She sighed. “You know why. The Circle. They’re so concerned with appearances. Berenice—Lady Aristonice—is said to have lived in a hovel, yet I can’t have a messy garden!”
“I wouldn’t call it a hovel,” Mircea murmured, tucking the fat pink rose he’d plucked behind her ear. “A little run-down, perhaps . . .”
She looked up at him in amazement. “You knew her? That was so long ago!”
“We don’t feel time the way you do,” he murmured, leaning in. “But I’ll tell you something about Lady Aristonice, if you like. Specifically what she would have said to the Circle.”
“And what’s that?”
He leaned all the way in and whispered something in her ear, something that made her blush and then burst out laughing. “I’d like to see their faces!”
“Try it. What are they going to do?”
“I shudder to think!”
He tilted her chin up and kissed her, long and slow and expertly. “You’re Pythia,” he whispered against her lips. “You can do whatever you want.”
Chapter Forty
The transition was harsher this time, like being underwater too long. I felt the grip of his mind, or of the vision—I still wasn’t sure which it was—clinging to me, even as I surfaced. I couldn’t breathe.
“Yes, I made her laugh,” Mircea was saying. “And the answer, when it came, was no. And the next time. And the next.”
I couldn’t complain about a lack of passion now. The dark eyes were flashing, the hands clenching on his chair arms, as if to keep him seated when he wanted to stride around the room, and maybe punch things. He did neither. But his face . . .
“No matter what words I used,” he told me, “no matter how I approached them, the gifts and favors and influence I put at their feet, it was always the same. My star was rising, I was on the senate, I could help them in their power struggle with the Circle—yes, it existed even then. I could give them so much, and I would have, freely, gladly, anything they asked . . .
“But it never mattered. Year after year, century after century, they never wavered. And they never told me why.”
“And then, one day, you got a phone call.” Tears were streaming down my face. I didn’t know why. Couldn’t think. Buzzing in my ears.
Mircea saw, and looked away, swallowing. “Yes. From Raphael. One of my subordinates had a true seer at his court. A young girl, just a tiny thing, ten or eleven. A girl whose mother was Elizabeth O’Donnell, the powerful clairvoyant and former heir to the Pythian throne, now a deceased runaway.
“I don’t know if I can describe to you how I felt after receiving that call. I sat there for a long time, unable to think, unable to move. The damn phone was beeping, wanting me to hang up, but I couldn’t even seem to do that. They told me that I sat there for hours, motionless. To me, it seemed like minutes.
“And then you got up and went to Tony’s.”
“And found you,” he agreed. “A delightful child, a breath of fresh air, and a chance . . . the first I had had in centuries . . . of a yes.”
* * *
“Come on!” I said excitedly. “It’s just up here.”
“I’m not as small as you.” Mircea, cobwebs in his hair from the wine cellar steps, nonetheless followed me into the supersecret place in the back, the one with the small door that creaked—oh, so loudly—when you opened it. But everything creaked here, the old farmhouse sounding like a grumpy old man, bones groaning and breath rasping, whenever the wind shook it.
The wind was shaking it a lot tonight—Eugenie had said a storm was coming. Good—no prying ears to figure out what we were doing, and ruin things. Not that anyone seemed to, when
Mircea was around. It was funny, seeing them all bowing and scraping, and acting like he was as dangerous as Alphonse, with his huge muscles and scary face.
Not that I found Alphonse so scary anymore. I’d watched too many horror movies with him, seen him jump when the monster appeared, and laugh to cover it up. He loved being scared, though, so he always came back for more.
I didn’t find the movies scary myself. When you live in a nest of vampires, Freddy and Jason and what’s-his-name from The Shining just don’t seem like that big a deal. But Alphonse still jumped.
“Are we almost there?” I looked back to see Mircea all hunched over, his nice suit getting wrinkled. That was too bad; I liked his suits, so elegant! And his gentle way of talking. And his laughter—I’d never seen a vampire who laughed so much!
Or anybody else around here, I thought grimly.
“Is it close?” I asked Laura, and she turned around to look at me. She wasn’t cramped; she was fine. Of course, she was littler than me now, although we’d once been the same size. But ghost kids don’t grow up, so I was taller. But not so much as Mircea.