Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,29

duels or on errands for their masters or from “greeting the sun,” as they called it when one decided to suicide by waiting for the dawn, many others did just fine. So where were they?

All those millennia of vamps, and yet so few survived. Maybe because of the same thing that had started happening to Mircea. They began to obsess over something in their human lives that hadn’t gone according to plan, or that had been left unresolved when they Changed. And by “obsess,” I mean fixate on to the point that they couldn’t see anything else.

Including the assassins sneaking up behind them.

It reminded me of the way some ghosts hung around after death, trying to put right events that had taken place, in some cases, hundreds of years before. Of course, for the ghosts, that was usually impossible, both because of how hard it was for them to actually interact with the world and because the people who had wronged them were often long dead themselves. That was not always true for vampires, however.

Especially not for vampires who knew a Pythia.

I’d found out about all this—what had happened to Elena, Mircea’s plan for me, and his growing obsession—not by Mircea telling me about it, as he should have done, but in an explosive confrontation with said crazy dhampir. Who had almost killed me, assuming me to be a threat to her beloved father. Who had then, and only then, spilled the beans. Because the consul had already let part of the story “slip” anyway, and because he was shortly going into Faerie at the head of our army and wanted to make sure that Elena was taken care of in case he didn’t come back.

Out of obligation, of course.

So yeah. I’d been shocked and horrified and heartbroken and a bunch of other things, and to a degree, I still was. But I got it, okay? I wasn’t completely heartless; I understood why you’d want to save someone whom you’d loved enough to marry, and who had given birth to your only flesh and blood child.

I even understood why it must have seemed like a godsend to Mircea when he’d discovered that there were people who could actually travel in time. And could undo the terrible travesty of justice that had ended with his wife writhing out her final hours on a sharpened stake set up by his own brother. Anyone would understand that.

But anyone wasn’t a Pythia, and responsible for guarding the timeline. Like from interference that might end up with a lot of other people dead who weren’t supposed to be! Of course, Mircea wasn’t in love with them—and he was in love with Elena, whether he realized it or not. It had been in his face that night, when he finally told me everything, even while he was vehemently declaring otherwise. It had been in the flashes of images I’d caught of his past, either through my seer abilities or because his mental powers were projecting them unknowingly in his distress. It had been clear as anything.

He still loved her, and he hadn’t needed a geis for that.

So how was I supposed to tell him no?

But that was the job, and something every other Pythia had managed for five hundred years. And I probably would have, too, but before I could he’d struck preemptively, sending me a gorgeous copy of Le Morte d’Arthur as a gift. I still had it in the library. It was a beautiful thing, gilt edged and leather bound, with full-color illustrations scattered throughout.

It was lovely . . .

It was also a threat. A handsome, classy threat, because Mircea was a handsome, classy guy. But a threat nonetheless.

Because if I didn’t do what he wanted, he was going to release to the public a secret he’d discovered about the other man in my life, John Pritkin.

My one-time bodyguard and partner in crime, Pritkin had been by my side almost since I’d stumbled into this crazy new life. We’d started out hating each other, had slowly learned to tolerate and then to respect each other, and had finally ended up in love almost without realizing it, even though we hadn’t had a geis. But Pritkin wasn’t his real name—at least, not the one he’d been born with—and Mircea knew it.

And soon, so would everybody else, if I didn’t pony up.

Dating Merlin, it seemed, had its downsides.

Not that we were dating. I’d barely seen him since a demon curse had left him more or less