“A source?”
“For the potion! I mean, you got it from someone—”
“Yes, we got it from someone.”
“Who? Just tell me that—”
Knowing dark eyes met mine. “If I do, will you still be here when I return?”
I bit my lip. Because we both knew the answer to that.
“I thought not.” He bent over and kissed my forehead. “This won’t take long, and then we’ll talk.”
I blinked and he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-two
“Mircea!” But the door was already closing. “Damn it,” I muttered, and threw back the covers, wondering why it felt like someone had sewn lead weights into them. And stood up.
And immediately collapsed, because I had no strength at all. My legs might as well have been nailed to the floor, they were so hard to move. So I didn’t. I just sat there, on a very nice Persian carpet of a type Mircea could probably have identified but I couldn’t, and leaned my head against the side of the bed.
So this was what happened when the potion wore off.
I sat there some more.
I finally decided to lie down, because even sitting up was too hard. I’d have tried to get back on the bed, but it was ridiculously high and far away. Might as well have been Everest. I settled for staring at the ceiling instead.
It probably wasn’t a good sign that it kept pulsing in and out. Or that the rug felt like it was spinning, very slowly, underneath me. I decided that there was a tiniest chance Caleb had been right, not about the addiction part, because how did you become addicted to something you could never find? But about the side effects.
They reminded me of a time when I’d used a power word I knew. It gave you a ton of stamina, like a week’s worth, all at once, to let you deal with an emergency. And you had better deal with it, because you weren’t just tired when it wore off. You were exhausted, passed out, useless, like for days, and—
And—
And shit.
I sat up. Okay, it looked like I could move, after all. Because my sleep-fuzzed brain hadn’t remembered to ask Mircea the most important question of all: what time was it?
The seat of his discarded chair was close enough for me to grab it and pull myself to my knees. And then somehow, and I wasn’t entirely sure how, I made it to my feet. And immediately wished I hadn’t.
I stood there, swaying slightly and clinging to the back of the chair, both exhausted and in serious pain, because my feet were a mess. Mircea had done something—the cuts were closed and the bruises had taken on the purplish hue of days-old wounds—but they did not want to hold me. And the door . . . the door looked like I was staring at it through a telescope, from the wrong way round. It was laughably far, to the point that there was no way, just no way—
And then the vamp was back.
It was the same one as before, with the glasses and the hair that could use a comb, and the generic, off-the-rack suit that needed pressing. I wondered vaguely how he’d gotten past the makeover squad. Most of Mircea’s guys looked like they got tackled and dragged to Armani first thing. Of course, maybe this wasn’t one, because I didn’t recognize him. Maybe this was . . . was the consul’s, I thought blearily, as we stared at each other.
And as he grabbed me, just before I hit the floor.
“Not the bed,” I said, because if I lay down, I wasn’t getting back up. “What time is it?”
He just stood there, holding me awkwardly, and didn’t say anything.
“What time is it?” I repeated, wondering why he was acting like he was hard of hearing when he was a vamp, and saw his pupils blow huge. And then this weird sound started coming from his lips. It wasn’t words—I didn’t know what it was—but it was freaking me out even more than I already was. “What time? What day? Damn it, say something!”
But he didn’t. He did almost drop me, however, and then his arms tightened, making me yelp in pain. The freaked-out look intensified, as did the sound, which had become a weird mewling cry, right in my face. And that sent me the rest of the way into a panic.
“Put me down! Put me down!” I yelled. But the vamp wasn’t putting me down. And he wasn’t stopping that horrible, high-pitched keening, either. However, he did take off running, through the door of the bedroom and down a hall, so fast that the rooms we passed were just a blur.
Like the faces that turned to look at us, and the stairs we all but flew down, and the rug that almost sent us sprawling before the vamp recovered, because his reflexes were better than his sanity. And the man who stepped out of nowhere in front of us, dodging back and forth along with the vamp, refusing to let him pass. And causing the keening to escalate to the point that I’d have feared for his heart.