Touch the Dark

Page 51

I reached up and ran a hand through his damp auburn curls to his neck, and drew him down to me. His rhythm didn't falter, but the angle changed slightly and we both groaned in response. I ran my tongue over him, tasting him, and his face grew slack with need. I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled, driving him into me even harder. The muscles in my lower areas tightened, wrenching a strangled gasp from him. I grabbed handfuls of his hair, pulling his mouth down to mine, bending him almost double. He cried out and, finally, lost his rhythm.
I laughed into his mouth as he thrust into me in ragged bursts, as if he couldn't get enough, couldn't go fast or hard enough, to satisfy some overwhelming need. I understood it, because I was also feeling two rising tides of desire, mine and that of the woman whose body I had invaded. She didn't seem to care; at that moment, all she wanted was to be satisfied, and on that we both agreed.
I slid out from under him, causing him to clutch at me convulsively to keep our bodies together, and flipped him over. I smiled down in satisfaction. He was glorious, sprawled there among the soft, pale sheets, his hair glimmering richly in the candlelight. It should have seemed wrong, to see Louis-César's body with Mircea's knowing eyes, but it didn't.
"I want to be on top."
He didn't argue. His hands moved up my body to cup my breasts and we both sighed as I slowly settled back onto him. I liked this angle better: I liked seeing him beneath me, although I still had to fight not to have that strange, double vision. It was Louis-César's face that stared into mine, filled with longing, but it was Mircea's triumphal smile as he began moving again.
"I told you before, Cassie," he murmured, "anything you want." Then the waves of pleasure caught us both, robbing us of speech, and I didn't care. The world burst into perfect, liquid pleasure a minute later and I cried out his name, but it was not my voice and it was not the name of the body beneath me.
When the world coalesced again, I was wrapped in warm arms and soft blankets, my head pillowed on a chest that still rose and fell with slight tremors. A hand was running through my hair, soothing me, and I realized I was crying. His words were a strange mixture of French and Romanian, neither of which I understand, but somehow they warmed me anyway.
"Cassie." A murmur in my ear brought me back the rest of the way, and I left the woman to enjoy that warm, wonderful haze on her own. "You can really do this." He gazed around in wonder. "Can you choose which time to send us back as well? Can you do it before the attack, to give us time to prepare?"
His words finally helped me slam down a barrier between the woman, who was basking in the golden glow of sexual satisfaction, and myself. I glanced in panic at the door, but it remained closed, with no sign of the older woman, the guards or a crazed Russian psychopath. We seemed to be safe for the moment, but there were probably people on the way to kill him even as we lay around recovering.
"Mircea, we have to get out of here! They'll come here first!"
"Cassie, calm yourself. There is no rush. The sybil and her assistants know where this Frenchman will be. As you said, they will be along presently, expecting him to be pleasantly preoccupied and unwary. But we will be waiting for them instead." He slipped out of bed and walked over to the mirror. He touched Louis-César's cheek softly. "This is a marvel!" He examined his borrowed body in astonishment. He turned towards me as he looked over his shoulder to check out the rear view and my mouth went dry. Louis-César was simply stunning; there was no other word for it. Backlit against the fire, his hair a reddish halo around his face, he might have been a Renaissance angel come to life.
"This is the famous mask, is it?" Mircea picked up a scrap of velvet that had been flung over the mirror and held it up to his eyes. "A piece of history indeed."
"Are you going to tell me who he was now," I asked impatiently, "or do I have to guess?"
Mircea laughed and tossed the mask aside. "Not at all," he commented, unself-consciously perching on the edge of a low chest of drawers near the mirror. I wished he'd put something on. The current situation wasn't doing anything for my mental abilities.
"I will be happy to tell you the tale, if it will amuse you. His father was George Villiers, whom you may know better as the English Duke of Buckingham. He seduced Anne of Austria, Louis XIII's queen, while on a state visit to France. Louis preferred men, you see, a fact that had long left his queen frustrated and childless." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "So perhaps it was she who seduced Buckingham, hoping for an heir. In any case, she was successful. However, it seems that Louis was not pleased about the idea of having a bastard on the throne, especially not a half-English one. Anne had already named her son after the king, in the attempt, I suppose, to hint that a bastard heir was better than none at all, especially if no one knew about the substitution. The argument failed, and her firstborn was sent into hiding."
Something was starting to come together for me, some long-forgotten history lesson maybe, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Mircea didn't wait for me to figure it out. "Eventually, the queen had another son, whom most said was sired by her adviser, Cardinal Mazarin. Perhaps she kept quiet about the deception this time, or maybe the king was becoming afraid that he would leave no heir, because the boy came to the throne as Louis XIV. He wasn't happy to have a half-brother who looked a great deal like the Duke of Buckingham. That might call his mother's virtue into question, and cause doubts about his own parentage, and therefore his right to rule."
"The Man in the Iron Mask!" I finally made the connection. "I read that book as a kid. But that wasn't how it went."
Mircea shrugged. "Dumas was a writer of fiction. He could say what he liked, and there were many rumors circulating at the time from which to choose. But to make a long story short, King Louis put Louis-César in prison for the rest of his life, holding the threat of harm to his friends over his head to keep him docile. To make the point even clearer, he had him sent on a tour of France's most infamous house of horrors, the leading castle in the medieval witch hunts, Carcassonne. King Louis used it as a place of incarceration for any who disagreed with him, but the torturers and the troops supporting them were all found dead one morning in 1661, causing the greatest fortress of the Middle Ages to be abandoned. It fell into ruins and wasn't restored for two hundred years."
"But didn't Louis-César say he was here that year, in 1661?" I looked around nervously. That was all I needed, a homicidal maniac or a bunch of fed up townspeople to come busting in with pitchforks, ready to slaughter everybody.
Mircea didn't look overly concerned. "Yes, he was moved around to many prisons through the years, staying in captivity until shortly before his brother died, when the last of the friends he was protecting passed away. Then he took off forever the velvet mask they had made him wear so no one would notice his strong resemblance to a certain narcissistic English duke, who had left portraits of himself all over Europe. He told me once that his jailers only forced him into the iron mask after he was turned, and even then only when he was transported from one prison to the other." He grinned at me. "It was a precaution, you see, so that he didn't eat anyone en route."
I gave him a dirty look—now was not the time for humor—and tossed him the robe I'd used during my previous visit. "Get dressed. We need to get out of here."
He caught the robe in midair. Nothing about the possession seemed to be bothering his reflexes, but then, I'd already found that out. "I have told you, Cassie; you are panicking for no reason. They will come to us, and after we dispose of the sybil, we will save my brother."
I blinked. I hoped I hadn't heard right. "What do you mean, dispose of her? She was kidnapped, Mircea! She may not be any happier about being part of this than I am."
He shrugged, and the casual indifference made me cold. "She aided our enemies and is indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least four Senate members." He saw my expression, and his face softened. "You have grown up as one of us, but I often forget, you are not vampyr." He gave it the Romanian pronunciation. It sounded better that way, but the implication behind his words hit me like a sledgehammer. "She is the key to all this. Once she is gone, there will be no other way for anyone to slip through time, and therefore no more threat."
I began struggling into the woman's clothes, which were scattered everywhere, and tried to come up with a response that would make sense to Mircea. I thought about the four Senate guards who had been killed. By the look of them, they had been with the Consul hundreds of years and must have served her faithfully or they wouldn't have been entrusted with protecting the Senate chamber. They may not have decided to betray her: the sybil had interfered with their transition and Rasputin was a powerful master who might have been able to force their obedience. It seemed unlikely that they would have chosen to essentially commit suicide by taking me on in front of such an audience if they had had a choice. But that fact hadn't saved them.
Vamp law was very simple, if a little on the medieval side, and intent wasn't nearly as important as in human courts. Nobody cared why you did something. If you caused problems, you were guilty, and the guilty had to pay. If you were in a quarrel with another master, your own might intervene to save you if you were useful enough to make it worthwhile, either by a duel or by offering reparations, but no one could do anything about a threat to the Senate. There was no higher power to which to appeal.
After only a minute, I gave up trying to figure out how the unbelievably complicated dress worked and threw on the lightweight slip instead. It was too thin, but at least I was covered. I crawled under the bed and retrieved the woman's shoes, then sat looking at them in annoyance. So, high heels weren't a modern invention. I couldn't believe women had been putting up with these torture devices for centuries.
"Would you like me to help, dulcea?" Mircea was holding out a peacock-colored dress that I assumed the woman had been wearing at some earlier time. "It has been some time since I played lady's maid, but I believe I remember how."