Because the half vamp, half human, result of coitus between a partly turned vamp and a human woman were deemed monsters, too. Elena had been alone, reviled, and terrified for her baby. So, she’d taken what must have seemed like the only chance for her child, and given her away to a passing gypsy band.
The gypsies were far more worried about vamps on the long stretches of lonely roads through the mountains than they were about dhampirs. In fact, they prized the latter for their tendency to kill the former, and took the child gladly, knowing that she’d be a potent asset once she grew up. It seemed as if everything had worked out as well as possible under the circumstances, but if it had, we wouldn’t have a story, now would we?
As might have been expected, Elena had regretted her decision almost immediately, and had run after the band to retrieve her child. But they’d already broken camp, and she couldn’t find them. And search though she might, that had continued to be the case.
Her daughter was well and truly lost, and with Mircea gone as well, she was left with only one hope: Vlad.
And you know how that turned out.
So, yes, I sympathized with Mircea’s desire to save his wife from a completely unearned and truly terrible death. Taking her out of the timeline and bringing her into the future with us had seemed maybe, possibly, doable since she’d died, so her absence wouldn’t affect anything that happened afterward. At least, it wouldn’t if no one knew about it.
And no one was supposed to. Mircea had developed formidable mental powers in the last six centuries. The idea had been for him to fog the minds of any onlookers, allowing them to believe that the execution had happened on schedule. But even he couldn’t control the memories of a whole regiment.
And based on the fact that he still hadn’t answered me, I was guessing that’s what we were looking at here.
“You can freeze time,” he began, before I shook my head.
“You know damned well—”
“You can.”
“And be powerless for the next day, or day and a half?” Because that particular spell sapped the hell out of me! “And with us stuck in freaking medieval Romania—”
“I can protect you—”
“—with a traumatized woman and half of your brother’s soldiers after us for stealing her away? Not to mention—”
“Not half. No more than two, perhaps three hundred—”
“—that he wants you dead anyway and will probably—” I stopped, my brain catching up. “Three hundred?”
He took my arm in his and pulled me off the tree. “There was starting to be pushback from some of the nobles, and even a few commoners, to the number of executions. Mob violence was feared, and a large contingent was thought appropriate.”
“Which only proves my point. I’m sorry, Mircea—”
“However,” he persisted, leading me up the hill. “The soldiers are spread out in pockets, only two of which are close enough to cause us any problem. And once you freeze time—”
“I am not freezing time!”
“—we can be well away before anyone realizes what happened.”
“If she’s even there,” I pointed out, because on top of everything else, we weren’t even sure that this was the right place.
Vlad, of course, had tried to hide his mistake, after his brother returned some years later. Afraid for his life, he’d gone to the lengths of torching the village where Mircea’s wife had lived, slaughtering the inhabitants and putting out the rumor that a plague had carried them off. The bodies had had to be burned, he’d claimed, to keep the disease from spreading.
Mircea might have bought it, as diseases wiped out whole towns fairly regularly in this period. But his dhampir daughter had returned looking for her mother at around the same time, and instead found a knife that Vlad had dropped with the family crest on it, in the smoldering ruins. Bent on revenge, she’d gone to the castle looking for him, but found Mircea instead. Who had immediately recognized the nine-year-old girl as the spitting image of his wife.
He’d escaped with her, prizing her life above revenge. But he’d later returned once more, intending to rain down some serious justice on his brother, who was more of a monster as a human than Mircea had ever been as a vamp. But before he could close the deal, Vlad had let slip a secret, a little something he’d learned as a young man, while serving as a page to the last Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. He’d informed Mircea that there were women called Pythias, who could travel in time and undo past wrongs, were they so inclined.
And Mircea had intended to make damned sure that they were inclined.
In the meantime, he’d kept Vlad alive and imprisoned, trying to force him to give up the place and time of his wife’s execution. Vlad had taken the knowledge to his grave, but the Pythian power was able to show me enough for Mircea to guess the locale, and a quick history lesson had coughed up a date. But who knew if it was the right one?
She might not even be here, I thought, as we topped the hill, and the whole grisly scene spread out below us.
For a moment I just stood there. It was farther away than I’d expected by the sound, which was fading in and out on the wind. But not far enough.
Not even close.