“Yes. She must have had some latent magical blood I didn’t know about. Possibly she didn’t either, but it came out under duress—”
“Mircea, she didn’t throw a spell! She savaged them—”
The beautiful eyes flashed. “And you wouldn’t have done the same? They were going to kill her—”
“I wouldn’t have been able to do the same! Not without the Pythian power—”
“Which she didn’t have!”
“—no human would!”
He frowned at me. “What are you saying?”
“The obvious.” I spread my hands. “She killed a couple dozen of Vlad’s guards almost faster than it takes me to say it, ran off at lightning speed, and was later screaming at the fey in some alien language. Or am I wrong?”
The frown tipped into a scowl, and he went to a small bar under a window. “I didn’t hear her.”
“But I did. I don’t speak fey, any variety of it—”
“Then you don’t know what it was, do you?”
“—but it wasn’t Romanian!”
“I wasn’t aware that you were so familiar with my native tongue.” He was busy fixing himself a replacement drink, so I couldn’t see his face, but the tone was acid.
I stared at him some more. He was obviously agitated, walking back to the fireplace and putting a snifter of what looked like claret down on the mantle, before picking it up again. Then draining its contents and setting it down once more, hard enough to crack the delicate glass stem.
The sharpened edge nicked his hand, causing a single drop of blood to drip through his fingers, gleaming in the low light like a ruby. He didn’t even seem to notice, which was impossible. Blood was the one thing that always got a vamp’s attention.
But not this time.
He strode toward the bathroom suddenly, ripping off the tunic in the process—literally. I looked at the shredded halves of the once fine garment in concern. Mircea was nothing if not meticulous about his person and possessions. If I’d gone to the closet in the bedroom next door, I’d have found military precision in the folded items, and all the hangers turned the same way. I didn’t even have to check to know that.
Yet an expensive piece of silk was now a rag.
I walked to the bar and poured myself a drink. The whiskey was good, but I hardly tasted it, and barely noticed the view outside the window. Autumn in the Catskills was beautiful, a cascade of leaves in every shade from bright green through deepest purple, with yellows, oranges and reds the most predominate. It wasn’t snowing, not yet, but there was a crispness in the air, a promise of winter being right around the corner.
I wondered if it would be our last, and then told myself not to be maudlin and drank my drink.
The mountains reminded me of those we’d just left, although these were more brightly colored, and a lot quieter. It was peaceful here, remote. I wondered if that was why Mircea liked it, as a refuge from the intrigue, court politics and backstabbing of his life elsewhere. I wondered if that was why he missed her, as a reminder of a youthful, less complicated time. Or if there was something more.
The thought hurt, even though that was stupid. We’d been broken up for going on two months now, and I had already moved on. For all I knew, Mircea had done the same; he certainly hadn’t believed in a solitary existence before he met me. If he wasn’t already seeing someone, it probably wouldn’t be long.
Or maybe it would, because I’d never seen him act like this about anybody but Elena.
I’d never seen him act like this about me.
I threw back the rest of my drink, choking a little because I wasn’t bad ass enough to get away with that, and started to return to the nonexistent fire. Only to stop in surprise because one was actually in the process of being laid, by a white-haired old vampire. He was dressed in a suit that looked vaguely Victorian, probably because that was when he’d bought it, and appeared to eb about a hundred, because that was around the age that he’d been changed.
Shit, I thought, recognizing Horatiu, Mircea’s oldest servant and former tutor.
He’d helped Mircea to escape Wallachia after that fateful run in with the nobles, and had stayed with him through the terrible years that followed, as his former pupil struggled to figure out his undead life. Mircea had finally changed the old man—at Horatiu’s request—on his deathbed, despite the fact that that sort of thing rarely turns out well. But I guess he hadn’t felt like he could say no.
And to be fair, Horatiu didn’t seem all that bothered by the crappy eyesight and dubious hearing that had followed him into his new existence. Everybody else, on the other hand, were very much so, mainly because he almost burned the house down on a daily basis. Usually, a servant followed him around on the duties he still insisted on performing, to make sure that a conflagration didn’t kill them all, only today, I didn’t see one.
I did see Horatiu about to set one of the wingbacks on fire, however, and grabbed the narrow shoulders, turning them toward the hearth.
“Mircea?” he paused, the quavering old man voice startled but quiescent. Then he sniffed, and unlike his other senses, his nose seemed to be just fine, because it wrinkled up at me. “You’re not Mircea.”