Page 106 of Fortune's Blade

“What? Where?” I stared around, even though that didn’t make any sense. Father was back home, probably with a champagne glass in his hand trying to shmooze somebody onto the consul’s side. That’s where he always was.

Only maybe not. Because when I looked back at Louis-Cesare, a hand separated from his own, a spectral thing like nothing I’d ever seen, and slid into Antem’s chest.

“The fuck?”

“Dory!” Claire said, stumbling back.

“I’m channeling your father, or his healing abilities, at least,” Louis-Cesare said, his face deathly pale and his body shaking from effort.

“How? He isn’t here!”

“He is. He’s in Faerie. I don’t know how or why, but he is. I tried reaching out to him through the bond, but didn’t expect anything. I was just desperate—we cannot stay here, in this place! You’ll end up dead; these people are all insane!”

The screeches rending the air seemed to echo his words, and were probably why the guards weren’t in here yet. The little noise we were making was nothing to whatever was going on next door. But he needed to keep his voice down, and I needed to understand.

“We cannot stay?” I repeated. “But earlier you said—”

“I know what I said! And I know you!” He stared at me again, and this time his eyes weren’t blue, or even the silver they became when his power was surging.

They were amber.

They were Mircea’s eyes.

“I should have known you’d come after her,” a voice that wasn’t Louis-Cesare’s emanated from his throat. “As soon as I saw her, I should have known you would be here, too.”

“Mircea . . ..” I whispered, before trailing off and staring at him, speechless. Because first-level master or not, senate member or not, he didn’t have this much power. Not to heal from a distance through the body of another, not to take over another, and a first level master at that!

No vampire did.

“I am in a triumvirate with several others,” he explained not at all. “It gives me added strength, but this remains difficult. I do not know that it will work. But if it does, it comes at a price—for you.”

Of course, it did, I thought, staring in shock at my father’s eyes in my husband’s face. And if that wasn’t a mind-fuck, I didn’t know what was. But the price thing.

Yeah, that was normal enough.

“What do you want?” I rasped.

“Your word. I heal the boy, and you go back to Earth. I will return Dorina to you, but I cannot do what I must if I am worried about you as well. I cannot guard both of you!”

“I haven’t asked you—” I began, only to be cut off.

“I don’t have much time! Promise me, and I will do what I can to see that he lives. Fail to do so, and he will die.

“Promise me!”

“I . . . I promise.”

The words came automatically, because that was what you did when Mircea Basarab ordered you to do something: you obeyed. I had been struggling against that habit my whole life, but had never managed to fully break it. And a moment later, I was committed, because—

“Auggghhhh!” Antem came off of the table screaming, and Claire moved to the door before I could, because I still couldn’t think straight. Too much was happening too fast, and my body was injured, and it seemed that my brain might be, too. Because I hadn’t even bothered to think—

What good would it do to heal him, only to have the guards kill him?

But Claire intercepted the suspicious soldier who was on his way in, and he didn’t argue. He backed out, his eyes only on her, because everyone around here acted like she was some sort of monster. Which was freaking rich, all things considered!

But I was grateful for it now.

I’d been halfway to the door, too late but trying, and turned back to see Louis-Cesare with his own blue eyes again. Thank God! That whole thing was going to give me nightmares!

---