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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.”
