“Again? You just got back.”

“And because I cannot trust you not to undermine my servants in my absence—”

“I didn’t—”

“—or to stay out of trouble for even a few days, you are coming with me.”

Chapter Four

The family’s customized Boeing Business Jet wasn’t so much a plane as a flying hotel suite. It had glove leather seats the size of recliners in the dining area that were clustered around a shiny maple table. There was more maple on the walls and a luxurious coffee-and-cream-patterned carpet on the floor, and the bathroom boasted almost as much granite as the one at Dante’s.

Mircea was sitting on a cream leather sofa in the lounge area, looking perfectly at home in a silver-gray shirt and tie and a sleek black suit. I felt a little too informal in a pair of jean shorts and a blue and white striped tank top, but I hadn’t had a chance to ask where we were going before getting dressed. At least I was clean.

Mircea had been staring out the window instead of at the forty-seven-inch plasma TV on the wall, but he looked up when I returned from my exploration. “There’s an actual bed in the next room,” I informed him, before realizing how that sounded.

His lips did a slow curve. “We aren’t going that far.”

“Where are we going, exactly?”

“To Radu’s home, near Napa.”

I knew Mircea had a brother named Radu. I’d even met him on one very memorable occasion. But this seemed an odd time for a social call.

“It has been my experience that family business never waits for a convenient time,” he commented when I said as much. “Although this will be a quick visit. The Consul is expecting to receive her African and European counterparts in two days, and I must be there.”

“They’re coming here?”

“With their entourages.”

“But . . . I didn’t think consuls traveled much.” A consul was the head of a senate and as such was seen as too valuable to risk. Not that the ones I’d met had seemed in need of much protection. They were pretty scary all on their own.

“These are difficult times. The danger in not combining our strength is far greater than any risks required to do so. If we don’t align our interests for the war, we may soon find ourselves without any.”

Mircea sounded like maybe he’d made that argument more than a few times lately. “Is that a prepared speech?”

He ran a hand over his face, and for the first time, he looked tired. “Yes, but it’s not supposed to sound like one.”

A steward came in and set a silver tray with some covered chafing dishes on the coffee table. They turned out to be hiding eggs, bacon and thick-sliced French toast. Orange juice in a cut crystal carafe sat on the side, along with a small bowl of fresh peaches. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour or so, but my stomach grumbled anyway. I’d missed dinner by about four hundred years.

I ate some of everything, even the eggs, despite the pearl-gray caviar the steward had insisted on piling on top. Mircea had coffee. But as stimulants don’t work too well on vampires, I doubted it was doing much for him.

He resumed staring out the window while I ate, which alone would have told me that something was wrong. He was the reigning champion of idle chitchat. And that was with someone he didn’t know.

Everyone on the Senate had a job, what in a president’s cabinet would be called a portfolio. Mircea was the Consul’s chief negotiator, the go-to guy when people were being stubborn about giving her what she wanted. Normally, he was able to engineer miracles, bringing even the most obstinate types around to her way of thinking. But this time, she might have asked too much.

“Do you really think the other senates are going to get on board?” I asked.

“What do your cards say?” he countered, obviously not wanting to give odds.

The only tarot deck I had on me had been a present from an old friend who’d had them spelled as a joke. I didn’t know who had done the charm, but it was a damn good one. Doing a spread with them was a real pain, but they were eerily good at predicting the overall magical climate of a situation.

“It won’t be a normal reading,” I warned him, fishing them out. “They don’t shut up long enough.”

I’d barely gotten the words out when two cards popped up all on their own from the deck.

“The Emperor,” a light tenor proclaimed, while a deeper voice majestically intoned, “Death!” After that, it was a little hard to tell what they said, as they kept trying to talk over one another. They got progressively louder in the process until I finally managed to shove them back in the pack and snap it shut.

“The Emperor stands for strength, assertiveness, sometimes aggression,” I told Mircea, who was looking amused. “If referring to a person, it usually signifies a father or father figure, a leader or employer, or a king or despot. If to a situation, it indicates a time when bold moves are needed for success.”

“Should I worry that the Death card came up as well?” he asked lightly.

“Not really. It almost never means actual death. Normally it foretells the end of something—a dream, an ambition, a relationship . . .”

“For some reason I do not feel particularly reassured” was the dry response.

“In this case, it modifies the Emperor,” I explained. “The two cards are often associated with each other. An emperor only secures power through the death of his predecessor, he stays in power partially by the fear of death he inspires and his power ends with his own death.”

Mircea frowned. “We will shortly have three consuls together for the first time in centuries. Do not take this the wrong way, but I sincerely hope that your interpretation is not the correct one.”

So did I.

“What do you plan to do with the alliance, if you get it?” I asked.

“Defeat this god of yours. We cannot reach him—he isn’t in this world; a situation we hope continues—but his followers are. To eradicate the threat, we must remove them. All of them. But such an operation will require a combined effort.”

A combined effort. Why did I see a problem there? “If the other senates agree, who will lead them?” I asked slowly. “The Consul?”

Mircea sighed and rubbed his eyes again. “That is one of many sticking points. None of the consuls are accustomed to taking anyone else’s direction, nor have they been for hundreds of years.”

“So it’s your job to convince the world’s five most powerful vampires to take orders from her?”

“Essentially.”

“And I thought my job sucked.”

He smiled slightly. “In fact, I do not expect to persuade them all. The Consul has a reasonably good relationship with the European and African consuls, which is how we were able to convince them to visit. And I have some influence at the Chinese court. But we have little leverage with the Indian durbar and none at all in Latin America. If we bring even one of those around, it will surprise me.”

“But still, even three or four senates united has to be some kind of record, right?”

“If we can pull it off, yes. But half the senators hate the other half, in many cases because of slights hundreds of years old. Not to mention jealousies, rivalries and too-sensitive egos. Without any real proof of our allegations to offer them, I am not sanguine about our chances.”

“We’re at war. That seems pretty tangible to me!”

“But against whom? Apollo is not here. All they see are the same old enemies—the Black Circle and a few rogue vampires—with whom our senate has successfully dealt on previous occasions. As a result, they are extremely suspicious of the necessity for an alliance. I believe they suspect us of inventing the divine connection in an attempt to bring them under the Consul’s subjugation.”

I blinked, absorbing all that. I hadn’t seen much of Mircea in the last few days, but I’d assumed that I was just really good at avoiding him. Or, more likely, that he’d noticed the distinct lack of Cassie in his vicinity right away and hadn’t cared. But that had made me feel pathetically like a kicked puppy, so I’d focused on the fact that he had a perfectly good reason to be absent.

Mircea and I had both been affected by the love spell gone haywire, but he’d been hit by it far harder and, because of some time complications, had had to deal with it far longer than I had. I’d assumed he was taking some time to recover and had been glad of it, considering how he’d looked when I last saw him. But it didn’t sound like he’d been getting any rest at all. And now this family thing had cropped up, whatever it was.

“You should try to take it easy for a while,” I said, frowning. “You aren’t exactly at your best right now.”

One of those expressive eyebrows went up. “I beg your pardon?”

I sighed. That hadn’t come out right. “I mean, everybody thinks master vampires are pretty much invincible. Only that’s not true, is it? You can get tired and . . . and things.” I’d seen him hurt and vulnerable recently, and the image had stuck with me. It was yet another reason for keeping my distance.

I’d learned the lesson years ago—never let people get too close. Care, but not too much, because sooner or later, I was going to lose them. My mother’s attempt at a new life had ended in a car bomb arranged by a vampire who’d wanted a Seer at his court. She was too smart to take the job, but he thought her daughter would be perfect—if only I didn’t have pesky parents around to tell me what a jerk he was.

Tony, the vamp in question, had also tortured my childhood governess to death in a fit of pique, after I’d grown up enough to figure things out and flee from him. Others I’d left behind, either at Tony’s or while moving about from place to place, trying to stay one step ahead of the servants he had searching for me. But however it happened, sooner or later, I’d look around and the people who meant something were gone. I’d learned the hard way that keeping my distance made it easier for everyone in the end.