Reap the Wind (28 page)

I’d have liked to have seen the expression on Kit’s face just then. Liked to have known how a first-level master took to being ordered about, especially so abruptly. But I didn’t.

Because I was busy.

Hitting the polished surface of the desk even before I heard the door click shut, feeling smooth hardness as my hands spread out, trying to find purchase that wasn’t there, discovering I didn’t need it when a furious master vampire grasped my hips, pulled me to the edge of the desk, and thrust back into me hard enough to make me gasp.

And then to laugh, like the crazy person I was really starting to believe I was, because I’d won. For once, he’d been the one to back down first. For once, I’d actually made the great Mircea Basarab cry uncle.

And then I was the one crying. And thrashing. And screaming as he took me harder than he ever had, harder than he’d ever dared, because human bodies break so easily.

But my body wasn’t here, was it? I was nothing more than a figment, a dream, an illusion. And illusions don’t break.

But they do feel, and this was raw and savage and everything, everything I’d wanted since that damned dream left me hot and aching and desperately unfulfilled.

Which wasn’t really a problem now, I thought deliriously. And then I didn’t think anything else. I just wrapped my arms around him and hung on as power slammed through me, into me, over me, a golden haze sinking into my skin that exactly matched the color of a pair of golden eyes.

“Well,” I said breathlessly, some moments later.

“Well?” Mircea replied, the voice muffled since his face was currently buried in my hair.

“Well . . . I hope . . . that taught you . . . a lesson,” I said, vaguely concerned that there was a flaw in my logic somewhere but too limp to care.

Mircea’s head raised. And I saw with some real satisfaction that he was almost as flushed and sweaty as I was. And his throat was working and his eyes were a little crazed. But he wasn’t out of breath, because he was a vampire and they didn’t technically need to do that.

“I told you,
dulceat¸a˘
,” he said grimly. “I am not in your head.”

“Really? Then what would you call—”

“Any more than I was in your room tonight, or in the shower last week.”

“The shower?” I began, confused.

And then I stopped. Suddenly, vividly, recalling a certain incident in the shower that, yes, had been fairly memorable. And which I probably should have thought about more, if I hadn’t already had too much to think about.

But it was coming back to me now. Along with the explanation I’d discovered later. Which, come to think of it, didn’t really have anything to do with Mircea at all, and—

And uh-oh.

“I think,” Mircea told me evilly, “that it is time we had a talk.”

“Cedar? You are sure that is how it’s spelled?” Mircea demanded, as he hustled me along a crowded corridor.

“I—I’m not even sure that’s how it’s pronounced,” I told him, feeling more than a little flustered. I’d just been dragged off the desk, barely in time to snatch up my crumpled bath towel, and then towed through a door I hadn’t noticed on the other side of the room. And then through a fireplace, of all things, and into a cramped little hallway with no windows and almost no light. And then through another fireplace and a room I didn’t have time to see before we exited into a wide, brightly lit hallway that didn’t feel all that wide at the moment because it was stuffed with vampires.

Masters, by the feel of them. Make that senior masters, I thought, as I stumbled through a body, which was almost impossible to avoid in a press this tight. They deferentially made way for Mircea, but closed up again right behind him, leaving me struggling through a sea of vampires. Or more like a sea of flashing colors and sounds and half thoughts:

“—so the masters can gut you with it?”

“I don’t care. I want my damned sword—”

“A gun has better range.”

“And a sword doesn’t run out of bullets!”

“Botas malditos están demasiado ajustadas—”

The vamps didn’t seem to like the situation any more than I did. Some seemed pretty oblivious, but others jumped and flinched and stared around as I passed through them. As if they knew something was happening.

And it was; I just didn’t know what.

“What’s going on?” I asked Mircea, trying to stay as close behind him as possible, to avoid freaking out any more vamps.

“We’ve been having a problem with some illegal portals that our enemies have been using to bring in weapons,” he told me.

“Portals from faerie?”

He nodded. “Even our allies don’t seem to care who they sell to, and it’s becoming a problem.”

“So you’re going to shut them down.”

“We’re going to try.”

“And if they don’t like that?” I asked, dodging one swiftly moving form, only to hit another slam on.

“They’ll learn,” he told me, and pulled me out the other side of the wildly staring vamp.

And then into a knot of several more going in the same direction as us.

The corridor was so small, and they were grouped so tightly that it was like being swamped by a wave at the beach. An unexpected deluge of color and noise and overwhelming sensory assault. And minds and limbs and the electric buzz of a master vampire times five.

“Have you seen the dhampir? Wonder where they’re keeping her—”

“It. And who cares?”

“I care. I’ve never seen one—”

“Which would explain why you’re still here.”

“Speak for yourself. I could take her—”

“It. And feel free to try.”

“Sure. And then have to deal with Daddy? I don’t think—”

“So the rumors are true?”

“What rumors?”

“The ones that say she’s not just any dhampir. That she’s actually—”

“Cassie! In here.”

That last was Mircea’s voice, and a second later, I found myself being pulled through a door into a tiny room. With nothing in it. And that included master vampires, thank God, because I’d been about to drown out there.

But this . . . this was nice. Or calm, at least. We were in what I guessed was some kind of reception room, although it wasn’t very welcoming, without so much as a picture on the wall or a single chair, and then we were through a door on the far side and into—

“Don’t step on the rugs,” Mircea told me. “Just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

I didn’t get an answer. Because the room’s only occupant had just looked up from a small desk to scowl at us. Or at Mircea, I supposed, since his eyes passed right over me to fix on his colleague.

“Are you through with your little fit?” Marlowe asked acidly.

“No. Cedar. What do you know about it?”

“The
tree
?”

“No. The spell. We think that’s how it’s pronounced.”

“‘We’?”

Mircea looked at me. “I only heard it once,” I said awkwardly.

“But if you had to guess?”

“Say-duh? Say-drr? SAY-der? I’m not real sure. I was kind of—”

“Who are you talking to?” Kit demanded, getting up. His eyes swept over me again but didn’t stop. I pulled my bath towel a little higher anyway.

Mircea repeated my variations on a theme. “Some type of ancient magic,” he told Kit. “I need everything you have on it.”

“You realize we’re leaving in less than an hour?”

“Then you’ll need to hurry, won’t you?”

Kit scowled harder, but then he got that constipated look a lot of vamps used when they were communicating mentally.

Mircea threaded his way expertly through the carpets. I followed, a little gingerly, because the floor was slick, highly polished marble tile, and the slippery little rugs were everywhere. They were odd-looking, partly because none of them matched, partly because most weren’t more than a couple of feet wide, but mostly because they were the only attempt at décor.

Mircea’s office had lacked the stamp of his character, but at least it had been fairly attractive. This . . . was not. It didn’t have a plant or a picture or a pillow. It didn’t have a single chair other than the one Marlowe was sitting in. It didn’t have much of anything, despite being a fairly large room, just the small rolltop desk, a hell of a lot of carpets, and—

And a couple utilitarian cabinets along the far wall.

A record scratched in my head.

I was still staring at them a moment later, when a fat little vamp with a bad black toupee came bustling in through the door carrying an incongruously modern-looking electronic pad. “Type of magic?” he asked without preamble.

Kit looked at Mircea. Mircea looked at me. Kit scowled again.

“Mircea. Is there something you want to tell me?” he demanded.

“Um,” I said, trying not to look at the cabinets, “that depends. What kind of magic did the gods use?”

“What?” Mircea asked sharply.

Kit scowled harder. “I
said
—”

“Not you,” Mircea told him brusquely.

And caused the curly-haired vampire to flush almost as red as his coat. “Mircea—”

“Well, what did you think it was?” I asked, a little defensively. Because Mircea wasn’t looking happy.

“An extension of your power, some new facet you were exploring. But you’re telling me the gods are involved?”

“The
gods
?” Kit asked, his voice going up. “Mircea, what the
hell
—”

“It—it was mostly demons,” I said, hoping to defuse the situation.

Annnnnnd made it worse.

“Demons?”
Mircea repeated, frowning.

“Um—”

“What kind of demons?”

“Well, sort of . . . a little of all kinds. It was the demon council—”

“The
council
?”

Kit started to say something, but Mircea shushed him with a gesture. Kit did not look happy about that. Mircea looked even less so. But it wasn’t like he was going to be able to help me if he didn’t know the truth.

“My mother wanted to talk to the council,” I explained. “And she used this seiðr spell to do it—”

“Your mother is
dead
.”

“Yes, well, that’s why she needed a spell,” I said awkwardly.

In fact, she’d needed it to address the council on behalf of Pritkin. Not that she’d done much of that. In fact, she’d barely mentioned him. She’d mostly talked about the war, and how we needed to ally if we had any chance of winning this. Which was true, but not helpful, since nobody else seemed to agree.

“But the spell is on
you
,” Mircea pointed out. Because Mircea is not stupid.

“Yes, well, I was sort of . . . channeling . . . for her,” I explained, as little as possible.

He just looked at me.

I looked steadily back. Because, sure, Mircea, I was going to talk first. I’d lived with vampires for most of my life; give me credit for
something
.

“We don’t know the type. Possibly used by the gods,” Mircea told them, his eyes still on me.

“Ah yes,” the little vamp said, a smart pen going to town on the small screen, almost too fast to follow. “That does simplify . . . ah. Here it is. ‘
Seiðr
,’ meaning ‘a cord, string, or snare,’ a form of old Norse magic and shamanism concerned with making visionary journeys.”

“Is it dangerous?” Mircea demanded.

“To which party?”

“To either party!”

The fat little vamp blinked. He did not appear to be used to hearing that tone from the Senate’s senior diplomat. “One moment,” he said, and started stabbing about with the pen again.

I risked another glance at the cabinets.

They were ugly old things, steel gray and slightly beat up along the bottom where too many feet had closed them too hard. They were the sort of catchall pieces that could be found in any office
—
well, any office that didn’t care about impressing clients. Hell, they could have been found in plenty of garages, holding old paint cans and half-used bottles of motor oil.

But that wasn’t what they were holding at the moment.

I knew that because I’d raided them once.

At least, I was pretty sure I had. They looked the same, but the old ones had been at the Senate’s former headquarters. Which was currently little more than a scorch mark on the desert due to having been an early casualty of the war. And considering how that had gone down, I hadn’t expected anybody to have waited around to rescue some old metal cabinets.

But then, they hadn’t had to wait, had they? They hadn’t had to empty and then repack them like a human, because they weren’t human. All a vamp had to do was snatch one onto his shoulder and walk off with it, which made packing in a hurry a whole lot easier, didn’t it?

And left me with a dilemma.

Because, if they were the same ones, they contained stuff the Senate had been squirrelling away for centuries. Like potent weapons they’d confiscated from other people so they could use them themselves. And ancient relics with powers they thought might come in useful someday. And old enemies trapped in magical snares . . .

And a potion called the Tears of Apollo.

“Hm, it’s all very vague,” the little vamp was saying. “A good deal about altering the course of fate . . . traveling in spirit form throughout the Nine Worlds . . . seems to have originated with the Vanir, the old Norse fertility gods. They taught it to the Æsir, the gods of battle, who eventually communicated it to the Scandinavian covens . . .”

“Can it be removed?” Mircea asked.

“Oh, certainly. The caster would merely have to—”

“Not by the caster. By one of the other people involved in the spell.”

“Oh, well, then. No.”

“I beg your pardon?” Mircea said mildly, but the vamp flushed.

“I simply meant—that is to say—well, you did ask about dangers earlier—”

“And?”

“And, well, that is the main one. In fact, it is the only one, at least that I can find so far. I can check the Edda, and of course I will, although frankly it’s not likely to be very useful in this case. The Vanir weren’t well liked, you know, by the Christian scholars who wrote most of the accounts, long after the fact, of the old Norse religion. The Æsir were the strong, manly, warlike types that the scholars’ own culture valued. But the Vanir . . . well, their association with fertility was considered a bit . . . effeminate . . . and therefore their magic—of which seiðr was a prominent part—is not well documented. It was considered somewhat beyond the pale, if you follow me.”

“No.”

The vamp blinked. “No?”

“No.”

“I—well, that is to say, I thought I was being rather plain—”

“You were mistaken.”

“I—I merely meant—that is to say—”

“For Christ’s sake, man!” Marlowe exploded. “Stop saying ‘that is to say’ and just say it!”

“Well, I’m trying to!” The little guy had more backbone than I’d expected. “I am trying to point out that
seiðr
wasn’t named after a snare for nothing! It is said that the gods would establish a link with someone they didn’t like, and then . . . hang up the phone. So to speak. And leave that person forever in a dream world, all alone, to eventually wither away from starvation, thirst, or madness . . .” He trailed off.

“The gods were a lot of fun,” I said.

Mircea ignored that, but his lips tightened. “But that is not the case here,” he pointed out. “No one has ‘hung up’ anything. That is the problem.”

“It is?” I asked.

“It is?” the man repeated, without knowing it.

“Yes!” Mircea told him.

“Why is it?” I demanded.

“Why is that?” the man asked.

Mircea closed his eyes.

“You don’t like me being in your head, do you?” I asked, light dawning. I’d been so freaked out about the opposite, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might feel the same. And now that it did . . . “Why don’t you?”

“You didn’t seem pleased when the shoe was on the other foot,” he pointed out.

“This is getting surreal,” Marlowe murmured. “Even for this place.”

“Cassie is here—mentally,” Mircea told him.

“I’d gathered that.”

“She seems to find it difficult to understand why I do not wish to have her in my head, unannounced, at any time she pleases—”

Marlowe gave a bark of a laugh. “Oh, this should be fun.”

“It isn’t fun!” I said, looking at Mircea. “And I wasn’t happy because I thought you were doing it on
purpose
. I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t know I was doing it at all!”

“Yet here we are.”

I felt my brows draw together, which was stupid because I didn’t have brows right now. But it felt like I did, and it felt like they had just knitted. “You’re blaming me for this?”

“No. I am merely pointing out that it is a security risk—”

“How? I thought we were on the same side.”

“We
are
on the same side—”

“Then how is it a risk for me to be in your head?”