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“Bet you wish you hadn’t had that gourmet stuff now.”
Gleaming dark eyes regarded me over his wineglass. “You didn’t give me a choice. And I’m surprised you don’t care for that ‘gourmet stuff.’ I recall Antonio having quite a good chef.”
Yeah, till he ate him, I didn’t say, because we were having a nice dinner. “How did you end up changing that bastard anyway?” I asked instead. “I always wondered. I mean, he was just a chicken farmer, right?”
Mircea shook his head. “Not when I met him. He had inherited the farm, such as it was, when his father died, and used the money from its sale to move to Florence. There he became . . . I suppose you would call him the strongman for a small money-lending operation.”
“A thug, in other words.”
“As you say. But a thug with ambition. He eventually gained control of the business—”
“Imagine that.”
“—and under his hand, it grew considerably in size. By the time I met him, he was a man of some means.”
“That doesn’t explain why you changed him.”
“You might say that we had . . . complementary problems,” he said, refilling his glass with the red wine he preferred. He tilted the bottle at me.
I shook my head. “I’ll stay with this one. And what kind of problems?”
“In Tony’s case, it was the plague. The Black Death cut a swath through Italy every few decades in those days, and at the time it was raging in Florence. There was no cure; the only way to combat it was to flee. And Antonio tried, moving himself and his household to the country as soon as he heard.”
“But he got it anyway?”
“No, but several of his servants did and he was afraid he would be next. He therefore moved again—and again and again. But everywhere he went, it was already there or it broke out shortly afterward. He told me it was as if the plague was following him.”
I nodded. That sounded like Tony. He was paranoid even when he didn’t have a reason.
“He finally ended up in Venice, hoping to get a ship to somewhere without the disease. But he was told by the sailors he talked to that it was everywhere that year.”
“And he started freaking out.”
Mircea smiled. “To put it mildly. He was in a taverna, drowning his sorrows, when I met him. At the time, I was in dire straits myself—financially speaking. I had left my home with little some years before and had . . . someone with me for whom I was responsible. I needed money for living expenses, and also to allow me to avoid a certain first-level master who had decided to add me to her family—by force if necessary. She had tracked me to Venice, and I had narrowly avoided her twice in as many days. I wanted to get away; Antonio wanted to avoid the plague. We struck a deal.”
“He gave you money and you Changed him,” I guessed. “Because vamps can’t get the disease.”
“Yes.” Mircea swirled his wine around. “He was the first child I ever made. It came as . . . quite a shock . . . when he threw in his lot with our enemies.”
“You thought him better than that?” I asked incredulously.
Mircea snorted. “I thought him smarter than that. I also thought it out of character.”
“Because it was a gamble.”
He nodded. “And Antonio doesn’t. Not with his neck, at any rate.”
I’d thought as much myself, more than once. Tony only liked to gamble when it was a sure thing. It made me wonder what he knew that we didn’t.
Mircea finished his meal and then lay on his side, a hand under his head and the other toying with his wineglass. “Why the sudden interest?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking about my parents and how Tony is probably the only person who could tell me much about them.”
“What about the venerable mage Marsden? He must know something about the former Pythian heir. I would be surprised if he hadn’t met her on occasion.”
“He did. But all he could tell me was that she was a charming young woman. As far as facts go, all I got was the standard bio stuff they’d give to a newspaper or something. Born Elizabeth O’Donnell, adopted by the Pythian Court at age fourteen, named the heir at age thirty-three. Ran away with Ragnar, aka Roger Palmer, my disreputable father, for reasons unknown, at age thirty-four. Died five years later in a car bomb set by Tony the Bastard. The End.”
“That is . . . somewhat terse,” Mircea agreed. “Surprisingly so, considering the Circle’s intelligence network.”
