going to let it go. I couldn't believe he didn't know. I had never seen a mage show surprise at Tony's during a feeding. Maybe they had simply learned to school their faces, but my impression had been that it wasn't a big secret. Yet Pritkin seemed genuinely confused. What the hell do they teach war mages, anyway?
I looked at Mircea. "You want to show him?"
Mircea laughed delightedly. "I would love to, dulceaţă, but I don't trust myself. The temptation to rid us of his annoying presence would be too great, and the Consul said most specifically that he was not to be harmed unless he gave cause." He slid his eyes in Pritkin's direction. "And alas, so far he has behaved himself."
"I meant with me."
"No." Tomas spoke up, causing me to jump slightly in surprise. He'd been so quiet that I'd almost forgotten he was there. "She is not to be harmed."
"I think, Tomas, that is the point our dear Cassandra is trying to make," Mircea replied. "That, done properly, it is not harmful." He looked at me. "You must have been a frequent donor at court, yes? You understand the procedure?"
I nodded. "Yep, not to mention feeding a ravenous ghost on occasion." Having done both, I knew that what the vamps did was little different than Billy Joe's feedings, except that he could absorb life energy directly and they had to get it through blood. Billy was able to skip that step, a good thing since his body was somewhere at the bottom of the Mississippi. He'd have trouble metabolizing even a liquid diet.
Mircea glided over with that peculiar grace of his. All the undead have it, but he made even most vamps look clumsy. He was an old hand at this; I knew he wouldn't hurt me and he was too full to take much. It was Billy Joe I would have liked to throttle—if the coward hadn't run off somewhere. Billy's feedings normally didn't bother me, since I could replenish the energy he took with food and rest. But he knew the rules about how much I was willing to donate at once, and tonight he'd broken them all to hell.
"What are you going to do?" Pritkin started forward, but Tomas would not let him by. Neither looked happy.
"Make sure he has a good view, Tomas," Mircea said, looking down at me thoughtfully. "I will do this only once. Cassandra is already tired, and we have much to talk about. I do not wish to put her to sleep." He smiled and cupped my chin in his hand. He felt warm, but then, he always did. The old ones don't have temperature fluctuations based on whether they have eaten recently or not. "I will not hurt you," he promised.
I was remembering why I'd always liked Mircea. The deep brown eyes and graceful physique had certainly played a part, adolescent hormones being what they are, but his appearance had been less important to me than his honesty. I had never once caught him in a lie. I was sure he was a capable enough liar when he wanted to be—it would be pretty much impossible to function at court otherwise—but he had always been frank with me. It might sound like a little thing, but in a system run by deception and evasion, sincerity was priceless. I smiled up at him, only half for Pritkin's sake. "I know."
Pritkin couldn't get to me, but he could still yell. "This is insane! You're going to let him feed off you? Willingly? You'll end up like one of them!"
Mircea answered for me, his dark eyes steady on mine. They were not a true brown, I realized, but a combination of many colors: cappuccino, cinnamon, gold and a few flecks of deep green. They were beautiful. "If we fed on the population at large as you seem to think, Mage Pritkin, how could we avoid making thousands, even millions of new vampires? It only takes three bites over consecutive days from a seventh-level master or higher. Can you believe that, with no restrictions, it would not happen time and again? Either by accident or intentionally? Soon, we would be no longer merely a myth, and would again be hunted."
He stopped, but he didn't need to go on. I couldn't believe that even Pritkin was unaware of what had happened to Dracula, and Mircea himself had been almost caught and killed many times in the early years. Radu, his younger brother, had