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I went after her, trying to remember the layout of these rooms as I ran. Because unlike Laura, I do not go incorporeal when I shift. I just pop out of one place and into another, and popping into the middle of a chair or a table wouldn’t be fun. So my nerves were taking a beating even before I pelted across another room, shifted through a fireplace, barely missed skewering myself on a poker, and darted out into the hall—
And caught sight of Laura skipping straight through the middle of a couple of men headed this way.
Or no, I thought, suddenly frozen.
Not men.
At least, not anymore.
They were coming down a gorgeous old spiral staircase, one of the house’s best features. It was made out of oak but had been burnished to a dark shine by the oil on thousands of hands over hundreds of years. But it didn’t hold a candle to the vampires using it. Well, one of them, anyway.
Mircea Basarab, Tony’s elegant master, would have probably made my heart race in plain old jeans. I say probably because I’d never seen him in anything so plebian, and tonight was no exception. A shimmering fall of midnight hair fell onto shoulders encased in a tuxedo so perfectly tailored he might have just stepped out of a photo shoot. The hair was actually mahogany brown, not black as it looked in the low light, but the broad shoulders, trim waist, and air of barely leashed power were no illusions.
Still, he looked a little out of place in a house where his host was lucky if he remembered to keep his tie out of the soup. Since Mircea never looked out of place anywhere, I assumed there was a reason he had decided to go all out. Probably the same one that had Tony forcing a family on a strict diet to sit through a feast every night.
For a second I wished I could have seen Tony, his three-hundred-plus pounds stuffed into a penguin suit, for once as supremely uncomfortable at one of his dinners as everyone else. But I wasn’t going to. Because the vamp at Mircea’s side, the one with the dark curly hair and the goatee and the deceptively kind brown eyes, wasn’t Tony.
Shit, I thought viciously, and backed swiftly into the room I’d just run out of.
Which was absolutely the right thing to do.
At least it was until they followed me in.
In a panic, I shifted—also the right move, since there were no other doors out of there. But shifting in a split second in a panic isn’t easy, and this time I didn’t manage it. Or, rather, I didn’t completely manage it.
Son of a bitch! I thought desperately, finding myself trapped in the fireplace as two high-level master vampires walked into the room.
Chapter Two
I tried shifting again but went nowhere, almost as if I was stuck. Which might have been because I was, I realized a second later. Half of my body was in the next room, having shifted back through the fireplace all nice and proper. But the other half . . .
The other half was still on this side of the wall, protruding through the blackened old bricks from just above the waist.
I twisted and turned desperately but went nowhere. And then I tried to shift again in a frenzy. But half a dozen attempts in quick succession only left me dizzy and with a serious desire to throw up. And no freer than I’d ever been.
A glance down at my waist showed that at least I hadn’t been cut in two, like an inept magician’s assistant, which is what I’d always assumed happened in these cases. Instead, an annoyed-looking bunch of bricks had puddled up around me in a working ring, like commuters jostling for space they weren’t finding. And giving off the subtle grind of stone on stone in the process.
I freaked a little at that, because if it was audible to my ears, it probably sounded like an avalanche to the va
mps. But when I looked up, only the fireplace screen was looking back at me. Literally, since it was one of those fake Tiffany things with a hundred colors and a bunch of bug-eyed insects all over it.
But there were no vamps, bug-eyed or otherwise. Amazingly, they hadn’t noticed my struggles, any more than they had my heartbeat or my panicked breathing. Either the darkness in the big old fireplace or the tackiness of the screen had shielded me from sight. And I guessed the storm had covered any noise I made, or else I was still barely inside the sound shield Jonas had laid. He’d linked it into a section of the house wards, and I wasn’t sure how far that extended.
Not that it mattered. Because sight and hearing aren’t the only senses that are stronger for a vamp. And despite the temperature, I was sweating like a—
“It’s the girl, isn’t it?” the second vampire said abruptly.
I stopped struggling for a second, when it felt like even my heartbeat froze.
“Cassandra.” Mircea nodded, handing his companion a drink. “She plays all over the house.”
And then it started back up again.
Of course the house smelled like me, I thought dizzily. Of course it did. My younger self slept at the other end of the hall; why wouldn’t it?
I swallowed and wondered, not for the first time, what the life expectancy was for Pythias.
Why didn’t I think it was very high?
