AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Doesn’t he get it?” I demanded. “That’s the kind of attitude that forced me to leave in the first place!”
“Oh, he gets it,” Rico said. “He just doesn’t want it.”
“I don’t give a damn what he wants! He has to understand—”
“He understands that you’re twenty-four,” Jules told me, swiping his cigarette case back from his friend.
“What’s wrong with being twenty-four?”
“Nothing. Unless you’re dealing with a guy who’s well over a thousand.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Marco,” he confirmed, tapping a cigarette on top of the case. “Saw the fall of Rome, or so they say.”
“The fall of—” I stopped and stared. “Gladiators, Colosseum, guys in leather miniskirts—that Rome?”
“That would be the one.”
“I wouldn’t mention the miniskirts,” Rico advised. “Marco used to be in the army.”
“Have to wonder how anyone took them seriously,” Jules said.
“I think if you laughed, they cut your balls off.”
Jules paused, halfway through lighting his cigarette, the flame dancing in wide blue eyes. “That would do it.”
“But . . . but why is he working for Mircea?” I asked. Vamps that old were Senate members or headed up powerful courts. They didn’t work for masters a third their age.
Jules shrugged. “You’d have to ask him; I was always afraid to. But you can see why he doesn’t react well when someone he considers a child—”
“A fetus,” Rico put in.
“—ignores an order.”
“An order he had no right to give!” I said heatedly.
“Technically, the master gave it—”
“Who also has no right to order me around!”
“I like this one,” Rico said. “Feisty.”
I shot him a glare, which had no effect, except to widen his smile.
“I guess Marco figures, if he still has to take orders after all this time, why not you?” Fred asked.
“Because I’m Pythia,” I said, striving for patience.
He blinked at me, obviously confused. “And?”
I threw my hands up.
Jules frowned at him, but not on my account. “Stop it.”
“It’s driving me nuts,” the little vamp said, tugging at the polyester monstrosity around his neck.
“You’ll get used to it.”
