“I think,” he told me, breathing hard, “there is a chance . . . that I hate your roommate.”
“It’s okay,” I told him, grabbing a towel. “I kind of think she hates you, too.”
“So it would appear.”
He lay back against the tub, looking martyred, with a forearm thrown across his eyes while I disentangled us.
“She’s just trying to be protective.”
“I keep telling myself that,” he said grimly, as I started to get out of the tub.
And tripped. Which was not a good sign, since I’m supposed to have better reflexes than that, even on soggy rug- and suds-strewn floors. But today, it seemed like I was off-balance in every way.
Not that it mattered, since I was caught before I hit down, and spun against the wall.
“You’re going back to bed,” Louis-Cesare informed me flatly, somehow on his feet and in front of me, having moved with that liquid speed all vamps have, but which was somehow so much sexier with him.
“Okay.” I perked up.
“Alone,” he said severely.
I sighed.
“So you can heal.” It was savage. I blinked. “Properly, finally. So that I may take you away, somewhere very far from this place, and make love to you until neither of us can see straight!”
Sounded like a plan.
So, instead of getting vamp married, I got a trip back to la-la land. Which sucked as a runner-up prize, but my body didn’t seem to agree. Louis-Cesare went to piss off Claire, and my stiff and sore muscles relaxed back into the familiar softness of my bed: old, well-laundered sheets; a soft, threadbare duvet; and a comforter that I’d finally managed to bunch up in exactly the way I liked. It was heaven.
I was out before my head hit the pillow.
* * *
—
Mircea, Venice, 1458
Mircea knew before he reached home, before he even reached his street, that something was wrong. He broke into a run, one too fast for wet cobblestones, or for the human his neighbors believed him to be, but they’d gone to bed by now. And he wouldn’t have cared if they hadn’t.
He could feel her agony in his mind.
He burst through the front door, tripping a little on the warped boards, into the tiny main room of their house. And immediately saw her. She wasn’t in her room, in her bed, as she should have been. She was writhing on the floor, screaming loudly enough to wake the whole street, if the rain hadn’t been bucketing down tonight.
It was what had made him leave off his pursuit, for not even hunters could hunt in this, and when the storm clouds broke, the strange duo he’d been following had disappeared, along with their prey. He’d turned for home, cursing the November weather, when it felt like it rained all the time. But now he was glad for it, because his old servant clearly didn’t know what to do.
Of course, neither did Mircea.
“It started a few moments ago. She was fine at dinner,” Horatiu told him, fluttering about.
The kindly old face was splashed on one side with light from the adjacent kitchen. It wasn’t much; the coals had been banked for the night, with just a few glimmers of red peeking through the ash. But, for a vampire’s eyes, it was enough.
To see the fear in Horatiu’s clouded gaze, to see the blood staining his worn nightshirt, to see it ringing Dorina’s mouth and glinting redly on her teeth. The ones she shouldn’t have had, because she wasn’t a vampire. But which protruded past her lips anyway when she had her fits.
Because she wasn’t human, either.
“You’re hurt,” Mircea said, focusing on the old man’s shoulder, where the stain was darkest.
“She wanted to leave; I tried to stop her. She didn’t like that.”