Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“I discovered it on my own, last night. After we got back, I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping.”

He lifted an arm as if to run a hand through his hair, a familiar gesture, but the bonds restrained him. He snarled a bad word in Romanian, but didn’t struggle again. That was the thing about Mircea, and one of my main worries in all this: he was a damned quick study.

“I was thinking about Elena,” he added, “and, suddenly, there she was. Memories of her, hundreds of them, cascading like pages, but they weren’t my memories. Some I wasn’t in and had never even seen before.”

So, I wasn’t the only one learning new skills, I thought grimly.

Even worse, this particular one was freaking advanced, to the point that I’d only done it once myself, by accident, when helping a friend who had been hit by a combat-level spell. It had turned him into little more than a lump of flesh, with no mouth to speak, or ears to hear any response if he had. But the Pythian power had put me in contact with him, nonetheless.

And it had been just like Mircea said: a cascade of memories like flipping through the pages in a book, but controllable, unlike those freaking items in the Pythian museum! I’d been able to slow things down, get a good look, decide what I wanted to view next. And, apparently, so had Mircea.

“What did you see?” I asked.

“That’s just it; I don’t know! I came across this memory, from the period after I left Wallachia, but Elena. . . She and her visitor weren’t speaking Romanian, or any other known language, and that thing—did you see that thing?” Dark eyes blazed into mine.

“I saw.”

“It’s some kind of fey, at a guess, but my people don’t know which. I couldn’t get a good enough look at it to describe it properly. It never takes off that damned hood, and all I could see—”

“Were teeth,” I finished for him.

“If you want to call them that! Huge, slavering—he took my child!”

“What?”

“Elena gave him my child—Dorina! Why would she do that?”

“I . . . don’t know,” I said, caught off guard by the question. And by the raw emotion on Mircea’s face. He was as handsome as always, but he looked frankly deranged. His hair was limp and straggling in his face; his color was high and his eyes were glittering.

“I want to know what happened,” he told me savagely. “I want to understand. I don’t understand anything!”

“You understand that Dorina was all right,” I pointed out. “She’s fine now, so—”

“Is she? Who knows what was done to her, where he took her? Elena said she was giving her to the Romani!”

“But she ended up with them—”

“That’s not the point!”

He was straining against his bonds again, hard enough to make me feel it, but I didn’t think he noticed. “Try to understand, Cassie. I don’t know anything, not anymore. Who my wife was, where she came from, what happened to my daughter—none of it!”

“And that’s all you want? To understand?”

“I don’t know what I want anymore,” he said, and there was a thread of something I had rarely heard from Mircea in his voice: pure honestly. There was confusion there, and anger, and fear, and guilt. And probably a hundred other things I might have been able to parse better, if I hadn’t been standing in a freezing forest in the middle of the night! But the honestly sparkled through everything else, like snow in moonlight.

“You’re not going to try to interfere?” I pressed him. “Or talk to her? Or attack anybody?”

His expression suddenly changed, from frantic desperation to a much more familiar outraged haughtiness. “Of course not!”

“Says the man who chased an entire party of fey across a countryside, after shifting me into a tree!”

“That was different.”

I thought about stabbing myself in the eye, but I didn’t have anything handy. I thought about stabbing him—there were plenty of branches around, I should be able to find a suitable stake—but it wouldn’t do any good. Not unless I planned to kill him. The only thing—the only thing—I could think of that might help was giving him what he thought he needed. Which right now, was information.

Maybe, if he figured out the mystery of his wife, it would be enough.

And if not, I thought grimly, I could always stake him later.