My old governess had had the deck spelled to report on the overall spiritual climate of a situation. It was supposed to be a joke, but over the years I’d noticed that its predictions were depressingly accurate. That was a problem because, no matter how I tried to twist it, the Magician Ill-Dignified was never a good thing.

You know the guys with the three beans under the shells at carnivals? The ones with the stuffed animals that are going all moldy because they never actually give any away? The Magician Ill-Dignified is a lot like that: a salesman or con man who can make you believe almost anything. You can avoid him, but you have to be on your toes, because he will not seem like a deceiver.

The card was safely tucked away, but an image of the tiny magician’s face still seemed to hover in front of me. And my imagination was giving him Pritkin’s bright green eyes. I didn’t know how far he was willing to go to ensure that the mystery spell stayed lost. And if Mircea died, my biggest reason for finding the Codex died with him. Maybe Pritkin didn’t view a single death as too high a price to pay to keep the secret.

Especially if that life was a vampire’s.

Chapter 4

Rafe watched me in silence for a moment, then cleared his throat. “There may be an alternative.”

I waited, but he just sat there, his jaw working but no sound coming out. “I’m listening.”

“I can’t tell you,” he finally said, sounding defeated. Apparently Mircea’s command hadn’t been so flawed after all.

I glanced at Billy, who sighed and shrugged. He doesn’t like possessions, but they do allow him to tiptoe through someone’s thoughts, gathering stray information here and there. And I doubted Mircea had prohibited Rafe from even thinking about whatever it was he didn’t want known.

“Drop your shields,” I told him, “and hold that thought.”

Rafe looked a little nervous, but since Billy slipped inside his skin a few seconds later, he must have done as I asked. I glanced around, wondering what the tourists would say if they knew that a ghost was currently possessing a vampire a few feet away. It made Dante’s staged shows look a little tepid by comparison. Then Billy stepped out of Rafe’s other side, looking freaked. “Oh, hell, no.”

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. Not a damn thing.”

“You’re lying.” I couldn’t believe it. Billy has a lot of flaws, but he doesn’t lie. Not to me.

His jaw set and his hazel eyes looked as implacable as I’d ever seen them. “If I am, it’s for your own good!”

There are, so tradition says, four main reasons for a ghost to appear to mortals: to reproach, to warn, to recall and to advise. I could add a few more: to annoy, to obstruct or, in Billy Joe’s case, to seriously piss off. “I’ll be the judge of that!” I told him angrily.

“And your judgment’s been so great so far?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Every time you get involved with the vamps, it’s a bad thing.” Billy held up three translucent fingers. “Tomas. ‘Oh, Billy, he’s just a sweet street kid who needs a home.’ A sweet street kid who happened to be a master vampire in disguise, who betrayed you and almost got you killed!” A finger went down. “Mircea. ‘Oh, Billy, I’ve known him forever, he’s nothing to worry about.’ Until he placed that damn geis on you and maneuvered you into the Pythia thing, that is.” Another finger folded under, leaving me staring at a rude gesture. “See why I’m a little worried here?”

“I’m involved anyway!” I reminded him tightly.

“You won’t like it.”

“I already don’t like it. Just tell me!” The bartender was looking at me a little funny. Probably wondering why I was yelling at the bar.

“Your buddy has been doing some investigating,” Billy said, with obvious reluctance, “and heard a rumor. But it’s probably no more than that. People have been speculating about the Codex for centuries—”

Rafe shook his head, then grabbed his throat again. The bartender began slowly edging away. I sent him a smile, but the expression in his eyes said clearly that he thought we were nuts. It would have bothered me less if I didn’t halfway agree with him.

“Billy!”

He sighed. “The word is that the Codex was never lost, that the mages have had it all along but circulated the rumor because they didn’t want anyone looking for it.”

“Wonderful,” I said morosely. “All I need is another run-in with the Circle.”

“Cass,” Billy said, almost gently, “there’s more than one.”

It took me a moment to understand what he meant; then my eyes automatically slid over to Rafe. “The Black has it?” I whispered in a savage undertone.

The Black Circle was a group of dark magic users, people with no scruples about how they obtained power or what they did with it. They had recently allied with some rogue vampires against the Silver Circle and the Vampire Senate, in a war that threatened to engulf the entire supernatural world. So far, I’d mostly managed to stay out of it. I really wanted to keep it that way.

At least Rafe had the grace to look slightly abashed. “I’m trying to avoid making any more enemies,” I said tightly.

“And if Mircea wants to raid a dark stronghold, he has the people to do it,” Billy pointed out. “He sure as hell doesn’t need us.”

I nodded emphatically. For once, Billy was making a lot of sense. Rafe looked lost, unable to hear Billy when he wasn’t in residence, so to speak. “Mircea has a capable stable—” I began, only to have Rafe cut me off with an agitated gesture.

“None of them will do anything,” he croaked, sounding half-choked. I went around the bar to get him some water.

“Why? Do they want him to die?”

“No!” He looked around agitatedly, but his almost yell had been lost in the thrum of music and the hum of conversation. He leaned over the bar and dropped his voice to a whisper anyway, so much so that I practically had to lip-read. “There might be a few who resent their positions, who think they could do better elsewhere, but most are wise enough to see…” He trailed off.

“See what?”

Rafe took the glass I handed him, but didn’t drink. He put it down and started rubbing both hands across the bar top in an unconscious, distressed motion. “That with Tony gone and Mircea dead, there will be no one to protect us. The family will be ripped apart, each of us taken by other masters to add to their power base. And they won’t know us, Cassie; they won’t care. We’ll be commodities to them, nothing more. Things to be used and discarded when we fail to please.”

I mentally cursed myself for not thinking that far ahead. Of course Mircea’s death would be more than a personal tragedy—his position as family patriarch ensured that. And it would be devastating for people like Rafe.

He’d never had much respect at Tony’s, where a steady trigger finger counted for more than artistic genius. But at least he’d known the rules of the household and where he fit into the hierarchy. In a new family there would be a constant struggle for position—maybe for decades. And Rafe was no warrior. He might not last long enough to carve a new place for himself.

“Then why won’t the family help him?” I demanded. “It’s their butts on the line as much as his!”

“Because the Consul has forbidden it!” Rafe whispered. “I am risking her wrath by even being here!”

Well, that explained the nervousness. “Why would she do that? She needs Mircea alive!” As scary as the Consul was, she couldn’t hope to win the war alone. The Senate was ultimately only as strong as its members, and it had already lost more than a quarter of them to combat or treachery. She couldn’t afford to lose Mircea, too.

“She says that everything that can be done is being done, and that we’ll only make matters worse by interfering. But I think there is more to it than that. You’re the obvious person for us to seek out, and she doesn’t want us to aid you.”

“But I’m trying to help!” Lifting the geis would benefit me as much as Mircea, and if there was one thing I’d have thought the Consul understood, it was self-interest.

“I know that, Cassie. But she doesn’t. She believes that you are still angry with him for placing the geis, and may attempt some form of revenge. She knows you don’t have to help him; that once he dies, the geis is broken—”

“She actually believes I’d do that? Stand by and watch him die?”

Rafe’s hands clenched on the bar top. “I don’t know what she might think under normal circumstances. But these are not normal! We are at war, and she is afraid of losing him. Even more, she’s afraid of your power. Fear is not an emotion she feels often, and when she does…she tends to overreact. Perhaps, if you spoke with her…”

I shot him a look, but didn’t bother to reply. I had a suspicion that the Consul’s plan to rid Mircea of the spell might involve killing the one who had placed it on him. Which, thanks to the aforementioned timeline snafu, was me.

“Mircea isn’t going to die,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Rafe. “He’s a Senate member, not a newborn!”

Rafe didn’t answer. Instead, he held out his hand, opening the palm to reveal a slim platinum hair clip. I recognized it immediately. Unlike a lot of ancient vampires, Mircea didn’t usually dress in the clothes of his youth. I’d only ever seen him in them once, and that had been to make a political statement. He preferred understated, modern attire, with the only outward sign of his origin the length of his hair. He once told me that in his day only serfs and slaves had short hair and that he’d never been able to overcome his prejudice against it. But even there he conformed to modern conventions by keeping it confined at the base of his neck in a clip. That one.

I stayed a good two feet away, desperate not to trigger a vision. Just thinking about Mircea was hard enough; I couldn’t risk seeing him. But this time, my caution did no good. A wave of images crashed into me, sweeping me away.