Ride the Storm (Cassandra Palmer 8)

“And when she doesn’t?” I rounded on him. “When you return from Faerie a victorious general with a loyal army behind you? What then?”

And I actually saw him blink.

Goddamn it!

I closed my eyes. Sometimes I honestly thought that every damn person around me believed I was an idiot. Maybe Jules was right; even vamps still tended to trust their eyes over anything else. And to the eyes, I was a skinny blonde with flyaway curls and freckles, who frequently fell over her own two feet. But that didn’t make me a fool!

And even if I had been, how much brain power did it take to add two and two?

God, I just . . .

I sighed, feeling the anger drain out of me, but not because of anything Mircea had done. But because I was just too tired to do this now. The adrenaline of the fight was wearing off, and the power I’d been forced to exert, little though it had been, had negated the shot in the arm I’d gotten from Jules’ whiskey and Ro

sier’s snack packs. I felt almost as bad as I had when I first woke up, and on top of all that, my feet were killing me.

“I do not take you for a fool,” Mircea said as I opened my eyes to look around for a chair. “I never have.”

“Are you reading my mind?” I asked sharply.

“Your face. I doubt I could pick up on even surface thoughts tonight. After the last two days . . .”

“Was that why you couldn’t stop her?”

“Possibly. But I know Dorina’s mind. I all but constructed it myself. I should have been able to prevent her from even entering the room, just as I should have noticed her tracking me to the basement. But I failed, from fatigue or from being opposed—”

“Then the consul wanted her to kill me? She’s decided that she needs you, so I’ll do as a target?”

“No.” He shook his head. “The demon alliance you forged is the foundation of all she hopes to accomplish. We cannot fight the fey on our own, just as the demons cannot on their own. But together, we have a chance.”

“Unless she’s decided that Adra doesn’t have a choice, and would ally with her anyway. She may have needed me to forge the alliance, but she doesn’t need me to keep it.”

“But she does need you as Pythia. You have no heir, and even were you to name one, there would be no time for her to be trained.”

“Then why is she siccing a pissed-off dhampir on me?” I asked, dropping into a chair by the fireplace. It was hot, this close, but the flames did more than the candles to dispel the gloom. They splashed Mircea’s face with light when he joined me on the opposite chair and sat forward, the handsome face earnest and open and tender and concerned.

And damn, he was good!

“My guess is that she didn’t realize that you were exhausted,” he said. “She assumed you would be able to deal with Dorina easily, by freezing time around her if nothing else. But a short fight would have cemented your distaste for her—and for the one who hid her from you.”

“And are we going to talk about that?” I asked steadily. “Or is this going to be another bullshit session where you distract me and I let you and nothing gets accomplished?”

His lips quirked, and he ducked his head. Mircea had always found my tendency to call a spade a spade funny. Maybe all those years of having to choose his words so precisely made hearing something blunt amusing.

Or maybe it was something else entirely, because who the hell knew?

“I will tell you the truth,” he said, looking up, suddenly somber. “About Dorina, and a great many other things. If you will listen?”

Chapter Thirty-nine

“Long ago, I made a mistake,” Mircea told me. “You know part of it, how my naïveté and thoughtless words helped to get my family killed. But I never told you the rest.”

“Why?”

“Fear. Unlike the consul, I know it only too well. I have tasted it every day, for centuries.”

I shook my head. “I know that’s a lie. You’re not afraid of anything.”

“I wish that were true.”