Fury's Kiss (10 page)

“And that’s
my
point, because I hadn’t had any last night!”

“If you cannot recall last night, how do you know?”

Because I knew what the level had been in the bottle this morning. I didn’t say, not needing that kind of hell. “Like Claire said, I don’t do that anymore,” I said sweetly.

He narrowed his eyes at me, but before he could say anything, Marlowe, of all people, came to my rescue.

“I have a squad of dead agents,” he said harshly. “And a live dhampir. And I have yet to hear why.”

“It is apparent why,” Louis-Cesare said, his eyes on mine. “We have been pressing the smugglers harder of late, and they have decided to strike back. The more operatives they deprive us of, the longer it will take—”

“Then why leave
her
? In the right circumstances, she’s as dangerous as another master. In some even more so, as she has abilities we lack!”

And that, I thought, was likely the closest thing to a compliment I would ever get from Marlowe.

Not that I was all that flattered when the next thing out of his mouth was: “They should have spilled her guts all over the pier, right beside Lawrence’s!”

“Typical!” Claire said, looking disgusted. Louis-Cesare apparently didn’t like the comment any better, because his face flushed and he rounded on the chief spy. But then Radu intervened.

“They may not have known what she is,” he pointed out. “She scents as human, and the other telltale signs are difficult to spot. And why would they have been looking for them? There are so few dhampirs; they simply aren’t what anyone expects—”

“It makes no difference!” Marlowe said, brushing that aside. “Whether they believed her to be human or mage or some mutant type of fey—”

Oh, yeah, I thought, watching Claire. This was going well.

“—why keep someone alive who could possibly identify them?”

“We don’t know that she can identify them,” Louis-Cesare argued. “She did not even know who I was when I found her. She may know nothing—”

“Oh, she knows,” Marlowe said, turning implacable eyes on me. “And she’s going to tell us, if I have to rip it out of her brain my—”

“Kit!” That was Radu again, but this time he was too late.

And suddenly it was like the old saying: you could have heard a pin drop. Which is a lot easier with vampire hearing anyway.

“Is that was this is about?” I asked, but Marlowe had clammed up. Not that it mattered; he wasn’t the one running this show.

He never had been.

“Mind tricks don’t work on me,” I said, my eyes meeting Mircea’s.

“Some do,” he said quietly.

And yeah. Some did. Specifically, his did, because they worked on pretty much everyone.

There was one thing I hadn’t gotten around to explaining to Claire in that twenty questions on vamps we’d been doing. Mainly because she wouldn’t have believed me. No one did unless they saw it for themselves, and precious few outsiders ever did.

Every senior master, sometimes even before reaching first level, developed special abilities. It was the crazy stuff the old legends assigned to all vamps but that most never lived long enough or got powerful enough to see. Like turning into mist or morphing into an animal—the kind of things that impressed people at parties. The kind of stuff that was often less useful than spectacular or awe-inspiring or breathtaking.

Except in Mircea’s case.

Mircea’s gifts weren’t like that. Mircea’s gifts weren’t showy at all—were, in fact, completely invisible, and all
the more dangerous because of it. Mircea’s talents lay with the mind.

“That’s why you came here, why you had Louis-Cesare bring me back,” I said. “You wanted me in familiar surroundings.”

“It usually works best that way.”

“You ought to know.”

“What is it?” Claire asked, picking up on the sudden change in atmosphere. “What’s going on?”

But this time Mircea didn’t answer. This was the crunch point, and he knew it. His eyes never left mine. “Will you do it?”

I didn’t say anything, because I was kind of surprised that he’d bothered to ask. Maybe whatever he was planning needed my cooperation. Maybe having me fight him would lessen the chance of getting anything useful. I actually wanted to believe that. Because believing the concern in those brown velvet eyes—
fake, fake, you know damned well it’s fake
—was always a bad idea.

If I had a problem dealing with the flood of emotions Louis-Cesare stirred up, it was nothing compared to the tsunami named Mircea.

It had been this way as far back as I could remember, a strange dance toward and away from each other, a suspicious, snarling, snapping dance, which I guess made sense considering that we were genetically designed to tear each other’s throat out. Lately, we’d been in one of the better cycles, circling closer, teeth still bared and claws still out because you never knew—
no, you never, ever knew
—but closer nonetheless. And I freely admitted that that had been mostly his doing.

I hadn’t
wanted
to get closer. I hadn’t needed one more ride on that merry-go-round, one more trip to that particular rodeo, when it always ended the same way. Why play when you can’t win? Why try when you know ahead of time that it isn’t going to work? When it
never
works? After centuries of the same old same old, I’d given up. I didn’t want to dance anymore.

Which was when Mircea had decided that he did.

And I had to admit, he’d learned a few new steps
since last time. Maybe more than a few, and they hadn’t been mere variations on a theme, either. When Mircea did something, he did it full throttle, and that included turning over a new leaf.

He’d started out by killing the creature who had killed my mother, despite the fact that the bastard in question was his own brother. He’d also told me a few things—very few—about the woman she had been, a commoner he’d married despite the fact that a match like that could only harm his ambitions. He had pulled me into his orbit by attaching me to the Senate’s shiny new portal demolition squad, which he happened to head up. He had dangled Louis-Cesare—moody, unconventional, passionate Louis-Cesare—in front of me like bait in front of a starving fish.

Okay, maybe not that last one, since Louis-Cesare was a serious potential asset to the family, if he ever got his shit together. Which he wouldn’t if he kept slumming around with me. So I didn’t know what, if anything, Mircea had done there, and what had been coincidence. But that was the problem with Mircea—I never knew anything for certain.

He was sitting silently, waiting for me to work through it. Other people were talking—I heard Claire’s bright tones, Radu’s soothing murmur, a flash of Marlowe’s thunder—but I couldn’t concentrate on any of it. All I could see were those dark eyes, so like mine, yet so different. So very different.

Part of the reason I’d freaked out on Louis-Cesare hadn’t had anything to do with him. He’d accidentally stumbled across one of my admittedly not insignificant number of hot spots, and this one was hotter than most. Or maybe sharper, because that’s what it felt like, the broken edges sharp as glass where memories used to be.

Mircea had used his little gift on me when I was a child, sorting through my head, taking out my recollections of his brother, of what had happened to my mother, of who-knew-what-else, because I sure as hell didn’t. But I could feel it, even now, the place where all those
memories should have been, as conspicuous in its absence as a newly lost tooth.

Or a hole in the head. Because that’s what it was: a hole, a wound, a fissure. I could feel the raw edges where my memories had been cut to pieces, the sudden blanks where the film broke and left me floundering on the brink of a thought. A diver walking to the edge of a cliff and looking over to see…nothing.

Supposedly, the idea had been to keep me safe, since my baby dhampir mind had been set on revenge, and nobody in our family was an easy kill. Particularly not when surrounded by an army of guards bristling with weapons. True, they were human and I was not, but they’d also outnumbered me by a few hundred to one and Mircea hadn’t liked the odds. He also hadn’t liked the idea of a quick and easy death for his brother in case I got lucky.

Or so he said. But there was a problem with that. Because Mircea’s idea of fitting punishment had been perpetual confinement, locking his crazed sibling away for centuries after making him a vampire so he couldn’t die and get out of it. So he could never forget. It was a symphony of revenge instead of the few notes I’d planned to mete out, and it made perfect sense—except for one small detail.

No one under master status can make a vampire.

So Mircea had already made the leap to at least seventh-level master when he Changed Vlad, and I was a baby dhampir at the time, almost literally. And yet he couldn’t have controlled me without the mental surgery? He couldn’t have found another way without taking almost every damn memory I had of my early life, including all recollections of my mother? He couldn’t have done something, anything, else?

I didn’t buy it.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the less I bought it, which was why I was having problems with this whole reconciliation thing. And now he wanted back inside my head for round two? I stared at him silently and said nothing.

Neither did he.

Maybe because there wasn’t anything to say. I didn’t ask if they’d already checked other leads because I didn’t have to. Mircea wouldn’t have come here—not to me, not with this—unless he’d already tried everything else. Unless he was out of options.

So he was sitting there, bouncing Aiden on his knee, being patient with Claire, somehow keeping Marlowe in check, and waiting. For the deal. For the terms. For the bargains that were the only real heartbeat of vampire life.

And suddenly I was just sick of it, completely and utterly. There were things I could have asked for, things I could have used, but I didn’t want anything from him. I never had.

Nothing that I was likely to get, anyway.

“All right,” I heard myself say hoarsely.

And the dam burst.

Color, light, and the sound of raised voices surged around me. It felt like a veil had been lifted from over my head, leaving me blinking. And wincing, because Stinky had apparently been trying to get my attention by sinking wicked sharp nails into my thigh.

By the time I pried his toes out of my flesh, the party had moved to the living room, because it was darker. And Mircea needed his concentration for whatever he planned to do to my brain rather than putting out fires. I didn’t follow because I needed a few minutes.

And because of Claire.

Claire was Not Happy.

“I don’t like this,” she hissed, not bothering to keep her voice down.

Not that it mattered. The living room was only across the hall and down a little ways. Which meant we may as well have been standing beside them as far as vampire hearing was concerned. But Claire didn’t look like she cared.

“You don’t understand,” I told her, passing Stinky over so I could hold a paper towel to my leg. So much for another pair of jeans.

“Then explain it to me!” she said furiously, somehow managing to be intimidating despite balancing a baby on each hip. “Explain why you would even consider—”

“Because Varus wasn’t among the corpses,” I snapped. Damn, Stinky was developing freaking talons. “Which means he set us up—”

“He set
them
up. Not you! Why do you have to—”

“Claire, if the criminal element gets the idea that they can butcher the Senate’s agents at will, we’re all going to be in trouble. The Senate’s got enough on its hands with the war; it doesn’t need another front opening up here.” Especially one that knew its weaknesses as well as Varus probably did.

The reason Geminus had gotten away with his little hobby for so long was that he hadn’t been just any old vampire. He’d been a senator, and what was more, the Senate’s weapons master, which had included locating and developing new ways to kill things. That had given him carte blanche to go into Faerie whenever he liked, and set up his network of portals. But it also meant that Varus, as his right-hand guy, had way too much knowledge about the Senate’s inner workings—and its arsenal.

“We have to find him,” I told Claire. “Finding Varus means finding his contacts, who may be some of the same people causing you problems back home.”

“That isn’t home.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head, red hair flying everywhere. It was sunny today, but it had been raining a lot lately, and Claire’s hair goes poufy when it rains. It was teetering on the edge of Afro territory right now, which wasn’t a great look for her. But it was better than the dark circles under her eyes and the pinched skin at the corners of her mouth.

I’d been kind of out of it lately, recovering from one disaster and apparently getting into another, and hadn’t really been paying attention. But maybe I should have; Claire looked like she could use it. “Are you all right?” I asked, wondering if we had a problem.

“This isn’t about me!” she said shrilly, green eyes flashing.

And okay, yeah. A problem. Of course, maybe having her slam somebody through a wall should have clued me in to that already. Claire had the stereotypical redhead’s temperament, but she usually stopped short of forcible redecoration.

“How can you let him do that, just…just tiptoe around in your brain like that?” she demanded.

“It won’t be the first time.”

“And that’s even worse! He already altered your memories once. What’s to say he won’t do it again?”

It looked like Mircea had less success with fey than with humans, I thought, because Claire clearly wasn’t a fan.

“It’s like I told you,” she said severely. “They only understand their own side, and it isn’t yours!”

“I’m part vampire, Claire,” I reminded her, since she seemed to keep forgetting that.

“You’re part human, too. And I’m beginning to believe the human part is the best part—in all of us.”

“What does that mean?”

She looked away. “Nothing. It’s just…Lately it feels like everyone I love is hanging by a thread, while some madman runs around with scissors. And some days, I just want to—”