Hunt the Moon cp-5 Page 16

  I ignored that for the bullshit it was. “What did you find?”

  “Little more than that, I’m afraid,” he admitted. “Your mother was extremely . . . elusive. My people even had difficulty finding a venue for tonight. She rarely went out, and when she did, it was usually to small dinner parties of ten or twelve people, which wouldn’t have allowed you to see without being seen.”

  “What about her background?”

  “She was adopted by the Pythian Court from a school in Des Moines, one of those for magical orphans run by the Circle.”

  I nodded; Jonas had said the same. And it wasn’t too surprising. The Circle ran a bunch of those schools, and not just for kids with no parents. They also locked up—excuse me, benevolently housed—kids who had families but who also had talents of which they disapproved—necromancers, firestarters, jinxes, telekenetics, etc. I assumed the orphans got out at age eighteen or whatever; the others . . . sometimes they never did.

  It was something I was working to change, and not just because it was appallingly unfair to be locked up simply for the crime of being born. But also because if I hadn’t ended up at Tony’s, I might have been in one of those pseudoprisons myself. Nobody was afraid of clairvoyants, most of whom were assumed to be frauds, anyway. But the talent I’d inherited from my father was another story.

  Having ghost servants who hung around, feeding off you and occasionally doing an errand or two in return, was seen as Highly Suspicious Behavior. Maybe because my father had refined it to an art form. According to rumors, he’d had his own ghost army, which he’d used in an attempt to seize control of the notorious Black Circle. The coup hadn’t worked and he’d ended up on the run, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d been powerful enough to try. And power like that would have gotten me put away real quick.

  But my mother hadn’t had it. Which made me wonder what she’d been in for. “What was she in for?” I asked Mircea, who was savaging some poor bunny, apparently with relish.

  He swallowed. “Nothing. Her records merely said that she was dropped off as an infant by person or persons unknown, with a note giving her name and birth date. The administrators assumed that a teenage mother had wanted to get rid of an embarrassing responsibility.”

  “And the name?”

  “There were no magical families by the name of O’Donnell in the area at that time. There were several in other parts of the country, but Kit found none who fit the requisite profile. He thinks the mother might have given the child the father’s last name, and that the father might have been human.”

  I didn’t have to ask why that was a problem. Humans outbred the magical community by something like a thousand to one. Even assuming O’Donnell wasn’t a wholly made-up name to begin with, sorting through the number of possible human fathers would be—

  Well, it wasn’t likely to happen. Not to satisfy my curiosity, anyway.

  “Okay,” I said, moving on. “So the court finds her, probably because they keep a lookout for particularly strong clairvoyants.”

  Mircea nodded and stole a fry.

  “And then she joins the Pythian Court. And then the record scratches, at least according to Jonas.”

  “And according to Kit. The Pythian Court is a separate, self-governed entity and does not have to vet its members through the Circle—or anyone else. The court tells us what it wants, when it wants, and has traditionally been . . . less than forthcoming.” Mircea shot me a suspiciously innocent look. “I think Kit is waiting impatiently for your accession, when he will finally have a conduit to all that lovely information.”

  I snorted. Yeah. He could keep on waiting. I wasn’t his freaking all-access pass.

  Mircea smiled. “This should prove . . . entertaining.”

  “Something like that.” I drank wine. “So, anyway, Jonas dated Agnes, or whatever you want to call it, for thirty years, yet he never got the story about what happened with my mother. He said she became angry whenever he brought it up, so he mostly didn’t. Which means the only thing I have to go on is what happened afterward.”

  “When she and your father went to live with Antonio.”

  “And that’s what I don’t get.” I said, swirling a rib around in the gooey sauce. “My father was some big-time dark mage, right? So how does someone like that end up working for a rat like Tony?”

  He pursed his lips. “It wasn’t a bad choice. Many of the mages who work for us have needed to disappear for one reason or another. Admittedly, most of them are running from the Silver Circle, not the Black, but the same rule applies: if someone is looking for you in one world, go to another. And the Circle often forgets that our world exists.” He smiled a little ferally. “Or it would like to.”

  “But Tony? He couldn’t have done better than that?”

  “With his abilities, doubtless. But you forget, dulceață, a more prominent court would also have been more risky, as it might have come under scrutiny by one or both of the circles. Whereas Antonio . . .”

  “Wasn’t worth their time.”

  One muscular shoulder rose in a shrug. “He was to the local branch, but I doubt he so much as registered at 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 and—

  And he licked my fingers clean.

  “You’re right,” he told me. “It’s delicious.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said, as he nipped the mound below my thumb.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it feels too good.”

  Mircea just smiled. And then he did it again.

  Bastard.

  The firelight gleamed on dark hair and wine-reddened lips. The robe had come apart some more, showing off most of a hard chest and a thigh thick with muscle. And I was tired of fighting.

  I tugged him over.

  His bent his head and I raised mine. A warm sigh caressed my face for a moment before our lips met. I made a soft sound and pulled him closer.

  He kissed me slowly, leisurely, like a man who knows he has all night and intends to use it. It felt . . . strange. My life wasn’t about slow these days. It was all hurry, hurry, hurry and go, go, go, constantly full speed ahead because something was always about to go fantastically wrong.

  But slow could be nice.

  Slow could be very nice, I decided, as his tongue slid over mine, liquid and warm, a patient, gentle seduction that matched the lingering caress of his hands. His hair fell around my face, gleaming with a few strands of red where the firelight shone through it. My fingers ran though the thick mass—like silk, just like silk—and down the long line of his back.

  I sighed, tension I hadn’t even known I had leaving my body.

  “How is the date going?” he asked, nuzzling my neck.

  “It’s . . . trending up.”

  He laughed and slid a knee between my legs.

  “You should go around like that all the time,” I told him sincerely, sliding my hands up his chest. God, he felt good. Warm, sleek skin over hard, hard muscle, nipples already peaked under my hands. I let my mouth close over one, my tongue circling it gently, and he made a sound of appreciation deep in his chest.

  “I might shock a few people.”

  “And make a lot more very happy. Of course, then I might have to beat the women off you with a stick.” I kissed my way over to the other nipple, which was looking sad and unattended and not half so rosy. “But, then, according to Marco, I may have to do that anyway.”

  “Marco talks too much.”

  “Marco doesn’t talk enough. I couldn’t get anything out of him about my competition.”

  “You don’t have competition.”

  I rolled us over for better access, and rested my chin on the hard surface of his chest. “You’re telling me you don’t have any mistresses?”

  “Not at the present.”

  I frowned.

  “That was evidently not the right answer,” he said ruefully.

  I kissed my way down his body, consciously keeping my nails out of his skin. It was a bit of a struggle. “How many have there been? And don’t tell me you forget,” I added, as he got that look on his face. The one that said he was wondering how big of a lie he could get away with.

  “I haven’t forgotten a single one, I assure you,” he said, and then he winced.

  And, okay, my n
ails might have sunk in just a little there.

  “So you’re not going to give me a number.”

  He suddenly rolled me onto my back again and nuzzled my neck. “Numbers are meaningless. Particularly when they are in the past.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “Even Ming-de?”

  “I never admitted Ming-de.”

  “Hmm.” He’d never denied it, either. And then he cleverly got out of the argument by the underhanded trick of sitting back on his heels and starting to strip off the robe.

  The white terry cloth had made his skin look darker than normal, a deep, rich caramel, but I didn’t miss it. Not with the fire painting intriguing shadows on a body that was already intriguing enough. It gilded his muscles, cast a very incongruous halo around that dark head and licked at the smug smile hovering about his lips.

  He took longer undressing than strictly necessary, because he was a bastard and a tease and because he clearly did not have a problem with nudity. I kind of suspected that Mircea liked nudity. Of course, if I had a body like that, I probably would, too.

  I must have said that last aloud, because he grinned as he crawled back over me. “If you had a body like mine, we would have a problem.”

  “You don’t like men?” I asked, running my hands up hard-muscled arms.

  “I like them well enough, just not in my bed,” he said, nibbling on my lower lip.

  “Have you tried it?”

  “I didn’t need to try it, dulceață,” he said, kissing his way downward. “I know what I like. I have always been very clear on that point.”

  I was, too, and Mircea pretty much hit every button, with smooth lips and rough fingers and cool, cool hair that he deliberately dragged across my body as he worked his way down. The silken caress followed the warmer, more insistent one, making me crazy, making me writhe, lighting up nerves I hadn’t even known I had. Until I arched up—in pain, because his mouth had fastened over the livid bruise below my belly button.

  “That hurts,” I protested, as he sucked at the already tortured flesh.

  “Not for long.”