Karen Chance - Masks

Mircea’s trip, on the other hand, had been somewhat different.

I heard things didn’t go as you’d hoped back home, Bezio wrote. I know there’s nothing that can ease pain like that—there wasn’t for me when I heard that my Jacopa had passed. But I hope you know you always have a home with us. I also hope you find—how did you put it? Not just a reason not to die, but a reason to live.

Or something like that. I don’t have your gift for words. But I’ve thought about what you said, and I think you were right. There is a diff —

A cry broke through his thoughts before he could finish Bezio’s letter. Mircea got up, moving swiftly to his daughter’s small room. And found her on the floor, in front of the cat basket, looking with concern at three tiny, mewling pink things squirming around in front of their proud mother.

Mircea thought it might be the blood worrying her, but apparently, it was something else.

“Look!” Dorina said, turning to him fearfully. “There’s something wrong with them!”

Mircea squatted on the floor beside the basket. “They look all right to me.”

“But . . . they’re all red. And wrinkly. And they haven’t any ears—”

“What did you expect? Sweet, fluffy kittens?”

“Yes!”

“That comes later. Along with the ears.”

“Then . . . they’ll be all right?” Worried dark eyes met his.

“Yes.”

She sagged back against him as the mother cat began cleaning up her brood. “Oh, good. I thought—”

“What did you think?”

She swallowed. “That they might be made wrong. Like me.”

Mircea pulled her back against him. “You were made perfectly. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

She sent him one of those looks, over her shoulder. The one that always made her look older than her few years. “Mother was human, before she died. You’re a vampire. You know what that makes me.”

“Yes,” Mircea said, hugging her fiercely. “It makes you my daughter.”

And my reason.