“You’ve done all you could,” Mircea said softly. “You need what strength you have left.”
He was right; I knew he was right. But it didn’t help. I lost people; I always lost people. My whole life that had been the one constant, the one fucking thing I could depend on, and I couldn’t—not again—
There was the ghost of a touch on my cheek, because he must have slipped out of my grip without me knowing. “You have to let go, Cassie.”
Yeah, people had been telling me that all my life, too. To the point that I’d started to tell it to myself: don’t care, don’t love, let everyone and everything that matters slip away. Let life take them, let it have them, because it’s going to anyway, because that’s all it does: take and consume and destroy. It lets you feel happy so the pain hurts more, lets you have hope so it can crush it, lets you have love so it can rip it away. You can fight against it, but it’s a trap, the whole damn thing.
Better get used to it.
But I wasn’t used to it. I’d never gotten used to it. I was tired of it, sick to death of it, and furious, so furious I could barely see.
I bent over Rhea, my tears dropping onto her face, my lips almost as cold as her cheek. But somehow I wasn’t kissing her good-bye. Somehow I was gripping her shoulders, shaking her, and then screaming at her like a madwoman. Or maybe it was the universe I was screaming at—I didn’t know; I couldn’t think. I just felt it, something hot and hard and furious welling up inside me, something I couldn’t seem to control because enough! You can’t have this one, you can’t take her—
“Cassie!” Mircea had grabbed me, fingers biting into my flesh, but I didn’t care.
“No, this one is mine! I’ve paid enough, I’ve lost enough!”
“Cassie!”
“No! This one is mine and you can’t have her!”
And then I was being knocked aside, hard enough to hurt, and for a second I didn’t understand what was happening. And I still didn’t, when I saw Mircea, clear and bright and there, as solid as if he was right beside me. Like the room around him, which was suddenly vivid with color and sharp edges, like Rhea beneath him as he thrust her back onto the floor, straddling her with both hands around her neck, looking for all the world like he was trying to choke her to death.
But instead of killing her, he was doing something that brought faint color back to her cheeks, that caused a small movement of her chest, that caused her eyelashes to flutter and her fingers—because at some point I must have grabbed her hand—to move—
“What—” I began, because even now I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. It seemed to be on a separate circuit from the rest of my brain, which was still screaming in denial even as I saw life flood back into Rhea.
“I should have realized,” Mircea said, looking at me wildly, through strands of sweaty dark hair.
“Realized what? Mircea, how—”
“She’s yours—you said it yourself!”
“But how—”
He suddenly threw his head back, laughing like a boy. And I just stared, wondering if I really was going mad. Or if he was.
“Mircea!”
“Your coven must work similarly to our houses,” he said, eyes bright. “And, as you saw yesterday, when I all but drained the family, the power exchange works both ways. I can send power to subordinates, but they can also send it to me.”
I blinked, suddenly remembering the small hits of power I’d gotten from my coven on a couple of occasions. I hadn’t thought of it because I wasn’t used to having a coven, which was what the Pythian Court actually was. And because the hits had always seemed so small.
But then, maybe I hadn’t needed as much before.
I stared down at Rhea, who was still unconscious, but also very much alive. “She’s powering the connection.”
“The link between the two of you is,” Mircea corrected. “And possibly your whole coven for all I know.”
He grinned at me, the dignified master vampire suddenly giddy from the power loss, from dragging someone almost literally back from the dead, and from the same euphoria that was finally hitting me.
And then blurring like a bad radio signal when someone else called my name.
“Cassie!”
A wash of sound blasted over me, a raucous, out-of-tune blare that made me jump—and realize that the wedge of neon behind me had widened and brightened. And that hands were reaching through, shaking me, and pulling me back. Pulling me away from him.
“Help is coming,” Mircea said, grabbing my hand, his voice strangely distorted. “Cassie—do you understand? Help is coming! Hold on.”