by Karen Chance
“A better world that may not have you in it! If you start a war now, it could kill off your ancestors or alter the world in ways that guarantee they never meet. You could be committing suicide!”
“Not if I stay in this time.”
“You’d stay here?” I asked incredulously.
“Unlike you, I risked my life to get here!” he snapped, suddenly angry. “Of course I’m staying!”
Agnes glanced at me. “Stop trying to reason with this joker. Go ahead and do it.”
“Do what?”
“Stop time. I’d take care of it, but I can’t pull that trick twice in a row. It takes too much energy.”
I fidgeted. “Uh, Agnes?”
“Your bad luck to get the mission with two Pythias!” she said with a smirk. The mage began to look a little worried.
I felt the muscles knot around my spine again. Of course, that may have been from the cuffs. “Um, there’s . . . sort of a problem.”
“What problem? You’ve done it before, right?” she demanded.
“Well, yeah. But it all happened sort of fast, and I’m not sure exactly—”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know how!”
She was glaring at me, so I glared right back. “Hello! No training, remember? That’s why I’m here!”
“That’s why you’re useless!” she yelled, poking me in the shoulder with the gun. Her expression was pretty fierce, but her head was doing some weird wobbly thing, like her neck was broken. I stared at her for a heartbeat before realizing that she was nodding at the mage’s little vial collection. Oh, great.
She poked me again, this time in the stomach, and it hurt. I stumbled away from her, moving a few steps farther into the room. “Oh, so what? I can’t perform on cue so you’re going to shoot me? Is that how this works?”
“Maybe I will,” she said furiously. “A Pythia who can’t do anything is no help to anyone. The people in your time would probably thank me.”
She had no idea. I retreated a few more steps, almost within arm’s reach of the vials. “You can’t kill a Pythia or her designated heir, or the power won’t go to you,” I reminded her. “Even I know that much!”
“News flash, kiddo,” she said, aiming for my head. “I already have it!”
Agnes let off a round and I screamed and ducked, only half acting the terror thing. I lurched into the barrel, tipping it over and scattering vials everywhere. The mage cursed and leveled his gun at me, but Agnes picked up Fawkes’ fallen sword and chucked it at him. He instinctively ducked and fell backward off his seat.
I dropped to the floor, trying to feel around behind me with tightly bound hands. My fingers touched two small vials and I grabbed them. I couldn’t see them, but it didn’t matter; I wouldn’t have known what they were anyway. I stared over my shoulder and, as soon as the mage popped his head up, I flipped them at him.
The first burst against his shields in a scattering of dry orange powder and didn’t appear to have any effect. But the second, a blue liquid, bit a chunk out of his shields. I started looking for more of those while Agnes kept alternating gunfire with throwing things: a wooden footstool, a burnt-out torch and a dead rat all sailed past my face to go splat against the mage’s shields.
I flinched back from the rat, and then I saw it—another blue vial, nestled up against the bottom of a barrel. I crouched awkwardly, scrabbling around on the grimy floor, and at last my fingers closed over it. I didn’t wait for the mage to pop back up this time, just chucked it over the pile of casks.
For once, my aim must have been pretty good. He screamed and shot out of the hedge of barrels like he was on fire. He sprinted past me, shedding sparks in his wake and—Oh, crap. “He’s on fire!” I screamed.
Agnes tripped him up and he went sprawling just outside the door. She sat on his butt and clocked him upside the head with her gun. He collapsed like a sack of sand.
“You wanted a hint,” she panted, batting out the flames on his back. “Here it is. You’re clairvoyant. Use your gift.”
I waited a few seconds, but she didn’t say anything else. “That’s it? That’s your big hint?”
“What did you expect?”
“Something else! Something more! There has to be . . . I don’t know, some kind of trick to it!”
“You’re the trick,” she told me, retrieving his cuffs. “Why do you think clairvoyants are chosen as Pythias? If anyone could do it, these morons wouldn’t screw things up every time they try to ‘improve’ things. They can’t see what effect their actions will have; they have to guess. We can know.”
A headache started to pound behind my eyes. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been counting on Agnes to help me until this minute, when she refused. “Maybe you can know,” I told her. “My gift doesn’t work like that. Some days, it doesn’t work at all!”
“Maybe you need to exercise it a little more. And to answer your earlier question, fiddling with the time stream usually causes more problems than it solves. Trust me on that one.”
“So that’s it?” I asked furiously. “That’s what you have for me? Don’t mess with time and trust my gift?”
“That’s all you really need.” Agnes dragged the mage’s hands behind his back and clicked the cuffs on. Once he was secure, she looked up at me, and for the first time, her gaze held a flicker of compassion. “Your power will work with your natural ability, training it—and you—over time. Eventually, you will learn what you need to know.”
“If it was that easy, you wouldn’t spend decades training a successor!” I said quickly before she could shift out on me.
“I never said it was easy. Nothing about this job is. I said you will learn.”
“And what if I don’t last that long?!” I screamed, but Agnes was already gone.
Chapter Three
I arrived back at Dante’s, Vegas’ hell-themed casino and my current hideout, exhausted, filthy and steaming. The worst part was, I’d gotten exactly zip out of it. I might be the world’s chief clairvoyant, but my power didn’t seem to know that. It came and went, ebbing and flowing like the tide, but never on such a precise schedule. And that meant I couldn’t do visions on demand. I couldn’t choose what I saw and what I didn’t. I wasn’t that strong and I never had been.
Despite the lurid theme of the casino, the penthouse was sleek, Scandinavian and contemporary, with a soft blue and gray color scheme that I usually found soothing. It wasn’t working so well today. That was doubly true when I walked into the living room and was immediately accosted by a couple of half-crazed thugs. I’d have been worried, except that they were mine. Sort of.
Marco, the one weaving a quarter through his fingers as he surveyed me, was six foot six with a twenty-inch neck. The guy made dump trucks look petite. The fact that he was a vampire was almost irrelevant.
I didn’t know the other guy, but that wasn’t unusual. Marco’s partners constantly changed, but they were always vamps armed to the teeth. This one was no exception and looked enough like Marco—slicked-back dark hair, barrel chest and tree trunk legs—that they might have been related. Of course, they just as easily might not. That description fit almost every babysitter I’d had in the last three days.
“What’s the deal here?” Marco asked, his voice thick with muscle. “You said you was going for a fitting. That you had to get naked for this designer guy, so we might as well stay here since you wasn’t letting us in the room anyway. You said you was just going downstairs. That you’d be right back.”
“I don’t have time for this,” I told him. I ached pretty much everywhere, except for my shoulders, which had stopped screaming and started going numb. It was making me think about lack of blood flow and gangrene. “Can you get me out of these cuffs?”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” He made a savage gesture, and the quarter sailed through the open balcony doors and took out a window on the next building. It made me jump, since Marco had so far shown no emotion whatsoever. “As soon as you tell me wh
at’s going on. Because I’m thinking we got a communication problem, you and me.”
“You took advantage of our trust,” his partner added in a high-pitched squeak.
“What’s going on is that I need to get out of these cuffs and into a bath!” I snapped, my temper hanging by a thread. “Mircea is coming—”
“Yeah. I know,” Marco said tightly. “The front desk called to say he’s on his way up.”
“He’s on his way now? Why?”
“You have a date.”
“Appointment. And that’s not until two a.m.!” I whirled, looking for a clock, but of course I didn’t find one. Clocks made you think about bedtime and bath time and dinner-time instead of gambling the night away in blissful ignorance. The casino didn’t like clocks.
“It’s five to two,” Marco informed me, shoving his hairy wrist in my face. “You’ve been gone all night.”
Shit.
“You want to get me killed, is that it?” he demanded. “I piss you off somehow I don’t remember? You working out some kinda grudge?”
“No! I . . . just lost track of time. I was busy.” In fact, I wasn’t all that great at timing my shifts yet. I’d planned to come back a few minutes after I left, in which case I wouldn’t have had to worry about explaining things to the deadly duo. Not that I should have had to do so in the first place.
Marco scraped something gray and hairy that was absolutely not smashed rat off my shoulder. “Doing what? Dumpster diving?”
I counted to ten and reminded myself not to overreact. The muscle twins were only doing what they’d been told. Getting rid of them was going to require talking with the one who’d sent them, and even that wasn’t likely to work. Because their master also considered himself mine, and he liked to keep an eye on his property.
Mircea Basarab had been born a nobleman in fifteenth-century Romania, when one’s woman was almost as prized a possession as one’s horse. They were also treated about the same: dressed up and shown off on important occasions, and petted and pampered and kept under careful watch the rest of the time. And although he had since modernized his wardrobe, his vocabulary and his job description, his attitude toward women was remarkably constant.
Not that I was his woman, as I’d mentioned several times. By coincidence, it was the same number he hadn’t been listening. I somehow had the feeling that something similar would happen if I brought up getting rid of Marco and friend. For someone who could hear a pin drop three rooms away, Mircea could be amazingly deaf.
It wasn’t that I objected to the idea of protection—quite the opposite, in fact. Far too many people had my name on their to-do-nasty-things-to list. But while vampires are formidable opponents—especially the masters, which judging by the power he was leaking all over the place, Marco definitely was—they tend not to perform so well against certain kinds of opponents. Like revenge-minded ancient deities. For what I was facing, I needed something a little more subtle with a lot more punch. Not that I had any idea what that was yet.
I heard the elevator outside the penthouse ding and went into panic mode. I fled to the bedroom, followed closely by Marco. His buddy must’ve remained in the living room to greet the master—and hopefully to stall him.
“Tell him I’m not up yet,” I said, trying to wriggle under the bedclothes.
Marco shook his head. “That ain’t gonna work. You knew he was coming. He’s gonna expect you to talk. He’s gonna expect some quality time. And if there’s cuffs involved, he’s gonna expect them to be his.”
I shut my eyes, trying hard not to think about Mircea and handcuffs. And got an inspiration. “The bathroom. Hurry!”
We ran into the gray and white opulence of the adjoining bath and I slammed the door. “Quick! Fill the tub. And get me out of these cuffs!”
Marco didn’t ask questions, just started hot water flowing into the huge soaking tub and threw in half a container of bath salts. Bubbles foamed up everywhere as he bent to examine the restraints. After a few seconds, he said a bad word. “These are magical cuffs,” he told me so softly I could hardly understand him over the rushing water. I guess he was worried about vampire hearing. “They ain’t gonna come off easy. We’re gonna need a mage.”
Pritkin would have normally been my first choice, but he already considered my intelligence to be sadly underutilized. If he saw me like this, I’d never hear the end of it. Not to mention that he’d demand to know where I’d been, and I hadn’t had time to come up with a good lie yet.
“Find Francoise,” I whispered. She was a witch and a good friend. There was an outside chance she wouldn’t laugh at me. “And get my bra off, fast!”
Marco shied back, and for the first time an expression broke through that tough demeanor. It was terror. “You’re cute, but you’re the master’s woman. And ain’t no woman alive worth that kind of—”
“I’m not propositioning you!” I hissed. “I need to be in that tub with my cuffs hidden under the bubbles until you get back, in case Mircea pokes his head around the door. And I can’t wear a bra and pull that off!”
“Then add more bubbles or something, because ain’t no way in hell—”
“Help me out here, Marco. Unless you want him to know you lost track of me for most of the night?” Truth be told, I wasn’t thrilled with that idea myself. Mircea was already of the opinion that I should be hidden away somewhere for my own protection, and I didn’t need anything adding fuel to the fire. The Pythia’s power wasn’t absolute, and he was damn tricky.
“I’m still not ripping your bra off,” Marco said stubbornly.
“I am pleased to hear it,” a voice said from the doorway.
Marco spun in a move too fast to see and went dead white. I looked past him and found myself staring into a familiar face. One with a full-lipped mouth curved enough to be almost feminine that contrasted starkly with strong, masculine features. Mircea.
“It’s not Marco’s fault,” I said quickly, because a vampire who disobeyed his master usually met a very serious fate.
“Not entirely,” Mircea agreed. His voice was calm, but his cheeks were flushed and a pulse throbbed at his temple. He looked to be in the middle of a slow-burning, very tightly controlled freak-out. And that really wasn’t good. Mircea’s iron control was legendary, although a few incidents in the recent past had shaken it somewhat.
Come to think of it, most of them had involved me.
“Out,” Mircea said, and Marco didn’t need to be told twice.
I was on his heels until a heavy hand descended on my shoulder, right over the suspicious stain. I caught sight of myself in the rapidly fogging mirror, and suddenly it was all too much. “I have fish guts in my hair,” I said.
“I can see that.”
“And I think there may be r-rat,” I admitted tearfully.
Mircea studied me for a long moment and then relief softened his grim expression and he let out a sigh. “I am more concerned about the gunpowder,” he said, pulling me in.
“Most of it didn’t blow up,” I told him, trying to pull back so that the God-knew-what clinging to my sweat-streaked upper body didn’t stain his silk shirt or drop onto his Italian loafers.
“Good to know,” he said calmly before drawing me into a fierce embrace. Mircea kissed like he wanted to live in my skin, slow and thorough, with teeth and tongue, like he never ever wanted to stop. Like he was afraid.
He took a second longer than me to open his lids. When he did, I was confronted with eyes that had gone bright amber. They’re usually a rich brown, changing colors only when his power is surging. From a distance, it’s impressive; this close, it was dazzling.
The rest of the package wasn’t too shabby, either. His hair was mahogany and below shoulder length, although it was hard to tell because it was always pulled back into a slim gold clip at his neck. Well, almost always. The few times I’d seen it in disarray flashed across my mind unexpectedly and heated my cheeks.
Despite close contact with me, his clothes wer
e dirt free and as usual were showcasing the sheer expense of restraint. Today’s outfit consisted of a long-sleeved shirt striped in black on black and black slacks. The clothes were so casually elegant that I immediately wanted to pull them out of shape. Of course, the body underneath might have had something to do with that.
Mircea’s fingers unerringly found the gash in the back of my jeans. They slid carefully over the small wound below and his lips tightened, but I didn’t get a demand for information. I hadn’t really expected one; Mircea was subtler than that. “We’ve been searching for you for hours” was his only comment.
“But Marco said he didn’t tell you—”
“An oversight that will never reoccur.”
Uh-oh.
Master vampires protected their families, and in return they received unquestioning obedience. Most of their servants were physically unable to disobey, with the only exceptions being those who reached master status themselves. But even in their case, going against a direct command was extremely difficult, especially when they served one of the few first-level masters in the world. Marco must have been really strong to be able to flout Mircea’s orders.
And now he was in trouble because he’d covered for me.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, worried.
“Discipline my servant.” His usually mellow voice was suddenly flat and hard.
“Mircea . . .”
“Do you know what some of our enemies could have done to you in five hours, Cassie?” His fingers tightened fractionally on my skin. “I do. I’ve spent all night with the possible scenarios running through my mind.”
“He didn’t know I’d left the hotel. I told him that I was—”
“He knew.”
“How? And if Marco didn’t tell you I was missing, how did you know?”
He didn’t answer, just leaned over and turned off the tap. A mountain of feathery white bubbles had foamed over the side of the bath and spilled onto the marble tiles, making the floor even slipperier than usual. They didn’t seem to bother Mircea, who sat on the side of the tub to examine the cuffs.