“You haven’t.”
I gave what sounded like a laugh and felt like a scream. “Yeah. Not gonna, either.”
I had enough nightmare fodder for a couple hundred years already. I could do without adding to the pile. Not that the chorus of cries that seemed to be getting louder every minute wasn’t already doing that!
“You don’t have to come,” Mircea assured me, the honeyed tones dripping with power, because he wasn’t above attempting to influence me.
And despite the fact that I knew what he was doing, despite the fact that it was what he always did, I felt some of the tension leave my spine. Mircea’s voice sounded like an angel’s and felt like a drug. Mircea’s voice ought to be illegal.
Not that it mattered in this case, because the surroundings were working hard against him.
“We are not doing this.” My own voice was flat and completely lacking in any kind of charm.
“You’re right,” he agreed easily, his arm going around my shoulders, and a sense of calm, peace, and singing joy spreading through my veins, because he was really pushing it. “This isn’t something for your eyes. I will find her and bring her here.”
He started to move away, but I held on. “Not a chance.”
Surprised brown eyes looked back at me, from over a muscular shoulder. Mircea wasn’t used to people disagreeing with him, particularly female people. Especially when he looked the way he did today.
Unlike me, he was in a nobleman’s attire, which in this era meant a fur-lined velvet surcoat, dark blue in his case, but rich and buttery enough that the nap gleamed with every movement. A pair of tall, black leather riding boots that hugged sculpted calves, and a silk undertunic and trousers in a matching dark blue, completed the look. They outlined an impressive expanse of chest and thighs that had hardened over years of horseback riding and one-on-one combat.
He looked like a medieval Vogue ad, and that was without the added hotness of a curved, scimitar-like blade shoved though a heavy velvet sash. Most girls would have melted at the sight of him, much less after the amount of power he’d just pushed through that casual comment. He’d probably expected me to be a puddle on the ground, patiently awaiting my master’s return.
But he wasn’t my master, and he wasn’t the one in charge here. I was. I was Pythia, and any changes to the timeline were my responsibility.
And this one wasn’t happening.
“There has to be a few thousand people over that hill—” I began.
“Cassie—”
“—at a minimum. There’s no way you can fog that many memories. You know you can’t!”
He turned back to me then, finally realizing that charm wasn’t going to work this time. He was going to have to plead his case. Of course, being Mircea, it was less pleading and more impatient explaining, but at least he was taking this seriously.
“I don’t have to,” he argued. “The majority are poor sufferers soon to die. If they are aware enough to understand what they see, they won’t live long enough to tell anyone. I merely have to avoid the guards—”
“And how many of those are there?”
I could almost see the cogs turning. That alone told me that he wasn’t feeling himself. He should have had a smooth, easy-to-believe lie prepared before he left the hilltop. But I wasn’t
the only one a little off kilter today.
I guessed that was fair, considering that his wife was about to be on one of those pikes. That was why we were here: to rescue her from a hideous fate courtesy of Mircea’s own brother. And I thought I had family problems.
Of course, Vlad hadn’t known that the peasant woman who’d come to court, claiming to be his elder brother’s secret wife, was the real deal. She’d wanted help in locating the child that she and Mircea had had together, and which she’d subsequently lost. But he’d assumed that she was trying to extort money from him, using his dead brother’s name.
And extorting money from Vlad ?epe? was not a smart move.
Predictably, she’d ended up as another of his gruesome lawn decorations, something that Mircea hadn’t known for years afterward, having been on the run at the time from some angry nobles who had blinded and then buried him alive. Mircea went into the ground as a clueless, cursed human, and emerged several hours later as a severely traumatized, half-healed, dirty vampire in a country that had a serious hate-on for his kind. It had been a toss-up as to which would get him first, the nobles or the torch wielding mobs.
As it happened, it was neither, as he was nothing if not capable, even then. And imminent death does tend to focus the mind. He’d run like hell, but not before dropping what money he had off with his wife, by way of a trusted servant.
It just goes to show how differently men view things than women. Mircea had thought that he was keeping Elena—his wife before death did them part—from the trauma of seeing him as a monster, and leaving her with enough money to last for years while he sorted out his strange new life. It had never crossed his mind that, of course, getting paid off by a tight-lipped servant would leave her with only one assumption: that she was being dumped. That her prince had found himself a princess, and that his dirty little secret was being shoved to the side with a bag of gold.
I could sympathize; I honestly could. Especially since the poor woman had shortly thereafter discovered that she was pregnant. That wasn’t a great fate in a time when single mothers were looked upon less than kindly.
Of course, they were looked on considerably kinder than the mothers of bouncing baby dhampirs.