Reap the Wind (26 page)

Which probably explained why I’d had a crush on him since I was a kid, when he’d paid a visit to the court of the vampire who raised me.

Tony had taken in my parents, who were on the run from the Spartoi, some nasty types Ares had left to hunt my mother, in exchange for Dad doing a few spells for him. Vampires weren’t able to do magic like humans, so most employed mages to create wards and such. And for a while, things seemed to have gone along fine.

Until Tony had figured out that his mage’s young daughter was a true seer, a rare and potentially profit-making commodity in the supernatural world. And tried to take me. My parents objected, Tony insisted, and in the end, the issue was settled by a deadly car bomb. Which had killed a weakened goddess masquerading as a human. And left her four-year-old daughter an orphan and Tony’s new house seer.

At least it had until his master found out about me.

Because unlike his servant, Mircea did his homework. And he’d discovered that the mage Tony had taken in wasn’t some down-on-his-luck hack, like most of the freelance types, but Roger Palmer, a former member of the infamous Black Circle. Who was best known for eloping with Elizabeth O’Donnell, the Pythia’s designated heir, and for somehow keeping her hidden for years from all attempts to retrieve her.

Mircea had found that very interesting, since the missing heir also just happened to be my mother.

Agnes had been getting old and everyone knew that the power would soon pass to a successor. Which was supposed to be a carefully groomed acolyte as usual. But it was the Pythian power itself that chose a host, not the former Pythia, so technically it could go anywhere.

And Mircea had bet that it would go to me.

The long shot had paid off, but another gamble hadn’t. He knew the Circle had never stopped looking for my mother, and would take me as soon as they found out who I was. They had jurisdiction over magic users, not the Senate, who only governed the vamps. And I couldn’t be changed into a vamp, because that sort of thing ruined magical skill, including the ability to channel the Pythian power.

So he’d left me at Tony’s, which, unlike his own glittering court, was about as far out of the limelight as it was possible to get. Before he went crazy and joined the other side in the war, Tony had dealt mainly in human vices, so wasn’t of great interest to the Circle. And anyway, I was already there. No one had any reason to question the origins of the little orphan girl Tony had taken in out of the goodness of his cold, clammy heart.

And so we had waited. For me to grow up. For Mircea to see what would happen. And in the meantime, he’d had a mage put a spell on me to ensure my safety at the court of a guy who made the human mafia look like sweethearts.

He’d thought of everything—except the possibility that the damned thing would backfire.

Like most strong magic, the spell he’d used had a reputation for being unpredictable, and a few time-travel shenanigans after Mircea and I met again as adults had resulted in a real mess. And in an obsessive, lust-fueled relationship that had been sorted out only when the spell was finally broken. But by then, his bite had ensured that, according to vampire law at least, I was now his wife.

And divorce isn’t a thing in the vamp world.

Not that I had asked for one. No, I’d asked for something almost as strange. I had asked to date.

The idea had been to find out if all that spell-induced attraction had something else behind it. Or if I was just wearing rose-colored glasses left over from a childhood in which Mircea had seemed like the only port in a constant storm. Tony had been scary. His master, on the other hand, had been kind and caring and handsome and thoughtful. . . .

And maybe I really was stupid. Or chronically naive. But I didn’t believe that all of that had been a lie.

Did Mircea want to profit from me? Of course he did. He was a
vampire
. But that didn’t mean he didn’t care about me, too.

It also didn’t mean that he did, my little voice commented, before I squashed it and leaned across the counter to grab my toothbrush.

And felt a hand slide down my naked ass.

For a second, I froze, staring at nothing. Except for the toothbrush hanging out of my open mouth. And then I spun, my heart hammering—

And still saw nothing.

Except for swirls of steam that looked faintly ghostlike even under the bright, cheery bathroom light.

And maybe there was a reason for that, I thought hopefully. “Billy?”

My ghost companion didn’t answer.

I licked my lips.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Billy Joe liked to play games, a relic of a life spent as a professional gambler on the Mississippi. Not a good gambler, mind you. It was why he’d ended his twenties with a tour of the river bottom, courtesy of a croaker sack, a lot of rope, and a couple pissed-off cowboys who he’d been trying to cheat.

I assumed his body was still there. His soul, on the other hand, was hanging out in Vegas these days, courtesy of an ugly old necklace he’d won a few weeks before his untimely demise and hadn’t had time to pawn. That had turned out to be his one bit of good luck, because the necklace was a talisman, a relic that collected the natural energy of the world and used it to support the owner’s magic.

Or in this case, the owner’s ghost. Billy now haunted it like other ghosts did graveyards and creepy old houses. And ever since I’d bought it, intending it as a birthday gift for my old governess, he had haunted me.

Only I didn’t think he was haunting me now.

There was no flash of red ruffled shirt or smug smirk to be seen. There was no ghostly Stetson falling over laughing hazel eyes. There was no anything, which probably meant that I was imagining things again.

I grabbed another towel and started scrubbing my dripping hair.

One of these days, I was going to have to consider the concept of just avoiding bathrooms altogether. Weird shit happened to me in bathrooms. Maybe I needed to come up with another way to get clean. Maybe I needed to find a room with a Jacuzzi. Maybe I needed some long-term therapy, although I wasn’t sure even a Pythia had that much ti—

There was a tinkling crash on the other side of the bathroom door.

I froze again, hands on my head, peering out from under a yard of Turkish cotton. And stared at the door. It stared back. But nothing else did, because it was closed.

“Roy?” I called softly, because a vampire’s ears didn’t need a shout. And because I felt more than a little absurd.

A feeling that melted into something else when nobody answered.

Damn it, get a grip, I told myself harshly, and grabbed the doorknob. There’s nothing scary on the other side. It’s just a freaking bedroom!

And it was.

It just wasn’t mine.

I stumbled into a room with high ceilings, beautiful molding, and tall windows looking out over the night. And then spun around in panic, and almost broke my nose on a stretch of old-world paneling. Because there was suddenly no door there anymore.

I staggered back, confused and pained, and landed on my butt beside an overturned teapot. It was on the floor underneath a small table, leaking onto the remains of a porcelain cup and saucer. And sending a rivulet of fragrant liquid running across some highly polished wooden floorboards.

It did not help with the confusion.

Neither did the large, unfamiliar bed containing rumpled bedclothes. Or the towel and robe that had been tossed over a pillow. Or the window I wasn’t close enough to see out of, but which was allowing moonlight to filter over expensive rugs and a Jackson Pollock–like painting on the far wall.

I didn’t know this place.

I didn’t know any of it.

But the vampire who walked through the door a moment later was another story.

I scrambled back to my feet, but he didn’t appear to see me. Which was the first thing that had made any sense. Because his name was Horatiu and he couldn’t see anybody.

He was Mircea’s old tutor—very old. He’d been middle-aged or more when he’d been trying to drum some Latin through his charge’s young skull. But that meant Mircea hadn’t reached master status—the level needed to make new vamps—until Horatiu was on his deathbed. And that sort of thing tends to mess with the formula. The end result was a doddering, half-blind, mostly deaf vampire who nonetheless insisted on earning his keep. As a butler, since I guess that was the safest job Mircea had been able to come up with.

Well, sort of safe, I thought, as the white-haired old vamp set a tray down precariously on the edge of a chair instead of on the adjacent table. A chair just above the overturned teapot, which I was starting to understand better now. But Horatiu didn’t seem to notice it, either.

Maybe because he was busy gathering the clothes off the bed and throwing them out the window beside a laundry chute. And watering a silk potted plant. And starting to do something to a bookshelf adjacent to the fireplace right before another vamp came in.

“Goddamnit!” The vamp was Kit Marlowe, the Senate’s curly-haired, goateed, impossible-to-ruffle chief spy. Well, make that normally impossible because he was looking a little ruffled now.

Maybe because the bookshelf had just caught on fire.

“Lord Marlowe,” Horatiu said, in his quavering old man’s voice. “Did you wish to join the master for breakfast?”

“No!” Marlowe said, rushing past the stooped figure to the adjoining bathroom.

“There’s plenty of kippers,” Horatiu called after him. “But not enough toast. I wish the master had said something—”

“Damn it, I don’t want breakfast!” Marlowe said, running back in with a wastebasket full of water. Which he proceeded to use to save the bedroom and destroy a bunch of probably expensive old volumes.

“I can make more, of course,” Horatiu offered querulously. “But I do believe we’re out of rye.”

He tottered out, doubtless off to find more trouble to get into, and left a fuming, damp, and cursing Marlowe behind him. Who hadn’t seemed to notice the chick in the towel yet. I opened my mouth to ask what the hell, only to shut it again abruptly when Marlowe strode out through the room’s only other door.

And right through the middle of me.

There was this weird sense of disorientation as our bodies merged, the same kind I got when Billy stepped inside my skin for an energy draw. Only there was no missing energy here. Just the skin-tingling sensation of someone occupying the same space as me for a split second, before he was gone.

I spun around, clutching my towel and breathing hard, because vamps don’t leave ghosts. And even if they did, I doubted one would be able to argue with Horatiu. Or to put out a fire quite so effortlessly.

But it sure as hell had felt like he’d been a ghost.

Or . . . or that I was, I realized, with growing horror.

I stood there for a second, wondering if one of the many attempts on my life had somehow made good, and if so, why I hadn’t heard the blast or seen the shooter or felt the pain before I ended up here.

But I couldn’t be a ghost—I
couldn’t
be. My guards would have sensed an assassin. So something else was going on, and vampire senses were the most likely to help me figure out what. As long as I didn’t lose him.

Only it seemed like I already had, because Marlowe had disappeared through the door on the other side of a sitting room. One that started to close even as I ran after him. And when I flung myself through the narrow opening, barely making it before the door clicked shut, I saw—

An empty room.

It looked like an atrium, or one of those weird cubbyholes where several hallways meet and then branch off. There was another nice rug on the floor, a potted plant in a tub, and a fireplace with a mantel but no chairs in front of it because this wasn’t a room you hung out in. It was a room designed to do nothing and be nothing, besides a way to get from one place to another.

Except in this case, because there weren’t any other doors.

It would have freaked me out, but I’d seen this before. It was a popular security feature in vampire residences, meant to slow down intruders by forcing them to play find the exit. But I didn’t look for one.

Because I’d already found something else.

Something that cast a bright splash of color against the old-world paneling on the opposite wall. Something that made me momentarily forget about Marlowe and Horatiu and even my own predicament. Something that drew me forward like a magnet.

Something beautiful.

I couldn’t see it as well as I wanted, because the only illumination was a couple of recessed lights set on low up in the ceiling. And a candle burning on the mantel for some reason, so I grabbed it. And illuminated a painting.

A large one, judging by the way the light only reached the bottom half of a gown. I lifted the candlestick higher, and the golden haze gleamed off a surface cracked from age, but still vibrant with jewel-like colors: rich cream, salmon pink, dusky coral, and pale aquamarine. They formed a sumptuous gown in satin, a hand wearing a huge pearl ring, a gold-and-pearl snood over a bun of sleek dark hair, and . . .

And a face I’d seen before.

Not in painted form but in photographs, a whole book of them that I’d found by accident in another of Mircea’s many residences. I hadn’t known who it was then; still didn’t, because Mircea didn’t like to talk about his past, much less the women who populated it. Whenever I brought the subject up, he went into evasion mode.

And nobody evaded like Mircea.

I wasn’t completely naive. I knew he’d had other lovers; how could he not in five hundred years? But I hadn’t found photograph books stuffed to the brim with them. Hadn’t stumbled across a painting that must have cost a fortune of any of them. Hadn’t seen evidence that any of them were more than a passing fling.

I stared at the high cheekbones, the full red lips, the sparkling dark eyes. And felt my hand clench on the candlestick. Because this woman didn’t look like a fling to me.

The photos I’d seen had been modern, but the dress was Renaissance-era Italian; at least it was if you had pots of money. I’d seen ones like it occasionally, in some of the paintings that Rafe, Tony’s resident artist, had scattered around. It had a low-cut bodice over a delicate chemise, a high waist, and long, fitted sleeves that tied onto the shoulders with little bows. The cross draped around the wearer’s slender neck was heavy gold, and the fat, lustrous pearls that dangled from her ears might have come from a sultan’s treasure.

And it wasn’t just her clothes that were costly.

I held the light closer, because I wanted to be sure. And yes. Her jewelry glinted dull gold by candlelight because it
was
gold, made with applied gold leaf. Likewise, the red on her lips and cheeks wasn’t ochre but outrageously expensive vermilion. And the sea gleaming behind her . . . well, that wasn’t indigo.

That pure, intense color could only be ultramarine. Imported all the way from mines in Afghanistan, it was extracted through a very laborious process from genuine lapis lazuli. Rafe had told me about it while he mixed up some for his own use one day. How it might not be especially dear in modern times, but had once been the most expensive pigment in all Renaissance art. Literally worth more than its weight in gold.

Yet it was splashed around everywhere here, from the sky to the sea to the bright blue in the embroidery on the woman’s gown. A gown that must have cost a fortune yet wasn’t half as lovely as the woman wearing it. A woman who occupied not only an album full of photographs, but a canvas that took up an
entire freaking wall
—

Only no. Not a wall, I realized a moment later, when I reached out to touch the shiny surface. And fell through that doorway I hadn’t been looking for instead. And into a vortex of light and sound and oh-holy-shit that ended abruptly with me on my hands and knees in another room with another fireplace and another master vampire.

But this one wasn’t Marlowe.

Mircea sat in a big leather chair behind a bigger mahogany desk. It looked a little incongruous, because he was wearing only a pair of deep plum sleep pants. His chest and feet were bare, and his dark, shoulder-length hair, which was almost always pulled back in a clip, was loose.

He looked like he’d just gotten up, but then decided to nap in his . . . office?

It looked like one, if a somewhat generic version. The rest of the house had been an eclectic mix of old-world charm and expensive modern chic—kind of like its owner. But in here, that had given way to upscale hotel bland in beiges and browns, if hotels were regularly lit by candles: a highly polished desk, a Kerman rug on the floor, and a wall of expensive-looking books. It said upmarket accountant or big shot lawyer. It did not say Mircea.

Except for a broken Chinese figurine, a happy potbellied guy with a tambourine who was serving as a pen cup.

And, of course, the man himself, seated behind the desk, slowly caressing the chair arms.

He really liked that chair, didn’t he? I thought blankly. For a moment. Until I felt another not-so-surreptitious stroke down my naked backside. A stroke that matched the movement of Mircea’s hand on the slick leather.

Exactly matched, I realized, as he smoothed down to the end of the arm, and then swept back up, completing the circuit. And a simultaneous caress swirled around my left butt cheek. It was one of his favorite moves, and it normally would have gotten me all hot and bothered.

Except that I was already hot, and not in a good way.

And then Marlowe walked through me again.

“You might want to check in before we leave,” he said as I choked and flailed and fell back. “Horatiu is trying to burn the house down.”

“He doesn’t have to try,” Mircea murmured, without opening his eyes. “It comes naturally.”

“He needs a keeper!”

“We tried that. But he noticed their presence.” Mircea’s mouth quirked. “And complained that he was too old to be training all the new arrivals.”

“Better that than a raging inferno!”

“We’ve all become rather good at discerning the smell of smoke.”

Marlowe snorted. “No doubt. And why aren’t you dressed?”

The chief spy was, if you could call it that, in a rumpled burgundy suit and a shirt Mircea wouldn’t have used to shine his shoes. Not that he shined his own shoes. And not that Marlowe was known for sartorial splendor. Or for giving a damn about impressing anyone.