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A tiny piece of ash stood out starkly against the cream silk. I reached to brush it off, but he jerked away. “We need to get going,” I said impatiently. It was probably going to be only seconds before someone saw me who shouldn’t.
I reached for him again, but suddenly he just wasn’t there anymore. Damn it! I’d forgotten how quickly vampires could move.
“Who are you?” The voice came from somewhere behind me.
I spun so fast that my skirts tangled around my legs. I stumbled a little, but caught myself before I went sprawling. But my hair came loose from the chic chignon Sal had managed to concoct, straggling into my eyes. I brushed it back and fumbled around on the asphalt, looking for the bobby pins. I’d told her this wasn’t going to work. Elegance and I were not on a first-name basis.
I finally managed to find a couple of pins and stood up, trying to keep hold of them and not spill my overloaded purse. Marlowe had scrounged around the Senate’s treasury and come up with the big bag o’ jewels that was currently trying to pull my shoulder out of joint. “Portable wealth,” he’d explained, when I asked him why I was carrying around a bunch of stones that made the Hope diamond look puny. “In a revolution, people want something that can be easily transported out of the country.” I could argue the ease-of-transport thing, but I wasn’t about to complain. I just hoped it would be enough. Unfortunately, the rocks and my gun hadn’t left room for a hairbrush.
“Do you have a comb?” We probably needed to look respectable for this. The way things stood now, I wasn’t sure they’d let either of us in the door.
When Mircea didn’t answer, I looked up, only to see that he was holding something, and it wasn’t a comb. “What’s that for?”
“For you, if you do not tell me the truth.”
“I already have a gun,” I told him, confused. What did he think I was going to do with that thing? It wasn’t a handgun; it was an M16 assault rifle. The thing was freaking huge.
And it was pointed at me.
“Oh.” I suddenly got the message. I dropped the bobby pins and held up my hands, palms out. But the gun to my chest thing didn’t change. “After what you just went through, it’s understandable you’d be a little spooked,” I said. And, wow, didn’t I wish I’d thought of that earlier. “But I really am here to help. Please, take my hand and I’ll prove it.”
Mircea’s only answer was to move back a few steps. Probably to get a better shot. Behind him, several of his vampires looked up from fire extinguisher duty and saw us. Just great.
“You can drop the glamour,” he told me grimly. “I am not deceived.”
“I’m not using a—” I began, but he did his disappearing act again before I could finish. It took me a moment, but I spied him across the parking lot, over by one of the limos. And, no, letting him drive off somewhere really wasn’t an option.
I shifted, but in the split second it took me to get there, he had vanished. I was about to open one of the car doors, to check inside, when I caught the reflection in the windows of two blurs moving up behind me. I shifted again before the vamps could grab me, landing back across the lot, near where I’d started. I was starting to get dizzy—not a good sign. Especially when we hadn’t even gotten to the damn auction yet.
I looked around, trying to spot Mircea, and almost ran into him. We both shied back, and a quick glance showed me that he’d lost the gun. Maybe he’d remembered that he didn’t really need it to kill me. Or maybe he’d decided to let me get a word in. “Listen,” I said. “I just want to—”
He threw a potion in my face. My mouth had been open, and I choked on an absolutely vile-tasting mess. It was green and oily and globules of it dripped down my chin to land on Billy’s necklace. Wonderful. The thing had so many nooks and crannies that I’d probably never get it clean.
When I finally blinked enough of the stuff away that I could see, I found Mircea staring at me, a half-perplexed, half-angry look on his face. “That should have stripped away the glamour,” he said, as if talking to himself.
“It probably would have, if I was wearing one!” I said furiously. He disappeared again. “You better hope this doesn’t stain!” I yelled at the space where he’d just been, right before an arm fastened around my throat.
“You must be powerful,” he whispered, his breath warm in my ear, “for that concoction to have failed.”
I shifted out of the almost choke hold and landed behind him. “Will you hold still for one minute?!”
Mircea spun in another movement too fast for my eyes to track and grabbed me around the throat, palm to bare skin. I sighed in relief. “Thank you,” I said sincerely, and shifted us before anyone else noticed our game of keep-away.
A moment later, I found myself pinned against a hard, cold brick wall. My body was busy informing me that maybe I’d done a few too many jumps lately, and I’d landed in a puddle and gotten icy slush in my shoe. Not to mention Mircea’s grip on my neck, which was a little too tight for comfort.
“Where are we? And who are you?” I couldn’t see him very well, but he sounded pissed.
“When are we,” I corrected. A thin, whirling snow was falling, catching on my goopy eyelashes. I couldn’t see much of anything with his body in the way, but the night was cold and damp, not hot and arid, and there were cobblestones under our feet, not asphalt. And judging from the dizziness I was experiencing, we’d jumped at least a few centuries. “And you know who I am.”
“You are not my Cassandra.” The tone was flat, hard. Not one I’d ever heard from him, at least not directed at me.
“Then who am I?” I really wished the road would stay still for a minute, long enough for me to get my breath back, to think.
“You are a mage, hiding under a glamour, which if you do not drop”—his hand tightened fractionally—“I will drop it for you.”
I swallowed, and felt it against his palm. I wondered how much longer I’d be able to do that, how much tighter that grip had to get before I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe. It didn’t feel like it had far to go, but I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to stop this. The one thing that had never occurred to me was that Mircea would mistake me for one of the people we’d been fighting. Because I knew him, instinctively, unmistakably, I’d just assumed he’d feel the same way.
Obviously I’d been wrong.
