Keep it superficial, stay far enough away, and no one even noticed when you left.

“Is something wrong, dulceaƫă?”

“No.” I swallowed. “Nothing. I just wish . . .”

“Yes?”

“I wish you could take some time off,” I told him.

Mircea’s face still looked grave, but his eyes were smiling. “I’m afraid a vacation is out of the question at the moment.”

“Well, maybe you could think of something else that relaxes you.”

Amber sparked somewhere deep in his eyes. “A few things do come to mind.”

I gave him a look. “I mean, maybe you could work on something different for a while? They say a change is as good as a rest.”

The growing amber flecks seemed to hold the light and warm it. “I am always happy to experiment.” He tucked a stray curl behind my ear. “Did you have anything particular in mind?”

I licked suddenly dry lips, trying not to think about what five hundred years of experience could dream up. “N-not really.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to wing it.” He pressed me back against the sinfully soft couch cushions and kissed me. When his tongue touched mine, my brain suddenly started suggesting all sorts of interesting possibilities.

And then the captain came on the intercom to announce our successful landing. I looked around in surprise. I hadn’t even noticed the descent.

“We could stay here for a while,” someone who sounded a lot like me said breathlessly.

Mircea kissed me again, quickly this time, before getting up. “Tempting. But I have to go.”

“You mean, we have to go.”

“I brought you with me to keep you safe—not to put you in more danger.” He started to walk away, but I grabbed his sleeve, managing to put a few wrinkles in its perfect drape.

“Danger? I thought we were visiting your brother.”

“I am. You are staying here. Radu is having a few problems and I don’t wish you involved in them.”

“Maybe I can help,” I said, starting to get up. Only to find that I couldn’t.

I looked down to see a familiar silver bracelet tight around my wrist. I pulled on it, but it was securely fastened through the arm of the couch, caught on something inside the plush leather—the frame, by the feel of it. Damn it, I’d forgotten to ask for the cuffs back!

“Mircea!”

“This shouldn’t take long, and you will be well cared for until I return,” he said. And then he just walked out.

I yelled and rattled the cuffs loud enough to wake the dead, but nobody came to help me. I tried shifting and ended up on the tarmac outside the plane—still attached to the couch—in time to watch Mircea drive away. I didn’t know where Radu lived, so I couldn’t follow him. Not to mention that it was kind of hard to envision being of much use chained to a huge piece of furniture.

I shifted back onto the plane, fuming, and a ghost popped in. That wouldn’t normally require comment, as it happens to me all the time—one of the annoyances of being clairvoyant. But this was a little different since this ghost I knew.

Billy Joe was wearing the jaunty Stetson and the ruffled shirt he’d died in a century and a half ago. Normally, the shirt is a brilliant crimson that easily catches the eye. At the moment, it was a pale, faded color, like it had been left out on a wash line too long. It got that way only when his energy levels were close to bottoming out.

“Don’t start,” I told him before he could open his mouth. “I tried to find you before we left. I knew you needed a draw.” Billy and I had a long-standing arrangement in which I fed him extra energy and he fed me information. Neither of us ever got as much as we wanted out of the deal, but it was better than nothing.

“Damn right I need a draw, but that isn’t why I’m here.” He noticed my wrist and his frown changed to a smirk. “You and the vampire getting kinky?”

“He didn’t want me following him.”

“So he tied you up?” Billy laughed. “Did you even get any first?”

I glared at him. The skin of my wrist burned where Mircea had touched me, a fluid heat that spread through me and brought an answering flush to my cheeks. “Just because you have a habit of popping in on me at all times of the day and night doesn’t give you the right to—”

“Guess not,” he said, hiking an insubstantial butt cheek onto the sofa. “So get out of those and let’s go. You got an important meeting to make.”

“If I knew how to get out of them, I’d have already done it,” I said testily. “And what meeting?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Which one have you been trying to set up for the past three days?”

It took me a second to get it. Pritkin had been pestering the Circle to meet with me ever since Apollo entered the equation. But I hadn’t actually expected him to get anywhere. Once a member of the Circle himself, Pritkin had broken with them over his support of me. I’d assumed they wanted his head on the platter right beside mine.

“The Circle wants to meet? Since when?”

Billy rolled his eyes. “Since yesterday. Word came in shortly after you left to chase Agnes. Don’t you read your messages?”

“What messages? I didn’t get any messages!”

“Pritkin went by your place about a dozen times, but you were never there. So he started leaving notes with that huge guy.”

“Marco.”

“Yeah. That’s the one.”

“Marco didn’t give them to me.” Or even mention them—or Pritkin or the meeting. I was beginning to think that he was right. We had a communication problem.

Billy shrugged. “Mircea must have ordered him not to.”

I opened my mouth to say that Mircea wouldn’t do that but shut it again before the words got out. Who was I kidding? Mircea totally would.

“The Senate likes the idea of a Pythia under their control,” I said, working it out. “And if the Circle and I make up—”

“You might get a little too cozy,” Billy finished.

“So Mircea was delegated to get me out of the way before the meeting.” I felt my face flush, remembering that scene in front of the mirror. So I was too precious to lose, huh? Too important to him?

“Uh, Cass?” Billy was looking at me a little funny. “The meeting is at Dante’s—Pritkin insisted. Something about neutral ground. Anyway, we got less than an hour before the mages show up.”

I started to stand, only to be jerked back down again. “I’m kind of chained to a sofa,” I pointed out.

Billy grinned. “Bet Pritkin could get you loose.”

I sighed. Yeah, but I’d never live it down. “He’s in his room?” I asked resignedly.

“I think you’ll fit,” Billy said gleefully. “If we push.”

I sighed. Never. And shifted.

Like me, Pritkin had recently gotten an upgrade in accommodations. They were roomier than the old version, but to be on the safe side, I landed in the corridor outside. And my large leather accessory landed on top of Marco’s friend. He was a vampire and the sofa was built to be lightweight for air travel, so it didn’t hurt him. It didn’t make him too happy, though.

“Marco said you might show up,” he said, lifting it off and dumping it to the side. “He also said you wasn’t to be allowed to talk to the mage.”

My eyes narrowed. “I’ll talk to whomever I damn well please,” I told him, trying to drag the sofa around so I could knock on the door.

He put a foot on the nearest couch cushion and took out a cell phone. “She’s back,” he told it while I pulled and tugged and got nowhere. “Marco says I’m to take you upstairs,” I was informed.

“You and what army?” I grunted. “And get your foot off my sofa.”

The vamp regarded my leather appendage for a second and then looked toward the elevator. The thought process didn’t appear to be swift, but he did eventually arrive at the right conclusion—it wasn’t going to fit. “I’ll have to break it in two,” he said, grabbing the other end. “Sorry, but I’m sure the master will buy you another one.”

“It’s Mircea’s,” I said quickly. “It’s his sofa. And he’s really, really attached to it.”

The vamp looked suspicious. “To a sofa?”

“It’s a designer original, hand-dyed to coordinate with the rest of the furniture on his BBJ. You mess it up, and they’ll never get another one to match. It’ll stand out like a sore thumb. It’ll be embarrassing.”

We stood staring at each other for a long minute, and the vamp blinked first. “I don’t want to embarrass the master,” he said slowly, reaching for his cell phone. But he’d forgotten to put his foot back on the couch, so I gave a mighty heave and slid over within arm’s length of the door.

“Hey!” He was there in a heartbeat, with his hand on my arm. So I kicked the door instead of knocking. “You gotta go back upstairs. Marco said so!”

“Tell Marco to go to hell!”

“Trust me, I’m already there,” Marco informed me from the stairwell.

Damn it! I tried to kick the door again, but Marco grabbed the end of the sofa and dragged me back out of reach. “You’re coming with us. Deal with it,” he told me.

An elderly couple came out of the next room while we were standing there glaring at each other. The man was wearing a blue polo shirt and a pair of plaid shorts that started around his armpits and just brushed his knobby knees. The woman had on a Chippendales souvenir tee, a pair of bright red jogging shorts and matching Keds. They both looked about ninety.

“You’re gonna have to move your couch,” the old man said. “The missus and I gotta get to the elevator.”

“If you don’t get to the buffet early, the eggs get all dried up,” the woman agreed. “They should cook more eggs.”