I could feel his fingers on my throat, flexing against the muscle there, and I knew I had to say something, do something, now. But I couldn’t shift again, not this soon, not with panic and exhaustion eating at my consciousness. And I was sure I’d black out before I could remember something that might convince him to wait a minute before he killed me—
Mircea’s hand abruptly fell away and I gasped, little black dots dancing in front of my eyes as my lungs fought with my throat to get enough air into my starved system. I felt his hand grip my chin, knew when he brushed my hair away from my face, but it seemed pretty trivial next to not asphyxiating. Light fingertips trailed over a couple of faint ridges on my throat, stilling directly over bright, sensitive skin.
“Where did you get this?” His voice was faint, but I wasn’t sure if that was him or me. My ears were still ringing, whether from the shift or the half-choking thing I wasn’t sure. It took me a couple of seconds even to understand what he was talking about. And then I realized why he’d released me, why I probably wasn’t going to die tonight—at least not by his hand. I sagged against the cold brick, so relieved I would have laughed, only it would have hurt my throat too much.
“Where?” His voice was stronger now, more insistent; maybe he’d had a chance to recover from the shock. I glared at him, a hand on my abused neck. He could give me the same opportunity.
“Where do you think?” I snapped.
Bite marks were like fingerprints; no two alike. I’d been wearing the mark of his teeth in my flesh for days, like a brand. It was probably the main reason Alphonse and Sal and even the Consul, in her own way, had been so cooperative. And if they’d re
cognized it, Mircea certainly had.
“It is my mark, yet I did not give it to you.”
“Didn’t give it to me yet,” I corrected. There was no way to hide the fact that I was from his future. His Cassie couldn’t shift people through space, much less time. So I’d already given that much away. The trick was not to give anything else.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I might have injured you!”
“Might have?”
His touch was back in an instant. Strong fingers wound into my hair, rubbed at the back of my neck, trailed carefully over the healing wound until I couldn’t feel it anymore. Not the pain, at least, but the two little bumps remained. They weren’t hard, but they were obvious, at least to me. I guess they must have been to him, too, because he bent his head and kissed them, carefully, lightly, lips soft and warm against the tiny scars.
It wasn’t a particularly sensual touch, but my body reacted immediately, with a rush of wild adrenaline. For a minute, my fingers clenched in his coat, not caring about the cold or that he smelled like smoke or that I had green goop trickling down my neck.
“They’re still there,” I said shakily, as he slowly stroked the length of my throat.
“They will always be there,” he murmured. “You are mine. They announce the fact to all who see you.”
“It’s a little more common to get a ring,” I said breathlessly. “Not to mention being consulted first!”
“I am a gentleman, dulceata?,” he said reprovingly. “I would never enter a lady’s house—or head or body—unless she invited me.”
“But I didn’t—” I began, and stopped. I hadn’t explicitly given permission at the time, but I hadn’t exactly thrown him out of bed, either. And when I had finally managed to put up a struggle, Mircea had let go. Even as far gone as he’d been, he’d let go.
“As I thought,” he murmured, and kissed me. And it was still as warm, as wet, as necessary as water. I found myself returning the kiss with an enthusiasm that I vaguely thought might not be all that ladylike, but he didn’t seem to mind. He kissed me until I was dizzy with it, heat spreading through me like I’d drunk something rare and strange and addictive. So addictive that it took me a moment to remember that feeding the geis was not the plan here.
I tore away, chest heaving, cold air prickling along my bare arms. I hunched my shoulders against the chill and gulped down a noise that absolutely was not even a little bit like a moan. “Would you please not do that?” I whispered. It was hard enough to think as it was, without him sending my hormone levels to join my blood pressure.
“Why?” He looked genuinely puzzled.
“Because we’re not…we don’t…It’s complicated, all right?”
Mircea was able to convey more by a small facial movement than I’d gotten from some entire conversations. At the moment, he had sarcastic eyebrows. “Dulceata?, the only time I have ever left such a mark was to punish or to claim.”
“Maybe I—”
“And when it is punishment, I do not feed from the neck.”
I swallowed and shut up. I wasn’t going to win this way. If I kept on talking, it wouldn’t be long before he’d have the whole story out of me. And maybe that wouldn’t matter but maybe it would. Because there weren’t too many people who could contemplate the kind of torture he faced and not be tempted to try to avert it. He wouldn’t succeed, but he would almost certainly alter time in the attempt.
I glanced around, but there was no one in view. I could see because of the light emanating from a couple of stuttering lanterns on either side of a nearby doorway. It was attached to a house that stood shoulder to shoulder with those on either side, a long row of four-story medieval dwellings listing together like old drunks. None of the others had lanterns, or shadows moving against the curtains at their windows. That, plus the fact that my power tends to take me where I need to be, meant that this was probably the place.
“There’s a party in there tonight,” I explained, trying for calm when my every nerve said now and hurry and it’s in there. The idea that the Codex might be only a dozen yards away was enough to make my thoughts a little tangled even without Mircea’s help. “A couple of dark mages are about to auction off a book of spells. We have to get in there and buy it or steal it or get it before anyone else does or—”
Mircea suddenly jerked me against him and pushed us both back against the wall. “Not the time—” I began, then the air crackled and tore, like all the lightning in Europe had decided to descend on us at once. There was a rush of wind and the world tilted horribly. A second ear-numbing crack and a flash of impossible purple light later, and an ornate barge sat in the middle of the narrow street, so large that its hull almost brushed the buildings on either side.
I stared at it, afterimages from the sudden storm dancing around the reality of a huge ship just blatantly blocking the road like that. I had only time to think, yeah, this probably is the place, before Mircea was dragging me into the shadows of an almost nonexistent alley between two inebriated buildings. His gaze was furiously intent. “Where are we?”