As he considered that possibility, Alex and Helena staggered into the room like a pair of drunks. Which was essentially what they were—blood drunk. They were completing their blood bond, feeding off one another until they were one, and converting Helena along the way. Only an extraordinary emergency would induce his father to call them to this meeting.
“Sorry we’re late,” Alex said, straightening up. Though he was too thin, and spots of high color stained his cheeks, his dark eyes gleamed with contentment. His lanky bride, Helena—who also resembled a fever victim—nodded in agreement, nervously pressing the pad of her thumb against the sharp new point on her right incisor.
Mikhail planted himself in the center of the room, folded his arms and looked at his father expectantly. No more waiting. No more—what did Madelena call it? No more drama.
His father hadn’t left his place by the fire, and his face, as always, was unreadable. His mother joined him there, taking his hand. Something was very wrong.
To his surprise, his mother addressed them instead of his father, another unusual event outside of their home, and particularly in the hall, which was a man’s place. Nerves made her English more eccentric than usual.
“I bring news. You will not like it, I know. But it is the will of God. So it is right, yes? Even if for now we do not understand it yet.” Gathering courage, she put her hand to her heart and closed her eyes. When she opened them she said, “I have dreamed the name of your true bride, Mikhail Ivanovitch.”
Mikhail shook his head, the denial automatic. As sure as he knew the sun rose, he knew he had no mate in all the world.
And why would they tell him here in the hall, instead of at home, where his brothers had learned the names of their wives? And why were they so grim? Why the secrecy?
Then his mother answered all his questions. “She is Alya Adad.”
Her words hit like a bat to the knees. In an instant, his father was at his side, holding his arm to keep him upright. Though the man had passed his hundredth year, his grip could crush bone. The pain cleared Mikhail’s head.
“I’m sorry.” His mother wrung a handkerchief in her hands. “But we must believe it is right.”
Mikhail could only gape at her, his lips numb, the blood roaring in his ears.
Gregor broke the silence. “Are you out of your frigging mind, Ma?”
“Gregor!” their father said. “Don’t speak to your mother that way.” As he said this, he pressed Mikhail into a chair and put a glass of scotch in his hand. Had that glass been poured and waiting? Had they guessed how this would affect him? Talked about it in advance? Was he shaming them with his weakness? “Drink.”
Mikhail did not drink. The room buzzed with his brothers’ excited voices, his parents’ low, slow answers to their questions. It was just noise, static to accompany him as he fell down a deep hole.
Alya.
Even in his shock, his analytical mind did not retreat. It turned the idea over and over and around and around, trying to understand…
Like a corpse breaking the waters of a dark lake, a single memory surfaced in his mind. A warm summer night. The blaze of torches and the flash of knives. A drop of blood on her hand. Her laughter. His kiss.
He’d tasted Alya’s blood. Just a single drop, and so long ago, but she’d been his destined bride. Merciful Jesus. All this time, all these grey years, he’d been bonded to her.
The truth was perverse. Unjust. Appalling.
And it made perfect sense.
Helena’s shrill whistle cut through the sludge of noise. Mikhail lifted his head and looked around the room with fresh eyes. In just a few seconds his world had collapsed and been rebuilt in a terrible new form. Helena threw out her arms in frustration. “Excuse me. I’m new here. Could somebody please tell me who this Alya Adad is?”
His father said, “The eldest child of Prince Zouhair Adad of Morocco.”
His mother said, “Mikhail’s first love.”
Gregor said, “She’s the fucking queen of the damned.”
Mikhail stood. That surprised them all, he could tell, and he hated their worried glances. He cast a long, slow gaze around his family circle, warning them against pity. “You should know her name, Helena. She rules the entire West coast. And we’re at war with her.”
Throwing back his head, he downed his scotch in a single swallow and pitched the glass into the fireplace. A plume of embers shot up the flue. “Excuse me.”
He stalked into his office, which adjoined the library. On the wall behind his desk hung an ancient banner bearing the Faustin dragon crest, hermetically sealed in a glass frame. It was over one thousand years old, but the brown sprays of blood and the marks of fire on the fragile silk still told the story of the battle in which his ancestors established themselves as lords of Kabarda. The Faustins were always at war, one way or another.
He dropped into his desk chair and leaned his head back against the cool leather. Alya Adad. God was laughing.
In a dynastic sense, it would be a perfect match. Alya’s lines were impeccable, more ancient than his, running back to the line of Darius the Great if the Adads were to be believed—and believing an Adad was always unwise. Nonetheless, she came from an old family, and a powerful one. A child born of the two lines would be a prince among princes.
But what chance would a child have born to a mother like her? Alya was power hungry, ruthless and cruel. She’d shown herself to be so at sixteen, and over the intervening thirty years her appetites had only sharpened. When she was younger, she took only the most powerful vampyr as lovers and took what she needed from them before moving on. Men were stepping stones to her. He’d merely had the privilege of being the first.
Like him, she had two brothers, and as far as he knew, both were still in Marrakech waiting for her father to step down, or for their chance to kill him, or however the Adads managed matters of accession. Alya, the girl child Adad planned to marry off to seal some alliance or another, turned out to be the wild card.
After refusing an arranged marriage, she’d run away from Adad and traveled the world. Along the way, as far as he could tell, she’d slept with most the vampyr princes of Europe and Asia. Eventually she settled down in California. From her home base in Los Angeles she gathered power. Over the course of ten years, she systematically challenged the old families who once held California, Oregon and Washington— and, to everyone’s surprise, won all those territories. Since then she’d claimed the title and privileges of a prince. The only other woman to have done anything similar was three hundred years dead.
One of those privileges was the right to exsanguinate her enemies, a right he’d exercised himself. This was a dangerous privilege. It granted you the power of your opponent, as well as his memories, but it could also drive you mad. Mikhail counted on his fingers the vamps he knew she’d exsanguinated and the number made his skin crawl. She’d be unspeakably strong.
His father knocked. Mikhail gestured him in. Even after two years it still felt odd to invite his father into the office he’d occupied all of Mikhail’s life.
His father said, “You see now why I called the meeting here.”
“It would be a marriage of state.”
“And it has bearing on the situation in Minnesota.”