Hunt the Moon

the national level. It was why I left you with him, if you recall.”

I nodded. After Mircea had found out about my existence, he’d considered bringing me to his court. But as a senator, he was watched constantly, and he’d been afraid that the Circle might get curious about me. And since I was a magic worker, not a vampire, he could have been forced to hand me over.

“Okay, I understand that,” I said, chewing thoughtfully. “My parents wanted to fly under the radar, so they hid out with a loser nobody cared about. I just don’t understand why they chose him.”

“Ah, now, that I can answer.”

It was so unexpected that it took me a moment to react. I’d hit so many brick walls trying to find out something about my parents, that I almost expected it now. “You can?”

“Yes. Well,” Mircea hedged. “I can tell you what Antonio told me. He said that he and your father had had business dealings for some years before Roger asked him for refuge.”

“What kind of business dealings?”

“You know that Antonio remained in the money-lending business?”

“He was a loan shark,” I corrected. Among a lot of other things. If he could make a buck off it, Tony had wanted in.

“As you say. In any case, many of his clients found that they could not repay their debts, and he was ruthless about confiscating whatever had been put up for collateral.”

“Yeah. We always had stuff sitting around,” I said, remembering. “Cars, boats—even a light airplane once. And then there was all the junk from the houses. I got in trouble for finger-painting on a Chippendale sideboard once, but how did I know? It was just another scarred, old table.”

“But antiques—even finger-painted ones—are easy to move,” Mircea pointed out. “That wasn’t true of magical devices, particularly unstable ones. They had to be disposed of properly, and such disposal is not cheap.”

I nodded. “You have to call in a Remainder.” They’d occasionally come to the farmhouse, men in stained coveralls who carted away boxes of suspicious charms, amulets and potions before they blew up in anyone’s face.

“And you know how fond Antonio was of spending money,” Mircea said. “But he couldn’t leave the items in place and risk having them burn down his investments, and he couldn’t abandon them somewhere without possibly coming to the attention of the Circle, which monitors that sort of thing. For a long time, he had to pay up.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with my father.”

“Antonio told me that Roger contacted him offering to dispose of any such volatile devices for free.”

I frowned. “For free? But isn’t that work kind of . . . risky?”

“Very. One of my cooks likes to tell the story of the time he bought a growth charm to use on his kitchen garden. But he didn’t monitor it properly, and it went past the expiration date. Shortly thereafter, he woke up to a garden of giants—squash as long as canoes, watermelons the size of small cars, tomatoes as large as beach balls —all of which had burst because of too-rapid growth. He said the mess was . . . astonishing.”

“He’s just lucky he didn’t have it in his room,” I said, getting a vision of a head swollen to the size of a beach ball.

“Indeed. Remainders earn their money.”

“Yet my father offered the service for free. Didn’t that make anyone suspicious?”

“Yes. But Antonio was not the type to turn down a good deal. After your father came to work for him, he developed the theory that he was using the leftover magic to feed his ghosts.”

I shook my head. “Ghosts require human energy. Some old charm wouldn’t do them any more good than it would you or me.” Less, really. It wasn’t like they needed to grow hair or lose weight or whiten their teeth.

“Then it remains a mystery, I’m afraid.”

Like everything else about my parents. I sighed and contemplated my almost-empty plate. I couldn’t possibly eat another thing. Except maybe that one last rib . . .

“You met him, didn’t you?” I asked, slathering on the sauce.

Mircea nodded. “Antonio sent him to court a few times as his representative.” His lips quirked. “I think because his manners were somewhat more refined than those of most of Antonio’s stable.”

“You mean he didn’t drink straight out of the bottle?”

“Or use the tablecloth for a napkin. Or lick the butter knife. Or drink from the finger bowl, and then complain that the tea tasted just like hot water.”

I blinked. “Who did that?”

“Alphonse.”

“Ah.” I grinned, thinking of Tony’s second, a seven-foot hunk of muscle who was great with the guns and the knives and the things that went boom. Not so much with the dainty table manners. “What was my father like?”

Mircea thought about it for a moment. “Somewhat reserved, as might have been expected. But articulate, wellread, even amusing at times. I tried to steal him away from Antonio, but he said he liked the good air in New Jersey!”

I nodded. Tony had business interests in Jersey. My father must have worked in some of them. “He was probably afraid you’d do a background check.”

“Probably. I have employed mages on a number of occasions who were at odds with the Silver Circle, whose punishments are often out of proportion to the crime. But the Black . . . no. I do not deal with them.”

I drank wine and didn’t comment. I didn’t want to think about what my father might have done as a member of the world’s most organized bunch of evil mages. I didn’t know why I was curious about the damn man at all. Maybe just because, while I knew a little about my mother, he was almost a total blank.

For years, all I’d known was that he’d been Tony’s “favorite human” until he refused to hand me over. Tony had been so incensed by this “betrayal,” as he saw it, that killing him hadn’t been enough. He’d had a mage construct a trap for my father’s soul, capturing it at the point of death. Tony had used it for years afterward as a paperweight—and as a subtle reminder to anyone else who thought about crossing him.

But as far as memories went, I had almost nothing—just the vague impression of a pair of strong arms tossing me into the air as a child. I couldn’t even picture him in my head. “What did he look like?” I asked, pushing a fry around because I was too stuffed to do anything else with it.

“It is odd, now that you mention it,” Mircea said.

“What is?”

“He was slightly swarthy, handsome enough, with dark hair and eyes.”

“Why is that odd?”

He shrugged. “Merely that, having seen your mother, I would have expected him to have been a blond.”

Chapter Fifteen

I gave up pretending to eat a few minutes later. There was a cart with dessert—chocolate hazelnut sponge cake, crème brûlée and pavlova with raspberries and kiwi. But by the time I finished the ribs and the fries and most of a bottle of wine, I couldn’t walk that far. I kind of doubted I could walk at all. I flopped onto my back and stared at the ceiling, lost in a food haze.

It was glorious.

Mircea leaned over to refill my wineglass, and a section of his bare chest showed under the robe, along with a hint of a dusky nipple. It’s a good thing I’m too stuffed to move, I thought hazily. I would so have jumped that.

He laughed, and I looked up and met amused, dark eyes. “What?”

He started to say something and then stopped himself. “You have sauce everywhere,” he said instead.

“Of course I do. I had ribs.”

“And apparently enjoyed them.”

I sighed. “They were really, really good.”

He reached over, picked up my hand. And before I could ask what he was doing, a pink tongue flicked out