Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(79)
“Why does everyone assume I plan to go aftersubrand? I’m insane, not stupid.”
“I have never assumed you to be either. But you wish to help your friend.”
“I don’t recall mentioning any friends.” And if Louis-Cesare had, I was going to skin him.
Those dark eyes met mine. “I am not stupid, either, Dorina. When the stone is recovered, assuming it is, it will be returned to its owners. I have no wish to make an enemy of the fey. In the meantime, you are to stay out of this. Once you are no longer in competition with him for the rune,subrand will have no reason to trouble you.”
There was no safe reply to that, so I didn’t make one.
“I’ll get people on it,” Marlowe said. “But it isn’t going to be easy. Not with that group. Our best bet may be to wait and see whose candidates start cleaning up at the challenges. Although what we’re supposed to do about it then, I don’t know. Prying it loose from any one of them, with the possible exception of the mage, will not be easy.”
Funny thing, that’s exactly what I’d been thinking about Marlowe.
Chapter Twenty-two
Anthony made his rather flamboyant departure a moment later, surrounded by a passel of genuflecting flunkies. “Not coming?” he asked, peering in the door at Mircea.
“I will be along presently.”
“Oh, good. We’d hate to have to start without you.” He strode away, cheerfully chatting with Jér?me, and I suddenly realized that he was wearing a toga. His personality was so big that it had eclipsed everything else. I simply hadn’t noticed.
I did notice that Louis-Cesare didn’t even look in at me as he passed, however. It looked like some of Marlowe’s comments had gotten through, after all. Slumming with a dhampir was okay as long as nobody knew, but now it was clearly time for damage control.
I don’t know why it surprised me. No vampire had a dhampir lover. A few had tried to seduce me over the years, for the thrill or the bragging rights or just because they liked living dangerously. But anything more than a one-night stand? No.
And that wasn’t going to change. Best-case scenario, it would be social and political suicide. Worst-case, someone influential might start to wonder about said vampire’s sanity. And there was only one solution for insane vampires. I should know; I was the one called in to dish it out.
But it did surprise me. It also hurt, and that was unacceptable. I was tired and I was drunk off my ass and I was in danger of getting maudlin. It was clearly time to go.
I started to get up, when a cool hand slid onto my undamaged wrist. “Could you give us a moment, Kit?” Mircea asked.
Marlowe didn’t even bother to argue. I had the feeling he wasn’t exactly looking forward to facing the Senate. He went out the door, and Christine came back in. She was lugging two large suitcases and had a third under her arm.
“Christine. Dorina and I need to have a short conversation. Perhaps you could wait in the office?” Mircea asked politely.
Christine looked up, saw him and blinked. Then she smiled, the way women always smiled at Mircea. “Of course.”
“We’re not done?” I asked warily. This was already more than we’d talked in . . . well, ever. At least in one sitting.
Mircea selected a small cigarette—Turkish, by the smell—and proffered me the case. “Not quite.”
“Nasty habit,” I said, declining. I only smoke weed.
“There are worse ones.”
“Meaning?”
He put the case away and sat back in the chair, lighting up with an easy, unhurried motion.
For a long moment, he didn’t say anything, which wasn’t good. Mircea never has to gather his thoughts. Mircea has entirely too many thoughts. That’s his problem.
Well, one of them.
“I’ve never spoken to you much about your mother, have I?” he finally asked.
For a minute, I just sat there, frozen. Of all the things I’d expected him to come out with, that would have probably been dead last. I’d given up asking about her years ago, because the result was always the same: a few dead, dry facts that told me nothing more than I already knew, uttered with cold indifference. She’d been a peasant girl; they’d had a brief affair; he’d left when he discovered that he’d joined the life-challenged segment of the population, which, coincidentally, was about the same time she found out she was pregnant. The end.
Then, a month ago, he’d dropped the bombshell that she hadn’t died in a plague as I’d always assumed. His crazy brother Vlad had killed her by slow torture. And then Mircea had made Vlad a vampire so that he could torture him in return—for five hundred years.
Nobody ever said the family didn’t know how to hold a grudge.
It hadn’t been a fun conversation, and I wasn’t eager to repeat it. But I knew so damn little of her, thanks partly to him and the memory wipe. Not that I would have had direct recall anyway; we’d been separated when I was too young for that. But I’d gathered bits and pieces, from what little others recalled, later on. Almost none of which remained now.
Trust Mircea to pinpoint a person’s weak spots with surgical precision. He knew that one sentence would hold me, knew I wouldn’t jump up and leave, no matter what he wanted to discuss. Not if there was any chance of learning more.