Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

There were some animal pens scattered about, but they were quiet, and no smoke threaded the night from the houses with chimneys. It looked like everyone had gone to bed a while ago. A single goat bleated a question to me as I passed his pen, a frog croaked somewhere nearby, and a pig turned over in its wallow of mud to show me a fat, hairy belly. But other than that, nothing moved.

Not even a man, suffused by a cloud of Mircea’s warm, masculine scent, standing by a house on the edge of the settlement.

He was peering in the gap between some closed shutters, still as only a vampire can be. He wasn’t drawing attention to himself, wasn’t even breathing as far as I could tell. But it was still not good, and not just because he’d come here again, on his own this time. But because of what he was wearing.

Which was not Romanian standard attire!

He had on a pair of modern sleep pants in royal blue and a matching robe. His hair was disheveled, the robe was open enough to show a stripe of muscular chest, and his feet were, indeed, bare. He looked like he’d also just rolled out of bed.

I paused, wondering what the hell, and that was a second too long. Because I guess he’d smelled me, too. The next second, a hard hand was over my mouth and I was being dragged back into the shadows of the forest.

I’d have protested more, but it saved me the trouble of doing the same thing to him.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, when he finally let me go.

“What am I doing here?” I repeated incredulously. “What are you, and dressed like that? Have you lost it, like completely? Because I need to know—”

“I haven’t lost anything—”

“Except your mind!”

“—except my patience! Go home, Cassie. This doesn’t concern you!”

“Doesn’t—” I cut off, because my brain was having trouble even processing that. And then it managed. Oh, yes, it did. “Mircea, what the hell—”

The hand over the mouth thing resumed, and I was abruptly jerked further back into the trees. Which would have made me even more furious, except that somebody was coming. Somebody who was maybe three feet high, and would have had me wondering why a child was running around on its own at this time of night. But the crazy VampVision gave me a glimpse under the hood as it hurried up the road toward the house where Mircea had been standing.

And that . . . was no child.

“What is that?” I demanded, when Mircea once again let me go. But only after the creature had knocked quietly on the thick front door of the house, and been let inside.

“One of the reasons you’re not needed here,” he said shortly, and started off.

Until I shifted him back to me, and used the Pythian power like a rope to bind him to a tree. I would have used it to drag him back home, kicking and screaming, but there was nothing to keep him from coming right back again. And in a contest over who would tire first, me or a first level master . . . well, there was no contest.

“I want answers,” I told him, as he struggled.

The cords of my power tightened, in response to the huge amount of force he was exerting, and held. But how long that would remain true, I didn’t know. This wasn’t a new ability; I’d been training with Gertie all month, and her idea of an easy session usually left me gasping and winded—and in possession of some novel way of using my Pythian abilities that I’d never even dreamed about before. But I wasn’t used to most of those yet, having had no need for actual combat all month, so it was a relief when he finally stopped struggling.

“I need you to let me go.”

There was power behind the words, at least as much as there had been in the bulging muscles a minute ago, enough to knock my head back.

And to piss me off.

“I need answers! Trade me,” I said shortly, because that was the one language all vamps understood.

And I guess Mircea was in a hurry, because he didn’t hesitate. “My wife is in that house.”

What a surprise. “And?”

“And I need to see who she’s meeting!”

I just crossed my arms and looked at him.

“You know that ability you have,” he snapped. “To page through someone’s life like reading a book?”

I frowned. “What about it?”