Tempt the Stars (2 page)

It wasn’t just that the farmhouse’s previous owners had met a messy end. This place had started out as an Indian burial mound long before anybody ever built on it, and after that had been a battlefield in the Revolutionary War. And then there were the various rivals Tony had dragged back through the years, most of whom had ended up never leaving. And the vengeful spirits that had followed a few of the vamps home, wanting a little post-carnage payback. The final result was basically ghost central, with the glowing trails they left so thick on the floor and walls and ceiling that the whole room pulsed neon.

“You know the guys around here hate other ghosts,” Billy said, whipping his head around at some sound I couldn’t hear. “Like, really, really hate them!”

“This is supposed to be sacred ground,” I pointed out. “The original owners didn’t like the newbies, and they’ve been battling it out ever since.”

“Yeah, well, they can battle it out without me,” Billy said. “I’m done.” And he started to disappear back into his necklace, which, since he haunted it, was neutral ground.

At least he did until I hauled him back out again.

“Laura won’t hurt you,” I said, wrestling him for control. “She’s one of the sweetest ghosts I ever met. She just likes to play.”

“Yeah, I bet. With my bones, if I had any!”

“She isn’t like that!”

“Sure. ’Cause when the innocent little girl shows up in a horror flick, it’s always a
good
thing!”

“This isn’t a movie!” I told him, and wrenched the necklace back.

“Okay. Okay, sure. She’s fine. She’s wonderful. But what about the others?”

He had a point. The house was a war zone the humans never saw, as generations of spirits made and broke alliances, chased and occasionally cannibalized one another, and generally continued in death the battles they’d fought in life. And like in battles everywhere, the weak didn’t survive for long.

“I don’t want you to risk yourself,” I told him honestly. “Just take a look around; see if she’ll talk to you. You know what I need.”

“Yeah, your head examined!” Billy snapped. “She’s a
ghost
—it’s not like she’s going anywhere. You could find her in our own time, without the risk—”

“Don’t you think I thought of that?” I hissed. “The house is empty in our time. Nobody trusts Tony’s people—”

“Can’t imagine why,” Billy said sarcastically.

“—so they’ve been portioned out to other houses where they can be watched. Ever since he turned traitor, this place has stood empty. And without human energy to feed off of—”

“Ghosts go into hibernation mode,” he finished for me.

He ought to know; he was as active as he was only because I let him draw energy from me. Other ghosts did the same, on a much smaller scale, from anybody intruding into their territory, because humans shed living energy all the time, like skin cells. That was why ghost sightings were usually reported in cemeteries or old houses. It wasn’t just because their bodies often ended up there. It was because ghosts who originated elsewhere had a much harder time feeding enough to stay active.

“I can’t find her at Tony’s in our day,” I told him. “And every time I try going back in time alone, I almost get caught. This may be my only chance.” He looked like he wanted to argue, which Billy could do every bit as long as Laura could hide. But I didn’t have time for that, either. “Billy,
please
. I don’t know what else to do!”

He scowled. “That’s not fair.”

And it really wasn’t. We sniped and argued and bitched at each other all the time, worse than an old married couple. And that was okay; that was standard in the families both of us had grown up in. But we didn’t handle the softer emotions so well, because we hadn’t encountered them too often.

Billy had been part of a raucous family of ten kids, and while I got the impression that his parents had been affectionate to a degree, there had been only so much to go around. And he’d often been lost in the shuffle. And as for me . . 

Well, growing up at Tony’s had been a lot of things, but affectionate wasn’t really one of them.

As a result, both of us preferred to stand aloof from the softer stuff, or to ignore it entirely. So yeah, teary-eyed pleading was kind of cheating. But I was desperate.

Billy made a disgusted sound after a minute and looked heavenward. Why, I don’t know. He’d been actively avoiding it for something like a hundred and fifty years now. Then he took off without another word, but with an irritated flourish that let me know that I’d pay for this eventually.

That was okay. That was fine.

I’d worry about the fallout later.

Right now I just needed to
find her
.

“Come on,” I wheedled, trying to sound calm and sweet. “I’m out of practice.”

Nothing. Just a dark, echoing room, crossed and crisscrossed by ghost trails. So thick and so confusing that the Sight was no damned good at all.

“Damn it, Laura!”

And, finally, someone giggled.

It was hard to tell where it came from over the sound of the wind and rain, but patience had never been Laura’s strong suit. A second later, there was an extra flutter next to the long sheers by a window. I lunged as she ran, too relieved to be careful, and slipped on a rug. And ended up falling straight through her.

“No fair fading!” I gasped, hitting hardwood.

She laughed, skipping merrily through the half-open door and into the hall as I scrambled to my feet. But she nodded. “No fading.”

“No foolies?” I asked, following her. Because otherwise, it didn’t count.

“No foolies,” she agreed solemnly.

And then she stepped through a wall.

Technically that wasn’t fading. It was also her patented get-out-of-jail-free card, since the child I had been couldn’t follow. It was why she’d won, nine times out of ten, when we played this game. But I’d learned a few things since the last time, and a second later, I stepped through the wall after her.

Well, not exactly stepped. I shifted, moving spatially through the power of my office, just like I’d moved through time to get us here. It was a good trick, as Laura’s face showed when I rematerialized a couple feet behind her. “How’d you do that?” she asked, eyes bright.

And then she took off again, vanishing through a bookcase.

I went after her, trying to remember the layout of these rooms as I ran. Because unlike Laura, I do not go incorporeal when I shift. I just pop out of one place and into another, and popping into the middle of a chair or a table wouldn’t be fun. So my nerves were taking a beating even before I pelted across another room, shifted through a fireplace, barely missed skewering myself on a poker, and darted out into the hall—

And caught sight of Laura skipping straight through the middle of a couple of men headed this way.

Or no, I thought, suddenly frozen.

Not men.

At least, not anymore.

They were coming down a gorgeous old spiral staircase, one of the house’s best features. It was made out of oak but had been burnished to a dark shine by the oil on thousands of hands over hundreds of years. But it didn’t hold a candle to the vampires using it. Well, one of them, anyway.

Mircea Basarab, Tony’s elegant master, would have probably made my heart race in plain old jeans. I say probably because I’d never seen him in anything so plebian, and tonight was no exception. A shimmering fall of midnight hair fell onto shoulders encased in a tuxedo so perfectly tailored he might have just stepped out of a photo shoot. The hair was actually mahogany brown, not black as it looked in the low light, but the broad shoulders, trim waist, and air of barely leashed power were no illusions.

Still, he looked a little out of place in a house where his host was lucky if he remembered to keep his tie out of the soup. Since Mircea never looked out of place anywhere, I assumed there was a reason he had decided to go all out. Probably the same one that had Tony forcing a family on a strict diet to sit through a feast every night.

For a second I wished I could have seen Tony, his three-hundred-plus pounds stuffed into a penguin suit, for once as supremely uncomfortable at one of his dinners as everyone else. But I wasn’t going to. Because the vamp at Mircea’s side, the one with the dark curly hair and the goatee and the deceptively kind brown eyes, wasn’t Tony.

Shit,
I thought viciously, and backed swiftly into the room I’d just run out of.

Which was absolutely the right thing to do.

At least it was until they followed me in.

In a panic, I shifted—also the right move, since there were no other doors out of there. But shifting in a split second in a panic isn’t easy, and this time I didn’t manage it. Or, rather, I didn’t
completely
manage it.

Son of a bitch!
I thought desperately, finding myself trapped in the fireplace as two high-level master vampires walked into the room.

I tried shifting again but went nowhere, almost as if I was stuck. Which might have been because I was, I realized a second later. Half of my body was in the next room, having shifted back through the fireplace all nice and proper. But the other half . . 

The other half was still on this side of the wall, protruding through the blackened old bricks from just above the waist.

I twisted and turned desperately but went nowhere. And then I tried to shift again in a frenzy. But half a dozen attempts in quick succession only left me dizzy and with a serious desire to throw up. And no freer than I’d ever been.

A glance down at my waist showed that at least I hadn’t been cut in two, like an inept magician’s assistant, which is what I’d always assumed happened in these cases. Instead, an annoyed-looking bunch of bricks had puddled up around me in a working ring, like commuters jostling for space they weren’t finding. And giving off the subtle grind of stone on stone in the process.

I freaked a little at that, because if it was audible to my ears, it probably sounded like an avalanche to the vamps. But when I looked up, only the fireplace screen was looking back at me. Literally, since it was one of those fake Tiffany things with a hundred colors and a bunch of bug-eyed insects all over it.

But there were no vamps, bug-eyed or otherwise. Amazingly, they hadn’t noticed my struggles, any more than they had my heartbeat or my panicked breathing. Either the darkness in the big old fireplace or the tackiness of the screen had shielded me from sight. And I guessed the storm had covered any noise I made, or else I was still barely inside the sound shield Jonas had laid. He’d linked it into a section of the house wards, and I wasn’t sure how far that extended.

Not that it mattered. Because sight and hearing aren’t the only senses that are stronger for a vamp. And despite the temperature, I was sweating like a—

“It’s the girl, isn’t it?” the second vampire said abruptly.

I stopped struggling for a second, when it felt like even my heartbeat froze.

“Cassandra.” Mircea nodded, handing his companion a drink. “She plays all over the house.”

And then it started back up again.

Of course the house smelled like me, I thought dizzily. Of course it did. My younger self slept at the other end of the hall; why wouldn’t it?

I swallowed and wondered, not for the first time, what the life expectancy was for Pythias.

Why didn’t I think it was very high?

“No. I meant, that’s why you’re here,” the other vamp said, dark eyes narrowed in suspicion.

That wasn’t unusual. He could be as charming as any of his kind, but unlike with Mircea, it wasn’t his job. His name was Kit Marlowe and he’d long ago transitioned from spying for Her Majesty, queen of England, to doing the same for another queen, this one in charge of the dreaded North American Vampire Senate.

Well, dreaded to most people, including most U. S. vamps because it served as their less-than-benevolent government. But for me, it didn’t seem quite so scary anymore, maybe because I was dating one of the senators. The one who was currently looking with amused tolerance at Kit.

“What gave you that idea?”

“Don’t be coy. I’ve seen you put less effort into charming countesses—”

“Who normally require little effort,” Mircea murmured, sipping brandy.

“—than into that child. ‘Why, isn’t that a pretty painting, Cassie? However did you do it?’” Marlowe mimicked.

“The colors were quite nice,” Mircea protested, lips quirking.

Kit didn’t look so amused.

“What is your interest?” he asked bluntly.

“She’s a charming child.”

“She’s a
seer
.” Marlowe’s eyes narrowed. “The real thing, by all accounts, but that is hardly enough to warrant camping out in the wilderness—”

“It is less than an hour to Philadelphia.”

“The
wilderness
,” Marlowe insisted, looking around disparagingly. “And in any case, if you wanted to see the blasted vamp, why not order him to your court? Why come here at all, much less for almost
a year
?”

“Ah. Is that what has your lady ordering you to check up on me?” Mircea asked, settling back into a dark red leather armchair. He still looked amused, although whether he actually was or not was anyone’s guess.

His companion remained standing, and tensed up slightly. “I needed to ask you about a number of—”

“Now who’s being coy?”

Marlowe dropped it. “Well, if she is curious, who can blame her? No one
does
this.”

“Many masters visit their servants.”

“Servants who live in Paris; servants who live in Rome. Not servants who live in the backwoods of Pennsylvania in a dump!” Marlowe gestured around, the small gold earring he wore in one ear flashing in a lightning burst. “What do you expect me to tell her?”

“That I am attending to family matters that do not concern her.”

“Oh yes. Yes, that will go over well,” Marlowe said sarcastically.

“It should. It’s the truth.”

“And you’re not going to offer any further explanation, any more details,” Marlowe said, prowling nearer to the fireplace.

“I don’t see why she would expect them,” Mircea commented as I started struggling again. “I am not a newborn who must be tended, and this has nothing to do with her.”

“Nothing?” Marlowe spun, just before he reached me. And just before he would have gotten close enough for a good look over the screen.

I swallowed hard.

I was twenty-four.

And I was already too old for this.

“That is what I said.”

Marlowe pounced. “Then the fact that her mother was Elizabeth O’Donnell, the Pythia’s former heir, is irrelevant, is it?”

Mircea’s head cocked, and his eyes narrowed slightly. “Now, I wonder. Is the mole in my family or Antonio’s?”

“I don’t need a mole,” Marlowe said shortly, and drank scotch.

“Ah, a listening device, then. And yes, it would be simple enough here. Antonio’s mages are not the best.”

“They’re shite,” Marlowe said bluntly, “and that isn’t the point. You have a line on a possible Pythia—”

“That’s rather reaching, wouldn’t you say?”

“No, I would not say! And you didn’t tell us!”

Marlowe’s tone was as accusatory as the words, but Mircea didn’t look concerned. “As yet, there is nothing to tell. Cassandra’s mother was heir to the Pythian throne at one time, yes, but she was removed—”

“But not for lack of ability! For consorting with that Roger Palmer character—”

“Whose capabilities are unknown.”

“He worked for your servant. You ought to know them well enough!”

“Yet, nonetheless, I do not.” Mircea’s tone was calm, but then, it always was. More tellingly, his eyes stayed brown. Marlowe wasn’t getting to him. “And as he and Elizabeth are now deceased, we may never do so. Leaving Cassandra’s talents in question.”

“Yet you decided to meet her anyway.”

“Would you not have?”

“And to gain her trust.”

“Only prudent.”

Marlowe crossed his arms. And even though I could no longer see his face, the set of his shoulders told a story all on its own. “Only prudent, if you had told us. Only prudent if you hadn’t shown, how shall we say, some persistent interest in the Pythian office before now.”

I’d been trying to get a hand on the ring of jostling bricks, to force the damned things open. Only to have them slide through my fingers as my head abruptly jerked up. And then even more abruptly jerked down again, when I felt someone’s hand on my butt.

That heart attack I’d been postponing for a few months now might have taken that moment to show up and say hi, except that the hand was not followed by a crushing blow or the sound of an alarm. But by a second hand on my other hip, and then by a sharp tug. My spine would have liquefied in relief, if it hadn’t been busy being pulled out of my body.

It had to be Jonas; one of Tony’s guys would have ripped me in two by now. Not that it didn’t feel like he was trying. And worst of all, he was making it hard to concentrate on what the vamps were saying.

And I wanted to hear this.

“How many gifts,” Marlowe asked, over the sound of grinding rock, “have you given through the years? How many visits have you made?”

“Not enough, apparently.” The tone was dry. “We remain as estranged from the seat of power as ever. If the consul would give up a bit of that stiff-necked pride and pay a visit herself, it might do more than any gift—”

“Do not take me for a fool, Mircea!” Marlowe said, striding forward and bending down, slapping his hands on both arms of Mircea’s chair. “I’ve known you too long! You’re the best ambassador among the senates. No one is questioning that. But you didn’t go in your senate capacity, did you? You went alone, quietly, with no retinue and with no mention in the senate records. You went for
you
, not for us, and I want to know—”

“And what I want,” Mircea said, his voice suddenly going flat, “is to know how you manage to run your department when all of your efforts appear to be occupied following me.”

“What do you expect?” Marlowe demanded, but he backed off slightly. “You’re her most powerful servant. Of course she is concerned at the thought of you allying yourself with a possible Pythia. It’s the sort of move that could put you in an inviolable position.” He hesitated, and then came out with it. “It’s the sort of move that could allow you to make a bid to replace her.”

“I have no such ambition,” Mircea said, more evenly.

“And if you did?” Marlowe asked pointedly. “What would you say then?”

“If you have already made up your mind to doubt me, why ask?”

“To give you a chance to explain.”

“Which I have done. You simply refuse to accept anything I say.”

“Because it doesn’t make sense! Do you really expect—”

I lost the thread of conversation again, because the stone around me suddenly heated up, and not like a rock on a sunny day. More like lava. Jonas gave a tremendous, wrenching jerk, and it felt almost like the bricks liquefied for a split second—

And then suddenly hardened again, leaving me trapped worse than before.

Way worse. Now my head and shoulders were sticking out, but my hands were stuck by my head like I’d been thrown into the stocks, and my chest was compressed to the point that it was hard to breathe. The stones went back to their former grind a second later, louder than ever, being right in my ear. And allowed me to catch a breath only when the ones directly underneath my chest turned just so.

Which they did about half as much as I needed.

“Urk,” I said, staring desperately at the sliver of Marlowe I could still see through the screen.

Hurry up, I thought, but not at Jonas. I could breathe, sort of. I was okay. I was going to be okay. Probably. And I wanted to hear—

“—control what you believe,” Mircea was saying. “I see many important people, including the leaders of other senates—”

“And yet
every
Pythia,” Marlowe said doggedly. “Before she was even crowned, in one case, receives a visit, and not in an official capacity—”

“Official visits are cold and formal. I do my best work in a more relaxed setting. I cannot charm anyone on behalf of the consul if I do not even know them.”

“And yet these visits do not appear to be working,” Marlowe pointed out.

“Do not appear to be working yet,” Mircea said, finishing his drink. “Every Pythia is different—”

“Including the one you visited before joining the senate?”

Unlike Marlowe’s other comments, it was said mildly, almost diffidently, a rapier strike instead of a bludgeon. And unlike the others, it landed. Mircea’s eyes flashed amber, bright enough to rival the lightning outside, and Marlowe took a quick step back.

“You have been busy,” Mircea hissed.

Marlowe blinked at him, as if he wasn’t used to hearing that tone, either. But he recovered fast. “You have to admit, it looks suspicious—”

“It would not have, had you not gone looking for it!”

“It’s my job to look for it. And I have a credible witness who saw you—”

“Paying a legitimate visit in broad daylight! Else you would have had no witness to worry you.”

Marlowe blinked again at the implication. But then forged ahead anyway. “I wouldn’t be worried if I knew why you were there. It could hardly have been on behalf of a consul you did not even know at the time.”

“I never said it was.”

“Then
why
?”

Yeah, I thought dizzily, why?

And then the stones started to heat up again.

No! I thought, kicking my legs, trying to get Jonas’ attention. Not yet!

And got smacked on the butt for my efforts.

Son of a—

Another jerk, and this time, I was up to my neck. Which would have been an improvement, except that now I couldn’t breathe at all. There was some agitated grasping going on in a way that would have been overly familiar if I hadn’t been about to suffocate. And either the moon had just gone behind a cloud or the room was starting to dim.

That wasn’t a great sign, and neither was the blood suddenly pounding in my ears, or the heart fluttering in my chest, or the damned moving bricks, which felt like they were trying to behead me. But the worst part was, I couldn’t
hear
.

But it looked like Mircea had recovered, and was back to doing what he always did, soothing frazzled nerves, calming ruffled feathers, getting people to listen. And Marlowe was. The dark eyes were still sharp and still guarded, but his stance had relaxed somewhat, and the intelligent face was thoughtful. He looked like he might be buying it.

Whatever it was, I thought angrily as darkness flooded my vision, making it impossible even to lip read. Not that I could have concentrated enough with the rocks around my neck suddenly going nuclear. I’d have screamed in pain if I’d had the breath, or flailed around had my arms not been trapped like the rest of me. Only that wasn’t true a second later, when strong hands grabbed me again, and pulled and yanked and
heaved
—

And thump.

And rattle and
crash
.