I concentrated on a modernist painting on the opposite wall, and it slowly came into focus. It should have looked out of place, a bright splash of color in an old-world room, like it should have felt odd having a hand grip mine from across a continent. But it didn’t.
He held my hand firmly but gently, careful not to let vampire strength bruise human flesh. He pulled it forward and the light came with it, like sunrise falling over a landscape. Leaving the room bisected between neon bright and dark, like the body of the girl lying on the floor between us.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked nervously, because I didn’t know how to heal someone.
“You’re already doing it,” Mircea murmured, dark eyes sliding shut.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said, trying to stamp down the panic clogging my throat. “I don’t have the power to do anything!”
“Neither does a bridge, yet it serves.”
I waited, but nothing else was forthcoming. I knew I should just shut up and let him concentrate. Healing was one of Mircea’s gifts, and it worked equally well on humans as on vamps.
But it worked on humans who were in front of him. I didn’t know how well it worked from a thousand miles away, but it had to be harder. And that was assuming he could do it at all, so shut up, shut up, shut up, and give him some time.
But I didn’t seem to be able to. Because Rhea didn’t have any time. And just sitting there while she bled out was—
I didn’t seem to be able to.
“I don’t understand,” I blurted, and then bit my lip, practically vibrating with the need to do something, but not having a lot of options left.
“You have a metaphysical link to your acolyte,” Mircea murmured, neon light from my part of the world flickering impossibly over his features. “And I have one to you. I am attempting to use you as a conduit to send her energy, as I would one of my masters who needed help.”
“But I’m not one of your masters,” I said, because I didn’t feel like a conduit. I didn’t feel anything, except for my fingers, blood slick and desperate, gripping his.
It was probably uncomfortable. If he was a human, I might have broken a bone by now. But he wasn’t, and I didn’t let go.
“No,” he said softly. “Which is why I don’t know that this will work. And she is very weak.”
I gripped him tighter. “But you can try—”
“Someone already tried. I feel the spell . . . sluggish, slow, impeding the blood flow.”
“A witch. She isn’t a healer, but she wanted to help. . . .”
“She succeeded. Your servant would have faded by now, otherwise.” But his expression didn’t look happy. “What is her name?”
“Rhea.”
“Rhea.” He rolled it over his tongue. It sounded different in Mircea’s voice, darker, sweeter, more exotic. And sent a shiver up my spine just from the power behind it.
Yet it had no obvious effect.
“Rhea.” The second call was stronger, more compelling, but still sweet. Not a command, but an enticing murmur worthy of a siren. It would have had me running to him, fighting for him, struggling through an army to reach him.
The body between us didn’t even appear to notice.
I swallowed, because Mircea wasn’t just a vampire; he was a first-level master, one of only a few hundred in existence. They ruled the vampire world through the six senates, governing bodies of immense power. And Mircea wasn’t just any old senator; he was second-in-command to the North American consul, and therefore one of the strongest vampires on earth.
And I felt every bit of that power when he tried again. “Rhea!”
It wasn’t a request now; it was an order, fierce and demanding. I felt it like thunder in the air around me, like an earthquake in the floor underneath me, like an electric shock radiating through my body, making me gasp. And tighten my grip enough that I thought I might break my own fingers.
That damn call would have brought me out of the grave.
It didn’t seem to be doing anything for her.
And we were running out of time—even I could see that. Rhea’s usually pale skin was alabaster, her dark lashes closed, her chest barely rising. Only her blood moved, slow but determined, seeping out of the terrible wound to stain her neck, like someone’s fingers had already done to her cheek.
She looked like a beautiful corpse.
“Maybe . . . maybe we need to try the other way,” I said desperately.
Mircea didn’t open his eyes. “What other way?”
“Seidr.” It was a spell my mother had cast on me during a trip back in time, and which I’d inadvertently passed to him. I didn’t fully understand it, which was why I hadn’t been able to remove it. And it hadn’t seemed like a priority, since it was just a communication spell.
But it was a powerful one.
More powerful than this, I thought, staring at the hazy dividing line still boiling between us.
But Mircea shook his head. “Cassie, this is Seidr. I tried reaching you the other way, the vampire way—”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t hear—”
“Nor should you have. You are not vampire. It was an instinctive reaction when your distress woke me. But it didn’t work, leaving me no choice but to try to access you through the Seidr link.”
“But—” I stared around again. “It wasn’t like this before.”
Seidr wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced, other than for being somewhere in the flesh. In fact, it was almost impossible to tell that you weren’t, except that people not in the link couldn’t see you. It was clear and perfect, not like a vision at all, while the room behind Mircea had become even less distinct than before, like it might dissolve at any second.
“It might,” Mircea said grimly, picking up on my thought. “Seidr is an expensive spell, powerwise—”
“But you have power,” I interrupted. “I can feel it, just sitting here—”
And then he opened his eyes, and I saw it, too. They were amber bright, startlingly vivid against the washed-out room around him, and flooded with power. “But you do not,” he said, “and you control the spell.”
“But I told you—I’m not doing anything!”
“But the spell still originates with you, Cassie. My people do not know how to do a Seidr spell. And remember what we were told? It was designed by the gods to talk to each other between worlds. But we are not gods. Even you are not, although you carry the power of one.”
“Power I can’t access right now,” I said, my lips turning cold as I finally understood. The Pythian power was virtually inexhaustible, but I wasn’t. And when I was too tired, I couldn’t channel it appropriately—if at all.
Mircea’s dark head inclined. “Without a good connection, I cannot give Rhea the strength she needs. I have it, but I have no way to get it to her.”
“Then send it to me! And I’ll—”
“That still requires a better connection than we have,” he said, patient with my panic. “Whether you or she is the intended recipient, I must have a stronger link. Otherwise, I can do little more than the witch already did, and slow down the process. But if you cannot strengthen the spell—”
“She’ll die anyway.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t qualify it, as a human might have, didn’t tell me it would be all right when we both knew it wouldn’t. He didn’t say anything else, for which I was grateful. He just gripped me tighter, although it was getting hard to feel his fingers anymore, like they were dissolving under mine.
And they probably were, because I was nearing exhaustion. I’d given everything I had left to that last shift, pulling a creature from another world, something I’d only very recently learned that I could do at all. And now I was powering the Seidr link, or trying to, but I wasn’t strong enough.
I never had been.
“You’ve done all you could,” Mircea said softly. “You need what strength you have left.”
He was right; I knew he was right. But it didn’t help. I lost people; I always lost people. My whole life that had been the one constant, the one fucking thing I could depend on, and I couldn’t—not again—