Embrace the Night
Page 60

He heard the small noise I couldn’t quite suppress, and it crinkled the corners of his eyes. “I was beginning to worry,” he said lightly. “Most women are not still coherent at this point.”
I kissed him to wipe the smirk off his face, jerking him up to me by the two halves of his shirt. He drove the kiss deep as I shoved the silk off his shoulders and worked it down his arms. A toggle went skittering across the floor, but the heavy material wouldn’t rip—it caught on his wrists. I pulled back, glaring at it, and tugged harder, until it finally came off. Mircea let me, his eyes glinting, a smile playing over his lips. I ignored it this time.
“I’m glad you’re braver than your counterpart,” I said, as he laid me back on the rug. I still had one stocking on, I noticed. It looked a little strange, as it was all I was wearing.
“What counterpart?” Mircea murmured, kissing his way downward again.
“The one from my time.”
“And why is that?” he asked, his breath ghosting over me.
I tilted my head back, already so close—“He was afraid to touch me.”
Mircea rested his chin on my stomach and looked at me with hot, golden eyes. One hand curved around my hip possessively. “I doubt that. As a famous Frenchman once said, the best way of enlarging and multiplying one’s desires is to try to limit them.”
“Even if they make me your master?” I gasped.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then Mircea abruptly moved over me, his arms braced on either side of my body, his face staring directly into mine. His pupils were still dilated, and his skin was flushed. But unlike me, he was in command of himself. “What do you mean?” he demanded.
“The geis responds to power.” His hair whispered across my breasts, a petal-soft sensation that was suddenly almost unbearable. I whimpered, and had to struggle not to reach for him. “And now that I’m Pythia…”
His eyes widened. Pain and surprise clashed on his face with something darker, more basic. “There is a chance that your power is the greater.”
I just nodded, barely able to manage that. My skin felt like it was on fire, my pulse was pounding and my willpower was gone. I slid my thigh between his legs and put my arm around his back and just held on. I bit my lip to stifle the sounds that wanted to come up my throat, the demands I wanted to make.
I shuddered and made a helpless noise as his arms went around me, cradling me against him. He kissed me, murmuring, “It’s all right, it will be all right,” against my hair, and I sobbed wordlessly back, struggling weakly, trying to tell him that it wasn’t, it wasn’t all right.
Mircea started stroking in long, soothing paths from the base of my skull to the small of my back, over and over, murmuring soft nonsense things. Suddenly all the fight went out of me and every muscle went liquid, a low roaring in my ears. He’d hit me with a suggestion, I realized. Normally, it would have infuriated me to not even be asked, but at the moment I was absurdly grateful for it. The warmth and certainty of safety lulled me, pulling me under so gradually, I didn’t even realize when I relaxed into sleep.
I awoke when the door slammed open and Horatiu tottered in. It wasn’t much later, judging by the lack of light outside. I was sweating, and the blanket someone had placed over me had tangled around my body, plastering itself to my limbs. The fire was going strong and the room was too hot.
“Where is the master?” Horatiu asked, his voice quavering.
I sat up, holding my head. It hurt, and I felt dry-mouthed and groggy. The usual telltale signs of a powerful suggestion having worn off. Mircea must have had to use the big guns to overcome the geis, and the result was worse than a hangover. I got up and staggered to the window, throwing it open and gulping in a few lungfuls of cold, crisp air.
“The master?” Horatiu repeated.
I blinked at him over my shoulder. He had a bottle of wine perched precariously on a tarnished silver platter and his hands were shaking, making it tremble badly enough that I was afraid it would fall. “I don’t know,” I said, moving to help, and a second later he had me around my already abused throat.
I didn’t need to watch the age spots fading, the shape of the hands gripping me reforming, to know who had me. “How did you find us?” I demanded, not bothering to struggle.
“You were kind enough to mention the vampire’s name in my hearing,” Pritkin sneered. “And it seems he is well known in Paris. Discovering where ‘Lord Mircea’ has his residence wasn’t difficult!”
“Tell me you didn’t hurt the old man,” I said, wondering what he’d done with the real Horatiu. Hoping a slip of my tongue hadn’t just ended a centuries-old life.
Pritkin’s bark of a laugh echoed harshly in my ears. “I found him asleep, with the tray beside him. I left him so. My quarrel is not with him.”
“No. Your quarrel is with me, and my patience is not endless,” Mircea hissed. He’d appeared in the doorway, a tray similar to Horatiu’s in his hands. It was loaded with food—a round loaf of bread, butter, jam—that he’d somehow rounded up.
“Then let me try it no further!” Pritkin said, pulling a dark sphere out from under his cloak. “Give me my property or we all die. Right here. Right now.”
“The map will do you no good dead!”
“Nor will it you!” Pritkin snapped.
“I said we were reasonable men. It appears I overrated one of us,” Mircea replied. His hands flexed slightly and his lips drew back from his teeth. I swear I could almost see his fangs lengthening. I felt like screaming at both of them that we couldn’t afford a fight when it could end with one or all of us dead. But it wouldn’t have done any good. So I went with something that would.
While Pritkin stood glaring at Mircea, I shifted behind him and grabbed the small sphere from his hand. I threw it out the window even as he turned, shock on his face, and Mircea grabbed us both and jerked us out of the room. The door shut just as an explosion rocked the front of the house. The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.
“Are you quite mad?” Mircea asked me conversationally. “That was a dislocator.”
I didn’t have time to respond, because Pritkin let out a roar of pure rage and threw himself at Mircea.
They crashed backwards, through the railing and down the stairs, hitting the bottom and then rolling straight into a large mirror. It shuddered, but didn’t break, at least not until Mircea grabbed Pritkin by the collar and threw him into it. The fracturing glass made a sound like crinkling tinfoil, cracking in jagged streaks of broken lightning that radiated out from his shoulders like wings. Then the mirror came crashing down, scattering glass everywhere, and Pritkin grabbed up a large shard and made a swipe straight at Mircea’s neck.
I didn’t see what happened then, because they carried the fight into the next room, out of sight. I jerked up the blanket I still wore and ran to the bottom of the stairs, but had to slow down to pick my way through the shards of mirror. And, right at the bottom of the steps, my bare foot encountered something that wasn’t wood or glass—a folded scrap of paper.
It was a single heavy sheet containing a mass of scribbled instructions. A mass of very familiar scribbled instructions. I stared at it in disbelief; I guess I knew who’d been running the auction now.
My head whipped up at the sound of an explosion, and I ran into the reception room to find a section of the floorboards charred black and smoking. But a broken vial lay nearby, so it had been a potion, not a spell. It looked like both men were too drained to try anything fancier than old-fashioned hand-to-hand, which meant that I had a few extra seconds before someone ended up dead.
A candelabra had been knocked to one side in the impact, and most of the candles had sizzled out against the floor, but one continued burning. I held it to a corner of the map and yelled, “Take off the geis or I torch it!”
The fight froze. Mircea looked up with a hand locked around Pritkin’s neck, while the mage halted the knife that had been heading for Mircea’s chest. “I already did!” Pritkin spat, face livid even in the almost nonexistent light. “There is no chance, none at all, that the counterspell would not have been sufficient, were you not opposing it!”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“You lie! What was your plan? For your vampire to find the Codex while you distracted me?” I stared at him, speechless. I hadn’t been the one doing the distracting! “Your intent all along was to find the Codex at any cost!”
I felt my chest heave with something similar to the expression on Pritkin’s face. “Well, if not, it pretty much is now,” I said furiously.
“It won’t do you any good!” He watched with a panicked expression as a tiny flame started eating away at the corner of the map. “It doesn’t contain a starting point—that was to be given verbally to the winner of the sale.”
“Then I’ll look up the auctioneer. I’m sure he can be reasonable.”
“Perhaps he would be, if he lived!”
Mircea opened his hand and got to his feet. “We appear to be at an impasse,” he told Pritkin. “You have the starting point, but not the map. We have the map, but not the starting point. We can achieve our goal only by cooperation.” It was a good speech, but he followed it with a smile that made the mage drop a hand to his belt, which contained its usual row of deadly little vials.
I ignored them and watched the flame grow, consuming the artwork that someone had painstakingly painted at the bottom of the page. Considering how sloppy the rest of the map was, it stood out. Particularly because it hadn’t been included on the version I would one day be given by a kindly-looking old man in a pretty French garden. It was a perfectly rendered, golden ouroboros, its tiny scales glinting in the candlelight.
“What are you doing?” Pritkin demanded, as the hungry flames leapt higher. “If you burn it, you will never find it. Even if the vampire made a copy, it won’t contain the starting point! And I won’t help you!”