Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“Yes, what they want from every woman they steal,” he said viciously. “They keep human women as brood mares, treat them little better than cattle, and then they—” he stopped, his jaw clenched as tightly as his fist, his cheeks burning, and the fabled Basarab calm absolutely nowhere in existence.

Right before he swept the entire contents of the desk off onto the floor.

The servant, who’d been picking up spilled tea things, finally had enough and fled in terror. I barely noticed. Because I’d figured out which of us was off our head, and it wasn’t me.

I moved away from the desk and sat in one of the two red leather, wingback chairs by the fireplace. Mircea’s mansion in the Catskills was high enough that, in late October, it was seriously chilly. But vampires don’t suffer much from cold, so the fire was out.

I pulled a fur throw around my shoulders, feeling like a grandma, and probably looking like one, too, in my bloody peasant garb. But I didn’t have anything else. I’d never lived here, not even for a single night, despite the fact that, technically, Mircea and I were married.

My hand instinctively went to the two little scars on my neck, fang marks that he’d given me once when a malignant spell was riding him and he hadn’t fully known what he was doing. But it didn’t matter. By vampire law, he’d marked me, and that was an unbreakable bond.

Since I hadn’t agreed to said bond, or even understood what was happening at the time, I hadn’t counted it as a marriage, although we’d dated for a while afterward to give it a chance. But while there was love there, even now, there hadn’t been the trust needed to build a relationship. As demonstrated by the current situation.

“Cassie, you must understand,” Mircea said, taking the chair opposite me. He was on the edge of his seat, sitting forward, catching and then holding my hands. The charisma that had been missing a moment ago was back in full measure, and for once, I didn’t think it was fake. I’d started to be able to tell the difference, and the honesty in his eyes was really compelling.

“I do understand,” I said. “I just don’t think that you do.”

“Why?” The brown eyes burned. “What is the harm in going back a little earlier, and snatching her away before the fey even arrive?”

I looked at him steadily. “Other than damaging the fey time line—”

“We don’t know that—"

“—and possibly ours as well, because the fey interact with us on a regular basis?”

“She’s one woman!”

“One woman we know nothing about.”

I got up, feeling the need to pace, and to my surprise, he let me go. He flopped back onto the chair with his hair unusually disheveled and his old Romanian costume still half on. The gorgeous surcoat had been flung over a chair, but the tunic was in place and unlaced halfway down a sun bronzed chest.

I assumed he’d adopted the glowing skin color for the disguise, as too many people in old Romania might have recognized vampire paleness when they saw it. But it looked good on him. Like the claret he’d gotten to replace the whiskey, which had stained his lips a deep red. They matched the threads of auburn in that mahogany mane and the discreet embroidery around the deep V-neck of the tunic.

He ought to have been the lead in some Gothic movie, a better-looking Heathcliff brooding over fate.

But he wasn’t.

He was a master vampire with power to burn, even when he wasn’t stealing mine. It was in the crackling energy that permeated the air around him, and the cinnamon amber glow lighting up those brown eyes. It was in the way he watched me as I paced, calculating, shrewd, even in the midst of his pain, wondering which tactic would work.

I could have told him: none of them.

Instead, I told him something else. “The Alorestri, the so-called Green Fey, have kidnapped human women for years, to help make more little soldiers for their perpetual wars. Their kingdom is on the border with the Dark Fey lands, and they lose more people to combat than any other group. Yet their birth rate is too low to bridge the gap, so they look for outside help.

“The Svarestri, on the other hand, think of humans as little better than animals, and refuse to sully their bloodlines. They don’t even buy human slaves in Faerie, much less going into a world they know little about in order to steal any. Your wife wasn’t taken by them for tha

t reason.”

Mircea gave me an impatient look, maybe because none of this should have been news to him. “And your power told you this?”

“Common sense told me this. I can’t see into Faerie. You know that.”

“Then you can’t be sure. You can’t tell me she was all right. That she was happy—”

“Is that the criteria now?” I demanded. I’d ended up back by the desk, but at that I turned to face him again, only to find that he’d joined me. “I thought it was to save her life.”

“It was. It is. But I have to know—I have to be certain—that she did not suffer. That I did not leave her to a hideous fate on an alien world—”

“Alien?” I stared at him. “You saw what she did to those guards—”