Hunt the Moon

“I bet you got away with murder,” I said, and he laughed.

“Not at all. My parents were quite strict.”

“I don’t believe it.” I tried to be strict with Mircea, I really did, but somehow it never worked. And I doubted that anybody else had better luck.

“It’s true,” he insisted, settling us into chairs by the wall. I didn’t stay in mine more than a few seconds. I felt too antsy, too oddly keyed up.

Mircea started to get up when I did, but I pushed him back down. “A gentleman doesn’t sit while a lady is standing,” he admonished.

I put a knee on his leg to keep him in place. “And if the lady insists?”

“Hm. A quandary.” A strong hand clasped my thigh through the silk. “Since a gentleman always accedes to a lady’s wishes.”

“Always?” That could come in handy.

He laughed and kissed my hand. “Unfortunately, I am not always a gentleman.”

“Close enough,” I told him honestly, and slipped the clip out of his hair.

A dusky wave fell over his shoulders. He looked up at me, dark eyes amused. I’d always had this weird fetish about his hair, which we didn’t talk about. But he knew.

It felt like cool brown silk flowing over my fingers. And, as always, touching him felt more than good. It felt right, steadying. And right now, I could really use some of that.

“You were talking about when you were a boy.”

“Ah yes. The trials of childhood,” he mused, that hand slowly stroking my thigh. “One of my first memories is of being thrown out to play in the snow, completely naked.”

“Naked?”

“Hm. It was not too bad when the sun shone, but after dark—”

“After dark?”

“—it became somewhat . . . frigid.”

I stared at him. “How old were you?”

He shrugged. “Three, perhaps four.”

“But . . . but why would anyone do that?”

“To demonstrate my fitness to the people. I was my father’s heir, and although he had no throne at that time to leave to me, he had absolute confidence that it would one day be his.”

“Yes, but to risk a child—”

“Life was about risk then. And there was no childhood, in the modern sense, when I was young. Not for peasant children, who started work in the fields by age seven. And certainly not for those of us in the nobility.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“Some of it was. There were puppet shows on feast days and sledding in the winter. And I could ride an unsaddled horse at age five at a full gallop, as could my brothers. Well, except for Radu,” he said, talking about his youngest brother. “He was deathly afraid of the creatures and took rather longer to come to terms with them. I should know; I taught them to ride.”

“Them?”

“He and Vlad,” Mircea said, his smile fading. I didn’t say anything, but inwardly I cursed. It was rare enough for Mircea to talk about his family, and that particular topic was almost certain to make him shut down. But to my surprise, this time it didn’t.

“Radu had absolutely no seat at all,” he said, after a moment.

“Neither do I,” I admitted. Rafe had tried to teach me, but had finally given up in despair.

“But you do not need to lead charges in battle, dulceață. He did! My father finally solved the problem by tying him onto the largest horse in the stable, and promising that he should remain there until he could ride it properly.”

“And did he?”

Mircea looked up at me, baring the long line of his throat as he leaned back against the chair. It exposed a vulnerable area, a traditional vampire sign of trust. “With amazing alacrity.”

I stared down into those velvety dark eyes, fascinated by the pleased humor on the handsome face, by the crinkle of the eyes, by the white, even teeth and the glimpse of tongue behind them. Without thinking, my hand stopped combing through the thick silk of his hair and dropped to his nape, before sliding forward to curve around his throat.

Most vampires would have moved away or at least flinched. Mircea just looked up at me, eyes bright, but no longer with amusement. There was something dark in those depths, something fierce and possessive that made my breath come faster and my hand tighten over the pulse that beat strong and steady under my fingertips.

His heart didn’t need to beat, of course, but he knew I liked it, so he rarely forgot. Like he always remembered to breathe when I was around, to blink, to do all the things that made him seem human, even though he hadn’t technically held that title for five hundred years. But he was human to me.

He would always be human to me.

“You shouldn’t look at me like that when we are in public, dulceață,” he murmured, stroking his hand up and down my leg. “It makes me wish to cut the evening short.”

“How short?”

Those fingers suddenly tightened. “Very.”

And for a moment, that sounded like a really good idea. Really, really good. But if I left with Mircea now, I knew how the rest of the evening would go. And it wouldn’t involve a lot of talking.

I licked my lips and stepped away a few paces. “You were telling me about your mother?”

Mircea didn’t say anything for a moment, but when I looked back, he didn’t appear annoyed. If anything, his body seemed to have relaxed, and he was smiling. “Princess Cneajna of Moldavia,” he said easily. “Tall, with raven hair and green eyes. Radu took after her, not in coloring but in a certain delicacy of feature.”

“What about you?”

“They said I resembled her more in temperament, although I never saw it. She was more . . . fiery. More highly strung. I remember her as beautiful and passionate, proud and ambitious.”

I bit my lip. I thought that described Mircea perfectly.

“I always thought I was more like my father,” he told me.

“How so?”

Mircea’s head tilted. “He was a . . . prudent sort of man, a diplomat, for King Sigismund of Hungary. He was around your age when he was sent as a special envoy to Constantinople to discuss a possible merger between the Roman Catholic faith and the Orthodox. It never happened, of course, but he impressed the Holy Roman Emperor with his tact and judgment.” Mircea smiled. “Although probably not for his piety.”

“He wasn’t religious?”

“No more so than was politically expedient. My mother was the devout one in the family. Forced her poor sons into the care of the Dominicans for part of our education.” He shuddered.

I smiled. “You don’t like monks?”

“I always have suspicions of any man who can willingly turn his back on the finest of God’s creations.”

Brown velvet eyes met mine, and a shot of something warm and electric shot right through me, making my pulse pound harder in my throat—and other places. I decided I really wanted that drink now. Luckily, another of the ubiquitous floating trays was headed my way.

I moved forward and reached for a glass, at the same time as a man on the other side. My hand brushed the flute, toppling it and sending a splash of golden liquid onto his pristine white shirt. He looked down and I looked up, an apology on my lips. And that was where it stayed, as both of us froze in stunned recognition.

Because we knew each other, and neither one of us was supposed to be there.

Chapter Nine

I stared at the thin, vaguely horsey features and pale blue eyes of the mage in front of me, and hoped I was