His tongue slid across my fingers the way his voice had shivered across my skin as I traced the curve of that full lower lip. Our eyes met, and I felt like I could fall into that amber gaze for weeks if I let myself. I expected him to kiss me, but his lips found my collarbone instead, mouthing it lightly, his tongue sliding along the bone before moving back up to explore the vulnerable skin of my throat.
Teeth brushed against me, a small sensation precisely where a vampire would bite, but I felt no fear. Unstuck, unmoored, floating almost gravity-free, but not afraid. He withdrew slightly, his tongue making a slow, possessive glide, right over my pulse, and I once again felt teeth. They weren’t the dull blade of a human’s, but a razor-sharp reminder of what, exactly, was in bed with me. But I still wasn’t worried. Because Mircea never bit me.
Only he’d gripped the flesh over the jugular, just hard enough for me to feel it, and he wasn’t letting go. It was a light sensation, no pain, but my pulse was beating hard against the pressure of his lips and there was a claustrophobic ache when I swallowed. “Mircea,” I began, and felt fangs slide into my flesh.
For a frozen moment, my heart stuttered in my chest, torn between pounding its way through my rib cage and stopping altogether. But I couldn’t concentrate on what his lapse in control might mean because the pain was immediately followed by a weightless swell of pure need. He was grinding our hips together as his teeth sank deeper, bright agony broken by strobing flashes of intense pleasure, everything bleeding into a surreal wave of sensation that rose and fell with each sinuous move of his body.
I started making these sounds—high, strangled whimpers and faint little gasps that didn’t sound like me at all. I arched as Mircea began to feed, the sensation rippling through me with an almost audible sizzle. It seemed to free some part of me that had been stretched too tight for too long, like an elastic band pulled beyond its limits. It finally broke with a snap I felt all the way to the bone, as if a dislocated joint had suddenly popped back into place. The sheer rightness of it caught my breath, hummed through my veins, telling me that I belonged here, right here, only here. I gasped in wonder, indescribable tension flowing out of me as I relaxed into Mircea’s embrace.
I could feel my blood surging into him, warm and alive and pulsing hotly. I tried to push him away, but my hands found his shoulders instead, pulling him closer. Mircea locked one hand in my hair, bringing the other behind my hips, melding us together…
And then I was sitting seaside, the green-blue water lapping at my toes, half buried in the sand.
I looked around wildly, disoriented, expecting an attack from someone, somewhere. I rolled over and clutched the beach, trying to present a smaller target, and was momentarily blinded by the sun in my eyes. I froze, sure that someone would use the advantage to sneak up on me, but nothing happened. I blinked for a few seconds until I could get a clear view, but all I saw was sun and sky and sand—and, on the crest of a rocky hill, a small temple slowly crumbling to pieces.
Nothing continued to happen. After a moment, my heart stopped trying to thud its way out of my chest, and my breathing returned to something like normal. I lay there and watched a flock of little brown birds dive in and out of the temple’s roof, where it looked like they had a nest. Other than the waves lapping around my ankles, they were the only things moving on the whole beach.
I finally sat up and, when nothing attacked me, got to my knees. Enough adrenaline had left my brain that I could think again, so I knew who it was that I should be seeing. The being who had once owned my power had shown himself to me before in a similar situation. He seemed to find it funny to pay his visits at the most awkward moments possible.
One of the small brown birds hopped along the sand, its feet making vague indentations that the water quickly filled in again. It ran out to the wet sand when the waves retreated, looking for whatever edible morsel they might have left behind, then raced them for the beach whenever they started back in. It finally tired of the game and hopped over to me, looking for a handout. I blinked and when I looked again, a handsome blond in a too short tunic rested on the sand beside me. For a second I thought he’d crushed the little bird, but then I realized the truth.
“It’s all me, Herophile,” he said, gesturing about. “The waves and the sand and, of course, the sun, although it is easier to converse in this form.”
“My name is Cassandra!” I snapped.
He’d given me the name of the second Pythia at Delphi, his ancient shrine, at our first meeting. It was supposedly some kind of reign title, but I didn’t feel comfortable using it when I didn’t know how to do the job it represented. Not to mention that, as names go, it pretty much sucked.
“Where have you been?” I demanded. “You promised to train me. That doesn’t translate into hanging me out to dry for a week! Do you know how close I just came to screwing everything up?”
“Yes. That’s why I pulled you out of there.” He glanced up from toying with a piece of seaweed. Unlike the last time I’d seen him, he didn’t look like he’d been covered in gold dust. But I still couldn’t see his face, which was merely an oval of light. It wasn’t so much majestic as odd, like talking to an oversized lamp. “You can’t continue this way. Something must be done about the geis—it’s a distraction.”
“A distraction?!” I could think of a lot of ways to describe it, and that wouldn’t have been on the list. “Mircea is dying and I’ll probably be next!”
“Not if you retrieve the Codex. The answer you seek is there.”
“I know that! What I don’t know is where it is or how to find it. Every lead we’ve had has led to a dead end—almost literally with the last one! Or weren’t you paying attention yesterday?”
He finished braiding the seaweed and fastened it around my wrist, bracelet style. “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a test.”
“I don’t need any more tests; I need help!”
“The help you need, you already have.”
“Then I guess I must have missed it!”
“You will find what you need when you need it. It is perhaps your greatest gift, Herophile. To draw people to you.”
“Yeah, only they all seem to want me dead.”
He laughed, as if my impending demise was the funniest thing he’d heard all day. “I promised to train you. Very well, here is your first task. Find the Codex and lift the geis before it causes more complications.”
“And if I can’t?”
“I have every faith in you.”
“That makes one of us.”
“You’ll succeed; I’m sure of it. And if not”—he shrugged casually—“you don’t deserve your position.”