I swallowed, too drained for a lecture right now but sensing that this might be one I needed. No one at Tony’s had been that old besides him and Rafe. And come to think of it, Tony had been pretty damn touchy about his dignity. I’d always thought it was because of his huge ego, and maybe it was. Or maybe there were still a few things I didn’t understand about vamps.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I didn’t realize—”

“Yeah, I know. But these are things you have to think about. Because you know what Nicu is thinking right now? He’s wondering if this was a hint, if the boss’s lady disrespecting him was Mircea’s way of telling him that he’s out of favor. He’s wondering if maybe he’s about to be disowned—again—and shuffled off to another court where he’ll have to spend the next fifty years clawing his way into a position of respect. If he survives that long. He’s wondering if the ax is about to fall.”

I stared at Marco, sickened. “I’ll talk to him. I’ll explain—”

Marco rolled his eyes. “Yeah. ’Cause that’ll go over great. Don’t worry about it; I’ll tell him you just don’t know no better. But you gotta realize that things are different now. You’re not a little hanger-on at a court nobody cares about. People pay attention to what you say, so you gotta do the same.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling about two inches tall. God, could today get any worse?

“I’m not the best person to be telling you this,” Marco said, looking frustrated. “We gotta find you a teacher, and not one of those hicks you came up with—”

“You two may as well come in here,” Sal called from the living room. “It’s not like everybody can’t hear you anyway. And we hicks would like a few words.”

Great.

Casanova had gone when we reentered the living room, probably back to corral the chaos. But Alphonse, Sal and Mircea were sitting on cowhide. Mircea and Sal were on either end of the same sofa, with the middle seat occupied by lunch in the form of a young blond man. That left the other couch for me and the guys, although it was hardly a squeeze—the thing had to be nine feet long.

Sal and Alphonse topped up their drinks at the awful bar while Mircea finished his dessert. I recognized him as one of Casanova’s stable who usually worked the front desk. We’d pulled a few shifts together and he gave me a slight smile as he got to his somewhat unsteady feet. One of the guards escorted him and the main course, a twenty-something brunet, toward the foyer.

Amazingly, Mircea looked tired even after a double feeding. He was sitting slightly slumped down, with his hands crossed over his stomach and his head tilted back. It would have been a normal enough pose for anyone else, especially after a hard day. But Mircea didn’t do relaxed. He usually had a frisson of energy around him, and not just from the power he gave off. It was noticeably absent tonight.

I stared at him, trying to focus on his eyes and not on the tired lines around them. Mircea wasn’t supposed to get tired. Or sick. Or hurt. It was one of the things that had made him so attractive to me, even as a child. In a world where alliances were constantly shifting and people were constantly dying, Mircea was stable, strong, eternal.

Except that he wasn’t.

Which meant that, one day, I could lose him, too.

If I was honest, that was my biggest reason for not wanting to let him any closer than he already was. Having someone was the precursor to losing him. It had happened over and over. It was easier not to want anything—not from Mircea, not from anyone.

Wanting, needing—they were so close, and needing always hurt.

“Cassie?” Mircea was looking at me strangely. I suddenly realized that I’d just been standing there, staring at him.

“How much blood did Rafe take?” I blurted.

Mircea gave me a small smile, but Marco hung his head and Sal burst out laughing. “What?” I demanded.

“It’s considered impolite to inquire about someone’s Change,” Horatiu informed me, tottering in with a folding table and a loaded tray. I jumped up to help him—and not just because the tray smelled divine—but good manners only won me a glower. “Sit down, sit down! Were you brought up by wolves, young woman?”

“By Tony,” Sal said, reclaiming her seat.

“Ah. The same thing, then,” Horatiu said, trying to balance the tray while wrestling with the folding table.

“Don’t mind him,” Alphonse said, rescuing my dinner before it hit the carpet. “That old goat lectures me all the time.” That didn’t reassure me much; Alphonse’s idea of good manners consisted of remembering to bury all the bodies.

“That old goat can hear you,” Horatiu said tartly.

“That’s a first,” Alphonse muttered, settling my dinner across my knees.

I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I smelled the roast beef sandwich Horatiu had rustled up. It had grilled onions and mushrooms and tangy little banana peppers and was pretty much my idea of heaven. The only thing that would have made it better was fries instead of the mountain of salad off to one side, but I didn’t feel like complaining.

I dug in while Sal frowned at me. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. She was hyperconscious of appearance, or so I’d always thought. But having met the family, her attitude was starting to make more sense. She might not have the age or the power of Mircea’s masters, but she was damned if she wasn’t going to outdress them.

“I look this way because the Consul threw me out of my room and somebody stole my luggage,” I told her between bites.

“Your luggage is here, where it’s supposed to be. What we couldn’t figure out is where you were, as you didn’t bother to inform anybody.”

“You had me tagged—you knew exactly where I was!”

“We knew you were somewhere in the hotel,” she agreed, as if monitoring my every move was no big deal. “But the wards around here interfere with the spell, so we couldn’t narrow it down any more than that. Marco only managed to locate you when you went outside.”

“For pizza. On her own,” he grumbled under his breath.

Mircea didn’t say anything, but his expression was deliberately blank. It made me very nervous.

“Coulda been worse,” Alphonse said. “We spent half the day thinking it was worse. The tag said you was alive, but then they brought the car in—”

Damn. I’d forgotten about that. “Is the Consul really pissed?” I asked nervously.

“About what?”

“Her car. I know it was probably really rare—”

“It was a car.” Alphonse shrugged. “It’s no big deal. But everyone would like to know how you survived.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I bet. I saw that thing and I’d have given odds that nobody made it out. Burnt to a crisp.”

I frowned. A lot of things had happened to that car, but that hadn’t been one of them. “It wasn’t burnt. And if it had been, the water would have put it out.”

Mircea lifted his head to look at me strangely. “What water?”

“The water in the lake. You know, that we nose-dived into?”

He was silent for a moment. “No, dulceaƫă, I do not. The car exploded in the middle of the desert.”

For a moment, I just chewed sandwich. I swallowed and drank some of my wine. “It exploded,” I repeated.

“We believe it was a car bomb meant for the Consul. The Bentley was one of her favorites.”

The gray whale we’d left at the bottom of Lake Mead had been a Packard. I’d seen the name written across its bulbous backside in big silver letters as it sank. None of this was making sense.

“She informed us that she asked Raphael to drive it out for her,” he added.

And then I remembered. Rafe had been saving a seat for me in a black Bentley. I’d seen it in the lineup, a sleek, antique gem gleaming under the emergency lights. I’d almost forgotten until now because we hadn’t taken that car. Somebody else had. Somebody who was now dead.

“I assume you shifted out before the explosion?” Mircea asked, watching me keenly. He knew something was wrong.

“We took another car,” I said numbly. And if we hadn’t, Rafe wouldn’t have been in the infirmary today. He would have been dead. If I’d gone back in time to try to save him, I’d have killed him.

Chapter Fourteen

“Here.” Sal shoved a glass into my hand. From the fumes, I was guessing it was straight whiskey.

I stared at the coffee table while I sipped it, but all I saw were hundreds of ruined cars baking under a cloudless sky. And all around them, an empty, dead landscape filled with bones. Had all that been the power’s way of telling me that I was about to screw up big-time? Had it been trying to warn me about Rafe’s death?

I really liked that idea, because in that case the images weren’t something to worry about. The crisis was over, Rafe had survived, and for once, we’d dodged a bullet. But as much as I wanted to believe it, something about that idea bugged me.

The burnt-out cars I could understand, considering what had happened to the Bentley. But why not just show me that? The actual explosion would have been a lot easier to decipher than some eerie landscape filled with rotting vehicles. And for that matter, why show me a destroyed Dante’s when I asked about preventing the attack on MAGIC?

I was sick of trying to figure out messages conveyed, not through language, but through nightmares! It was just one more reason I hated my gift. Once in a while, you got an image that was clear-cut and unmistakable. Like on my fourteenth birthday, when I’d been gifted with a vision of my parents’ deaths in a car bomb, complete with sound and vivid Technicolor. Those types were bad enough, but at least they beat the more mystical variety, which could mean anything or nothing. Half the time you never understood them until the events had come to pass and it was too late.

“So this is what? The third attempt on the Consul’s life in the last month?” Sal was asking.