Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

I bit my lip. “Sorry?”

“And then you take two steps and fall over, and I think you’re dead. But no, turns out you’re just exhausted. So I carry you off to bed. And the next morning, when I think I’m finally going to get a damned explanation, what happens?”

I didn’t say anything that time.

“So I’ve had a day,” Marco said grimly. “You were gone and the girls wouldn’t tell me shit, and that damned mage kept calling—”

“You mean Jonas?” I asked worriedly.

“Who else?”

We were talking about Jonas Marsden, the head of the Silver Circle, the world’s chief magical authority and my . . . well, colleague, technically, although he acted more like my boss. And of course, he’d been there to see all of this. My luck practically demanded it.

“What did he want?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.

“To talk to you. He had a fit when you disappeared last night, and a worse one when you came back. He wanted to carry you and the girls off somewhere, but Rhea wouldn’t budge until she talked to you, and he didn’t have enough mages with him to force

the issue. Not with the witches yelling about ‘Pythian sovereignty,’ whatever the hell that is, and me threatening him with a couple dozen masters—”

I winced. And was suddenly profoundly grateful that I’d been unconscious.

“—but it wasn’t pretty. For a while there, I thought I was going to have to call for reinforcements. But he finally agreed to go if I promised to have you call him as soon as you got up. But, of course, by this morning you’d skipped out—again—with no explanation—again. And I had to tell him you’d gone on an errand!”

“I owe you,” I said fervently.

“Oh no. No, we’re not even there yet.”

I swallowed.

“So every half hour: is she back yet, is she back yet?” Marco gave Jonas’ voice a high-pitched whine it in no way possessed. “And then the girls needed food and a place to stay—”

“I’ll see if I can—”

“And then the press got word about your court blowing up, and they somehow got our number—”

“Not again. How do they keep—”

“—and then the boss called.”

I swallowed. And, once again, everything else suddenly felt trivial. Manageable. Easy, by comparison. “The . . . boss?”

“Yeah, you know.” Marco smiled evilly. “Your husband?”

Chapter Four

Mircea Basarab was a lot of things. Handsome—beautiful, really, if you could use that word for a man—in that stunning way that movie stars are and the rest of us aren’t. Only Mircea didn’t need a great wardrobe and the right lighting. Mircea could make women swoon naked and in the dark.

Especially naked and in the dark, come to think of it.

It wasn’t surprising, since he’d had five hundred years to refine his seduction technique, which he now used as the chief negotiator for the dreaded North American Vampire Senate. It controlled the country’s vamps far more strictly than the Circle did its mages. And speaking of mages, the Senate was heartily tired of them monopolizing the Pythias, which they had done for centuries as the traditional Pythian bodyguards.

Right up until a Pythia ended up sort-of-kind-of-but-not-exactly married to a senator, that is.

Like I said, my love life is complicated.

Or it had been until recently, when Mircea had all but vanished from the scene. I hadn’t heard from him in more than a week, not since he’d gone off to handle some crisis in New York. That had been a little disappointing, because, okay, he was busy, but would a phone call have killed him? But it had also been a relief, because we had things to talk about, oh yes we did, and they were things that I’d just as soon postpone until I fixed the immediate crises of a demon curse and a homeless court and a bunch of homicidal acolytes.

“What did he say?” I asked Marco casually.