Embrace the Night (Cassandra Palmer 3)

Mircea must have heard us come in, but he continued what he was doing. He stood with his back to us, the candlelight on his bare skin causing his muscles to fall into sharp relief. He’d washed the river gunk out of his hair and now he threw it back, the water droplets shimmering in the light. The scene looked for all the world like a really good romance novel cover.

I sighed and Pritkin turned his glare on me. “He’s a vampire!” he said, as if I hadn’t noticed.

“Yeah. And?”

“I believe the mage is surprised that I do not burst into flames from the holy water,” Mircea said, toweling off with what looked suspiciously like an altar cloth. I was a little surprised myself, considering that he’s Catholic. But then I got a better look at it and realized that it, like the cathedral, had seen better days.

Boxes, barrels and casks were piled here and there, clogging all but the main aisle, which was marred by a lot of muddy footprints. Outside, I hadn’t been able to avoid noticing that the probably saintly but definitely creepy statues around the entrance had been vandalized. It didn’t look like the revolution cared for religion all that much.

“But, of course!” Pritkin sneered. “The water is not sacred at the moment! The Jacobins made certain of that!”

“They vandalized the cathedral before turning it into a ‘Temple to Reason,’” Mircea agreed, probably for my benefit. “Which, considering their excesses, does seem somewhat ironic.”

“They defiled it,” Pritkin snapped. “Naturally it now embraces something equally foul!”

“But,” Mircea continued, “as we are not of their ilk, let us make good on the name. I have found that most men can be reasonable, given the right incentive.” He held something up in two fingers of one hand, while continuing to towel his hair with the other.

“That is mine!” Pritkin took a step forward before he caught himself.

“And you have something that belongs to me. I suggest a trade,” Mircea said, turning around at last.

I saw it when he recognized Pritkin; it was nothing overt, but for an instant his body stiffened and his eyes slid to me. I shook my head briefly, but stopped when Pritkin glanced between the two of us. “What subterfuge is this?” he demanded. “Do you take me for a fool?”

“No, not a fool,” Mircea said, with the air of a man who didn’t know quite what to make of him. I wondered how long it would take him to put it together. Magical humans could live as long as two hundred years, so there might be a few still around who were alive at the time of the French Revolution. But they wouldn’t look thirty-five.

“This is how we shall proceed,” Pritkin said crisply. “You

will take the map outside and leave it beside the ley line. I will pick it up and open a fissure. As soon as I have verified that it is authentic, I will give you the spell.”

“He already knows the spell I need,” I explained.

Mircea switched his incredulous look from the mage to me. “And you trust him to give it to you?”

“I am not the one whose honor is in question!” Pritkin said, furious.

“You kidnapped and tried to kill her!”

“I kidnapped her so I wouldn’t have to kill her!”

“Mage, by all that is holy, I swear—”

“Holy?” Pritkin’s sneer was the same as always. “You dare to even use such a term, you—”

“Shut up!” I yelled, and it echoed oddly off the sides of the cathedral, like a ghostly loudspeaker. I could not take one more minute of this. “We don’t have a choice,” I told Mircea more calmly.

“He has already proven himself treacherous! Trusting him again—”

“I’m not asking you to trust him. I’m asking you to trust me. Please.”

Mircea didn’t answer, but he crossed the space and grabbed Pritkin’s arm, so fast that I didn’t even see him move. “If you harm her, you will never see the map again,” he said softly. “You will not live long enough to see anything again.”

Pritkin tried to shrug him off, but found that he couldn’t. “If you speak the truth, I have no need to harm her!” he said viciously. “Now release me!”

Mircea reluctantly complied, after a squeeze that made Pritkin set his jaw in pain, and we all trooped back outside. Pritkin stubbornly didn’t rub his arm, although it had probably lost circulation, and he took care to keep us both clearly in view. Mircea put the map in the center of the cobblestone pavement and moved back half a dozen yards, which in vampire terms meant he may as well not have bothered to move at all. He could cross that much space in a heartbeat.

I looked pointedly at Pritkin. He waved a hand at me and uttered a few guttural syllables. Nothing happened. He frowned and did it again. “I didn’t feel anything,” I said, except my blood pressure starting to rise.

“It was not successful.”