He clapped Mircea on the shoulder again.
It was the same one.
He left.
Jerome stared after him, openmouthed. “I . . . think you were just warned off,” he said slowly.
“That’s . . . and with his reputation . . . I just . . . oooh,” Auria said, scowling. “The consul—the other consul—is right. Mircea would do wonderfully at court!”
“Yes, but he’ll live longer here,” Jerome said cynically.
“But think of the possibilities! So many patrons—so much wealth!” Her face shone. “We should all go!”
“I have an errand.”
“An errand, he says,” Bezio muttered, from the floor.
“You can get up now,” Jerome told him. “That government type that you don’t respect at all is gone.”
Bezio looked up. “I didn’t respect the old government—which was run by a madman,” he pointed out. “Maybe this one will be different.”
“Sure it will.” Jerome rolled his eyes.
Bezio frowned at him. “Did anybody ever tell you, you’re awfully cynical?”
“Me? I’m cyn—all right. Yes, sure. Then maybe I’ll just have to take you with me, so you can bring me out of myself.”
“Well, someone needs to. You’re too young to be that jaded.”
“For the last time, I have two centuries on you, ‘old man’!”
“Two centuries?” Mircea asked.
“Later,” Jerome told him. “Rest now.”
They left, still arguing, and took the others with them. Leaving Mircea alone with Auria, who was smiling at him tearfully. “We got her, didn’t we?”
He nodded.
“I still can’t quite believe it. I always thought . . . I was always told that I couldn’t do anything alone. That without my master, I was nothing. But the bad things—they can be fought. They can be fought, and we can win!”
“Sometimes,” Mircea agreed.
“A lot of the time. But even if we don’t, it feels so good just to try. It makes me angry that I spent so much of my life fearing the bad that I couldn’t enjoy the good things that were there, too.” She leaned over, and kissed him softly. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
She left, and Mircea lay back against the sheets, exhausted from just that quick exchange. But strangely euphoric, too. Some of Auria’s seemed to have rubbed off.
Or maybe it was something else.
It feels so good to try, he thought. Yes, yes it would. Mircea felt sleep claiming him, but not before he saw himself again at that house in the woods. But this time, he didn’t wait in the trees. This time, he went in. To warmth and life and a woman who deserved the truth she’d asked for, and the chance he’d never given her.
Even if it didn’t work, he was tired of living in fear, too.
Maybe . . . it was time to try.
Seven Years Later
The small house was set in a row of narrow, ramshackle buildings spilling candlelight onto the dark water of a small canal. It had a sagging chimney, warped shutters, and peeling yellow paint above discolored, crumbling bricks. It had always reminded Mircea of a faded, but still fastidious, lady, holding her skirts up out of the wet.
It was no better than the workmen’s homes that surrounded it, except that it was situated at the end of the little canal, where an old wooden bridge connected the island to another spar of land a few yards away. As such, it had a little more privacy than most, with the only neighbors on that side the seagulls who perched and cawed and shat on the pilings. The local urchins amused themselves by throwing the birds scraps, which was why the place typically smelled of fish guts—and rotting vegetables and raw sewage, since the canal served as the local trash heap until the tide came in and washed it all away.
But the tide had been and gone, and the predominate smells even to a vampire’s nose were of a nicer variety: olive oil, spices, and roasting meat.
He pushed open the warped wooden door and went inside.
He felt a burden lift from his shoulders immediately, despite the fact that they’d just been saddled with a warm, talkative bundle. “Did you get it?” she demanded. And then, when he merely stood there, looking innocent, “Did you, did you, did you, did you?” while she crawled around him like a little monkey, riffling through his clothes with the same speed she used to pick other men’s purses in the marketplace.
Not that he was supposed to know about that.
Of course, he also wasn’t supposed to feed her insatiable sweet tooth, either, lest it and the rest of her teeth rot out of her head. But Mircea wasn’t very good at denying his daughter anything. Not after the life she’d led. And not that it would have mattered, since those nimble fingers found, identified, and liberated the small package of sweets inside his shirt before even vampire reflexes could react.
And then she was gone, disappearing back into the heart of the house, the swinging curtain to the kitchen sending a blast of enticing smells blowing through the outer room. Mircea hung his cloak on a hook and left his muddy boots by the door. And then he followed.
And promptly tripped over a cat.
This was a bit of a surprise, since he did not own one.
Yet, he thought, seeing Dorina’s face.
“She’s pregnant,” Dorina told him quickly, around a mouthful of marzipan. And snatched the creature up only to look at him over its mangy head. The cat was white and tan, not brunette, and had big blue eyes, not black. But there was something very similar in the looks he was getting from the two of them, nonetheless. “She needs a safe place to sleep.”
“And to litter with fleas, no doubt,” the old man at the turn-spit said resentfully.
Horatiu had reinvented himself as Mircea’s self-professed steward, if such an establishment as this could be said to need such a thing. And he did his best to keep the house tidy. But the usually derelict creatures his young charge often brought home made that even more of a challenge than the man’s fading eyesight.
“She doesn’t have fleas! Well, not many, anyway,” Dorina protested, trying to pet the creature. But sugar-coated hands just came back matted with fluff. And, yes, there were fleas. Dorina saw Mircea notice the small, leaping creatures that her hands had disturbed and tried to cover them with her skirts. “And she’ll help with the rats—”
“We don’t have rats!” Horatiu looked affronted at the very idea.
Dorina rolled her eyes. “Everybody has rats. And she won’t need much else to eat, once she’s had the babies, and I’ll take care of her and you won’t even know she’s here!” Her eyes had returned to Mircea, to look up pleadingly. A thin little girl, because no amount of sweets ever seemed to put weight on those bones, dressed in the tattered rags she wore to play in, with dark eyes so much like her mother’s that they took his breath away.
Mircea sighed. He knew when he was beaten. And, apparently, so did Horatiu.
“Greedy bloodsuckers,” the man grumbled.
“Then they should fit in well enough around here,” Mircea said. “But what about the kittens?”
But Dorina’s mind, no less nimble than her fingers, had already scurried off on another subject. “You’re not greedy,” she said, her small dark head tilting. “But you are hungry. Why?”
Due to a small detour on the way home, he thought, wondering how she knew. He wanted to ask, but he found it disconcerting, like so much about this strange existence. Did he look more human after he’d fed, or less? Was he better able to keep up the façade after stealing blood from some unsuspecting person, or did their energy only bring out more clearly what he was? He hesitated, but there was no fear in her dark eyes, no loathing. Just a child’s curiosity.