against the Turks, who were encroaching closer every day, and swore to give her whatever she wanted in return. Berenice said that she had all she needed, and that he should keep what gold he had and leave the city. That it would fall soon, and him with it.”
“And did he?”
Mircea nodded. “He died dressed as a common soldier, fighting on the ramparts. He refused to leave, despite her warning, just as he refused to leave that night, staying and arguing with her for some time. During which time Vlad picked up several useful bits of knowledge, which he offered in trade to me, more than thirty years later.”
“What useful bits?”
Mircea glanced at me, and then away. “I’m coming to that.
“After speaking with Vlad, I traveled to see the Lady myself. She was still there, in the same house, on the same broken street, with a new group of dogs her acolytes fed, for she was quite elderly by then. The city was different: the Turks were polishing up their captured jewel, and there was building going on everywhere. Except for Berenice’s street, where it felt like time had stood still.”
* * *
“Back again?”
The dark-haired girl with the pretty, round face and cheap tinsel earrings looked up at him from an undignified crouch. She was surrounded by mangy, underfed curs, all of which were nonetheless patiently waiting for the big bowl of scraps she was turning out into broken dishes. They were hungry, some looked to be starving, yet still they waited.
Like him, Mircea thought, hiding his irritation behind a smile.
“Back again,” he confirmed.
“I told you; it could be days,” she warned, laughing when a small puppy jumped up and licked her face. “Even weeks.”
“I have time,” Mircea said, and bent to help her with her task.
* * *
And, okay, I was beginning to think these weren’t visions. Partly because I didn’t get many visions anymore, the power bogarting my abilities for its own use, and partly because they didn’t feel right. They had more of the hazy quality of dreams, soft-edged and lacking in detail.
Or memories, I realized, suddenly understanding.
Mircea was right—he was tired, and his perfect control wasn’t so perfect just now. The Seidr link between us might be gone, disrupted by whatever Ares had done, but he was still a powerful mentalist. And he was projecting. His own memories, and one he’d picked up from his brother.
But I didn’t think he knew it.
He was lost in thought, staring at the fire, oblivious. I should tell him, I thought. I should let him know . . .
That his mind was leaking the truth all over the place, no matter what his lips said.
“Cassie?” Some movement of mine made him look up. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, I . . . think I will have that drink now.”
“Berenice was in bed with a fever when I finally talked my way into an audience,” Mircea told me as I saw him walk across two rooms, one richly furnished, lit by our shared fire, and one dim and shuttered. Weak sunlight streamed in through the louvers of the second, to stripe meager furnishings and a threadbare rug. And the frail old woman underneath the bedsheets, eyes watery with age and sharp with intellect.
* * *
“You bother me now, and with this?”
“I’ve waited for weeks—”
“I’ve kept kings waiting for months! While I’ve seen beggars, fresh off the streets. I see who I like, and I answer what I will! And your answer, vampire, is no.”
“You won’t even hear me out?” Mircea couldn’t keep a thread of anger from his voice, and she caught it.
“I have heard you! Haunting my halls, as you haunt my dreams, and I will hear you no more. You have your answer. Now begone. Or I’ll sic the dogs on you!”
* * *
“She was . . . not inclined to assist me,” Mircea said, handing me a glass.
I hadn’t even noticed him return.
I took it, spilling a little, because my hand was unsteady.
“But I met her chief acolyte during the week she kept me waiting,” he added, settling back into his chair. “A pretty little thing, dimples, big dark eyes, always laughing. Eudoxia was her name. She seemed well-disposed toward me, and I thought, a new Pythia will reign soon. I can wait.
“And I did—another twenty years—until my friend and well-wisher finally came into power. The court had moved at last—to Paris—and I traveled to see her there. I brought expensive gifts. I was so excited—”
* * *
“It doesn’t look like the biggest city in Europe,” Mircea said sourly, looking out the side of the creaking carriage. By God, this thing was slow!
“You’re too hard to please,” Bezio told him, frowning as he tried to recall which trinket went in which box.
“You had to take them out,” Mircea said. “You put them back.”
“We’ll be there soon.” Big dark eyes looked at him soulfully. If his old friend had been a girl, instead of a huge, hairy man, he’d have batted his eyelashes. “Help me?”
“It’ll take an hour to get there in this thing, and that’s if we’re lucky,” Mircea snapped. “I knew I should have ridden ahead!”
“But you didn’t.” Bezio looked at him knowingly. They’d been friends ever since his first years in Venice, and the man knew him like no other. Which could be damned inconvenient at times. “I think you want to be there, and you don’t want to be, and it’s making you surly.”
“I bungled it,” Mircea said tersely. “I should have visited her before this. Should have written more—”
“You wrote plenty. You did plenty. Any more and it would have been too obvious. Like this.” He held something up. “Don’t you think this is a bit much?”
“No!” Mircea snatched the necklace, of huge pearls set in gold, and looked around for its box. Which could have been any of them. “Put it back!”
“Well, I will if I can remember where it went,” Bezio said amiably. Mircea wanted a fight, to get the unbearable tension out of his system before they arrived, but his friend wasn’t obliging. “You’re taking a king’s ransom—none of which you need. People have been bribing Pythias for thousands of years—”
“I am not bribing her!”
“But if it helps at all, it’s only to get you in, and you’ve already got an in. But once you’re there, they say what they say—”
“And what would you know about it?”
Bezio rolled his eyes. “Like I said. Surly.”
* * *
“Yes,” Mircea said, his eyes distant, “I was . . . hopeful. Until I saw her face. Until the second no.”
I frowned, because I wasn’t getting this. Even with help, I wasn’t. “But . . . what was so important that you needed to see—”
He wasn’t listening. His eyes were back on the fire; I wasn’t sure he even knew I’d spoken. It didn’t sound like it when his voice came again, rough with remembered emotion. “I asked her why; she wouldn’t tell me. I begged her; she commiserated, seeming sincere. I raged at her; she had me removed. And later sent me a note, in her own hand; I have it to this day. Telling me to give up. To move on. To waste no more time on this fool’s errand.
“I decided the problem was me. My self-importance, my boldness. I was still in those days much as I had always been: outspoken, opinionated, even brash. I said things to her I should not have said. I penned a note of apology. And afterward, I worked to change.”
I didn’t say anything. The words were pouring out of him suddenly, this man who was usually so stingy with facts that I could group everything I knew about him on a single sheet of paper. It looked like I’d need a few more after this.
“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “Biting my tongue did not come naturally, and took years of study. Watching those older than I, learning how to speak without saying too much, how to smile when I wanted to snarl and go for someone’s throat. Learning something that felt inherently dishonest, but I did it—I forced myself to, until it came more naturally.
“Eudoxia aged; she died. A new Pythia took the throne. And I returned, my arguments polished, my words carefully—so carefully—chosen. Like my gifts, which were far more lavish this time. I was growing rich; my family was expanding. I could afford it.
“And I was listened to. Her name was Isabeau, an auburn-haired beauty. Rescued from the gutter, after her parents died in a plague. Intended for little more than a servant, yet she surpassed them all. I thought she would sympathize, would understand what it was to lose everything, and have to claw your way back, and so it seemed. We had many pleasant visits walking in her gardens, choosing flowers for her table. I made her laugh. . . .”
* * *
“I don’t know.” Isabeau leaned against a tree, her abundant auburn hair a contrast to the dark gray bark. She looked back up the impressive sweep of lawn toward the chateau. “It’s better here, outside Paris, but I don’t like the grounds. They’re too formal. Everyone is copying the Italian style these days, and torturing the poor plants into all sorts of ridiculous shapes.”
“It’s your garden,” Mircea said, smiling. And leaning an arm on the trunk above her head. “Do with it what you like.”
“I’ll tell you what I’d like,” she said, gray eyes becoming animated. “An English garden, have you seen them? They just let everything run wild, all over the place.”
“Then why don’t you?”
She sighed. “You know why. The Circle. They’re so concerned with appearances. Berenice—Lady Aristonice—is said to have lived in a hovel, yet I can’t have a messy garden!”
“I wouldn’t call it a hovel,” Mircea murmured, tucking the fat pink rose he’d plucked behind her ear. “A little run-down, perhaps . . .”
She looked up at him in amazement. “You knew her? That was so long ago!”
“We don’t feel time the way you do,” he murmured, leaning in. “But I’ll tell you something about Lady Aristonice, if you like. Specifically what she would have said to the Circle.”
“And what’s that?”
He leaned all the way in and whispered something in her ear, something that made her blush and then burst out laughing. “I’d like to see their faces!”
“Try it. What are they going to do?”
“I shudder to think!”
He tilted her chin up and kissed her, long and slow and expertly. “You’re Pythia,” he whispered against her lips. “You can do whatever you want.”
Chapter Forty
The transition was harsher this time, like being underwater too long. I felt the grip of his mind, or of the vision—I still wasn’t sure which it was—clinging to me, even as I surfaced. I couldn’t breathe.
“Yes, I made her laugh,” Mircea was saying. “And the answer, when it came, was no. And the next time. And the next.”
I couldn’t complain about a lack of passion now. The dark eyes were flashing, the hands clenching on his chair arms, as if to keep him seated when he wanted to stride around the room, and maybe punch things. He did neither. But his face . . .
“No matter what words I used,” he told me, “no matter how I approached them, the gifts and favors and influence I put at their feet, it was always the same. My star was rising, I was on the senate, I could help them in their power struggle with the Circle—yes, it existed even then. I could give them so much, and I would have, freely, gladly, anything they asked . . .
“But it never mattered. Year after year, century after century, they never wavered. And they never told me why.”
“And then, one day, you got a phone call.” Tears were streaming down my face. I didn’t know why. Couldn’t think. Buzzing in my ears.
Mircea saw, and looked away, swallowing. “Yes. From Raphael. One of my subordinates had a true seer at his court. A young girl, just a tiny thing, ten or eleven. A girl whose mother was Elizabeth O’Donnell, the powerful clairvoyant and former heir to the Pythian throne, now a deceased runaway.
“I don’t know if I can describe to you how I felt after receiving that call. I sat there for a long time, unable to think, unable to move. The damn phone was beeping, wanting me to hang up, but I couldn’t even seem to do that. They told me that I sat there for hours, motionless. To me, it seemed like minutes.
“And then you got up and went to Tony’s.”
“And found you,” he agreed. “A delightful child, a breath of fresh air, and a chance . . . the first I had had in centuries . . . of a yes.”
* * *
“Come on!” I said excitedly. “It’s just up here.”
“I’m not as small as you.” Mircea, cobwebs in his hair from the wine cellar steps, nonetheless followed me into the supersecret place in the back, the one with the small door that creaked—oh, so loudly—when you opened it. But everything creaked here, the old farmhouse sounding like a grumpy old man, bones groaning and breath rasping, whenever the wind shook it.
The wind was shaking it a lot tonight—Eugenie had said a storm was coming. Good—no prying ears to figure out what we were doing, and ruin things. Not that anyone seemed to, when
Mircea was around. It was funny, seeing them all bowing and scraping, and acting like he was as dangerous as Alphonse, with his huge muscles and scary face.
Not that I found Alphonse so scary anymore. I’d watched too many horror movies with him, seen him jump when the monster appeared, and laugh to cover it up. He loved being scared, though, so he always came back for more.
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.