Mircea glided over with that peculiar grace of his. All the undead have it, but he made even most vamps look clumsy. He was an old hand at this; I knew he wouldn't hurt me and he was too full to take much. It was Billy Joe I would have liked to throttle—if the coward hadn't run off somewhere. Billy's feedings normally didn't bother me, since I could replenish the energy he took with food and rest. But he knew the rules about how much I was willing to donate at once, and tonight he'd broken them all to hell.

"What are you going to do?" Pritkin started forward, but Tomas would not let him by. Neither looked happy.

"Make sure he has a good view, Tomas," Mircea said, looking down at me thoughtfully. "I will do this only once. Cassandra is already tired, and we have much to talk about. I do not wish to put her to sleep." He smiled and cupped my chin in his hand. He felt warm, but then, he always did. The old ones don't have temperature fluctuations based on whether they have eaten recently or not. "I will not hurt you," he promised.

I was remembering why I'd always liked Mircea. The deep brown eyes and graceful physique had certainly played a part, adolescent hormones being what they are, but his appearance had been less important to me than his honesty. I had never once caught him in a lie. I was sure he was a capable enough liar when he wanted to be—it would be pretty much impossible to function at court otherwise—but he had always been frank with me. It might sound like a little thing, but in a system run by deception and evasion, sincerity was priceless. I smiled up at him, only half for Pritkin's sake. "I know."

Pritkin couldn't get to me, but he could still yell. "This is insane! You're going to let him feed off you? Willingly? You'll end up like one of them!"

Mircea answered for me, his dark eyes steady on mine. They were not a true brown, I realized, but a combination of many colors: cappuccino, cinnamon, gold and a few flecks of deep green. They were beautiful. "If we fed on the population at large as you seem to think, Mage Pritkin, how could we avoid making thousands, even millions of new vampires? It only takes three bites over consecutive days from a seventh-level master or higher. Can you believe that, with no restrictions, it would not happen time and again? Either by accident or intentionally? Soon, we would be no longer merely a myth, and would again be hunted."

He stopped, but he didn't need to go on. I couldn't believe that even Pritkin was unaware of what had happened to Dracula, and Mircea himself had been almost caught and killed many times in the early years. Radu, his younger brother, had not been so lucky. He had been taken by a mob in Paris and delivered to the Inquisition. They had tortured him for well over a century, until, when Mircea finally found and freed him, he was dangerously mad. Radu had been locked away ever since.

"It was constant war once," Mircea continued, as if he knew what I had been thinking. "Between us and the humans, between families of vampyre, between us and the mages, and on and on. Until the senates rose, until they said enough, or we will destroy ourselves in the end. No one wants to return to that, especially the conflict with the humans. Even if we won against the billions who would oppose us, we would lose, for who would feed us if they were gone?" He looked at Pritkin. "We do not wish for huge numbers of us, running wild, with no supervision and no hope of secrecy, any more than you do. We bite to drain a subject in an execution, or to frighten as with the captives today. But for a normal feeding," he said, returning his attention to me, "we prefer a gentler method." He smiled, and it was like the sun broke through the clouds after days of rain. It was breathtaking.

"What are you doing to her?" Pritkin looked around Tomas' shoulders. "You're not doing anything." He sounded almost disappointed.

Tomas reached out and removed Mircea's hand from my face. "Leave her alone."

Mircea regarded him with amusement. "She offered, Tomas; you heard her. What is the trouble? I have promised to be gentle." Tomas' eyes flashed and his jaw clenched. He did not look appeased. Mircea's eyes widened slightly, then sparkled wickedly. "Forgive me; I did not understand. But surely you cannot begrudge me one small taste?" He stroked my face, a lazy caress, but his eyes were on Tomas. "Is she as sweet as she looks?" Tomas actually growled at him, and this time he flung Mircea's hand away.

I wished Mircea would get on with it. I wanted to question Pritkin, and I couldn't while he was on his vampire fixation. "Can we just do this?"

"I will do it, if it must be done," Tomas said and bent his head towards me.

I immediately pulled away. "Uh-uh. I never agreed to that." I owed Tomas a few things all right, but a feeding wasn't one of them.

Mircea laughed again, a rich, mellow sound. "Tomas! You did not tell her?"

"Tell me what?" My mood was not improving.

The glint in Mircea's eyes was pure mischief. "Only that he has been feeding from you for months, dulceaţă, and, as often happens in such cases, he has become… territorial."

I looked at Tomas in shock. "Tell me he's kidding."

The answer was on his face before he spoke, and I felt the world tilt. In vamp circles, feeding has strict rules. Even the same norm can't be fed from regularly, as it creates a feeling of possession in the vamp involved and can lead to all sorts of problems because of jealousy. But taking blood without permission from someone connected with our world is considered even more of a violation. That's not only because of the often sexual by-product of the feeding process, but also because anyone recognized as part of the supernatural community has special rights. Tomas had just broken a whole group of laws, not to mention betraying me yet again. So everything about him had been one vampire trick or another, from the way he looked to the way I'd felt. I might have eventually been able to forgive him the deception, but not this. I couldn't believe he'd done it, but looking at him, I knew he had.

Tomas licked his lips. "It was not frequent, Cassie. I had to know where you were at all times, and regular feedings create a bond. They helped me keep you safe."

"How very generous of you." I could barely get the words out; it felt like someone had hit me.

I started to rise—I'm not sure why—when Mircea put a restraining hand on my shoulder. His expression was suddenly serious, as if he realized something of how much the news had affected me. "You have every right to be annoyed with Tomas, dulceaţă, but now is not the time. It is my fault; I shouldn't have teased him. I will refrain, if you will please let it go for the moment. Otherwise we will waste the day in arguments."

"I don't want to argue," I said, and it was true. I wanted to throw something at Tomas' head, preferably something heavy. But that wouldn't get me answers, and right then, I needed information more than revenge. "Fine. Just get him away from me."

"Done. Tomas, if you please?" Tomas looked like he was going to argue, but after a noticeable pause he moved off about two feet. Then he stopped, looking mulish. I would have pushed the issue, but he would only have said that he needed to be close to watch Pritkin. Since I tended to agree with that, I kept quiet.

Mircea sighed and cupped my face again. He didn't prolong it this time. His fingers gently stroked down my chin to my neck, and I could feel his power calling to me. His caress was delicate, barely a touch at all, but I shivered as a warm surge of pleasure danced through my body, driving away some of the shock I felt at Tomas' actions. My skin tingled and a mist of sparkling, delicious energy rose between us. I suddenly knew whose wards Billy Joe had broken earlier, whose power we had borrowed to fight off the attack at Dante's. This was the same giddy, bubbling, champagne-on-ice sensation I'd felt at the casino, a heady mix of desire and laughter and warmth that was almost instantly addictive. I knew I should be aggravated about the wards he'd put on my power, but no one could have bathed in that feeling and stayed angry. It was simply impossible. It poured over me like sunlight given form, and I laughed in wonder.

Mircea started when our energies mingled, then went very still. I barely noticed. I was happily drowning in a glorious, golden glow. It felt as though he was touching something far more intimate than my neck and, for a second, I actually thought that my robe had disappeared and a warm hand was caressing all the way down my body. I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry and a pulse began to throb insistently in tender places. I flashed on a long-ago evening, Mircea and I curled up together on the divan in Tony's study, him stroking my hair as he told me a story. I'd spent more time with him on that visit than Tony had, half of it snuggled in his lap, but I'd never reacted this way. Of course, I'd been eleven. Sitting on his lap now took on a completely new connotation.

Mircea was wearing an odd expression, almost confused, as if he'd never seen me before. He searched my face for a moment, then took my hand and bowed over it. I felt a brief touch of lips, then he released me and stepped back. The whole thing had taken maybe ten seconds, but it left me breathless, flushed and momentarily heartbroken, like the most precious thing in my life had been snatched away. I almost reached for him but managed to stop before I humiliated myself. I sat there, trying to lower my pulse back to something approaching normal, and stared at him.

I'd forgotten how much more personal vamp feedings were than what Billy did. I hadn't thought about that aspect with Mircea, a fact that amazed me now. He had the charisma for which his family was famous, his power was great enough for him to win and hold a Senate seat and there was no denying his masculine beauty. I had, of course, never met Dracula, who died long before I was born, or the unfortunate Radu, but looking at Mircea, I could understand why the family had become legendary. If you met one of them, you weren't likely to forget it, no matter what tricks were used to fog the memory.

I looked up to see Tomas scowling, his eyes moving back and forth between Mircea and me. What was his problem now? It was over. Then I glanced at my reflection and saw that my eyes had lost focus, I was rosy and my lips were half parted. I looked like I'd just had really good sex, which was not far from the truth. I quickly rearranged my face to look less like afterglow.