For once, my aim must have been pretty good. He screamed and shot out of the hedge of barrels like he was on fire. He sprinted past me, shedding sparks in his wake and—Oh, crap. “He’s on fire!” I screamed.

Agnes tripped him up and he went sprawling just outside the door. She sat on his butt and clocked him upside the head with her gun. He collapsed like a sack of sand.

“You wanted a hint,” she panted, batting out the flames on his back. “Here it is. You’re clairvoyant. Use your gift.”

I waited a few seconds, but she didn’t say anything else. “That’s it? That’s your big hint?”

“What did you expect?”

“Something else! Something more! There has to be . . . I don’t know, some kind of trick to it!”

“You’re the trick,” she told me, retrieving his cuffs. “Why do you think clairvoyants are chosen as Pythias? If anyone could do it, these morons wouldn’t screw things up every time they try to ‘improve’ things. They can’t see what effect their actions will have; they have to guess. We can know.”

A headache started to pound behind my eyes. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been counting on Agnes to help me until this minute, when she refused. “Maybe you can know,” I told her. “My gift doesn’t work like that. Some days, it doesn’t work at all!”

“Maybe you need to exercise it a little more. And to answer your earlier question, fiddling with the time stream usually causes more problems than it solves. Trust me on that one.”

“So that’s it?” I asked furiously. “That’s what you have for me? Don’t mess with time and trust my gift?”

“That’s all you really need.” Agnes dragged the mage’s hands behind his back and clicked the cuffs on. Once he was secure, she looked up at me, and for the first time, her gaze held a flicker of compassion. “Your power will work with your natural ability, training it—and you—over time. Eventually, you will learn what you need to know.”

“If it was that easy, you wouldn’t spend decades training a successor!” I said quickly before she could shift out on me.

“I never said it was easy. Nothing about this job is. I said you will learn.”

“And what if I don’t last that long?!” I screamed, but Agnes was already gone.

Chapter Three

I arrived back at Dante’s, Vegas’ hell-themed casino and my current hideout, exhausted, filthy and steaming. The worst part was, I’d gotten exactly zip out of it. I might be the world’s chief clairvoyant, but my power didn’t seem to know that. It came and went, ebbing and flowing like the tide, but never on such a precise schedule. And that meant I couldn’t do visions on demand. I couldn’t choose what I saw and what I didn’t. I wasn’t that strong and I never had been.

Despite the lurid theme of the casino, the penthouse was sleek, Scandinavian and contemporary, with a soft blue and gray color scheme that I usually found soothing. It wasn’t working so well today. That was doubly true when I walked into the living room and was immediately accosted by a couple of half-crazed thugs. I’d have been worried, except that they were mine. Sort of.

Marco, the one weaving a quarter through his fingers as he surveyed me, was six foot six with a twenty-inch neck. The guy made dump trucks look petite. The fact that he was a vampire was almost irrelevant.

I didn’t know the other guy, but that wasn’t unusual. Marco’s partners constantly changed, but they were always vamps armed to the teeth. This one was no exception and looked enough like Marco—slicked-back dark hair, barrel chest and tree trunk legs—that they might have been related. Of course, they just as easily might not. That description fit almost every babysitter I’d had in the last three days.

“What’s the deal here?” Marco asked, his voice thick with muscle. “You said you was going for a fitting. That you had to get naked for this designer guy, so we might as well stay here since you wasn’t letting us in the room anyway. You said you was just going downstairs. That you’d be right back.”

“I don’t have time for this,” I told him. I ached pretty much everywhere, except for my shoulders, which had stopped screaming and started going numb. It was making me think about lack of blood flow and gangrene. “Can you get me out of these cuffs?”

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” He made a savage gesture, and the quarter sailed through the open balcony doors and took out a window on the next building. It made me jump, since Marco had so far shown no emotion whatsoever. “As soon as you tell me what’s going on. Because I’m thinking we got a communication problem, you and me.”

“You took advantage of our trust,” his partner added in a high-pitched squeak.

“What’s going on is that I need to get out of these cuffs and into a bath!” I snapped, my temper hanging by a thread. “Mircea is coming—”

“Yeah. I know,” Marco said tightly. “The front desk called to say he’s on his way up.”

“He’s on his way now? Why?”

“You have a date.”

“Appointment. And that’s not until two a.m.!” I whirled, looking for a clock, but of course I didn’t find one. Clocks made you think about bedtime and bath time and dinner-time instead of gambling the night away in blissful ignorance. The casino didn’t like clocks.

“It’s five to two,” Marco informed me, shoving his hairy wrist in my face. “You’ve been gone all night.”

Shit.

“You want to get me killed, is that it?” he demanded. “I piss you off somehow I don’t remember? You working out some kinda grudge?”

“No! I . . . just lost track of time. I was busy.” In fact, I wasn’t all that great at timing my shifts yet. I’d planned to come back a few minutes after I left, in which case I wouldn’t have had to worry about explaining things to the deadly duo. Not that I should have had to do so in the first place.

Marco scraped something gray and hairy that was absolutely not smashed rat off my shoulder. “Doing what? Dumpster diving?”

I counted to ten and reminded myself not to overreact. The muscle twins were only doing what they’d been told. Getting rid of them was going to require talking with the one who’d sent them, and even that wasn’t likely to work. Because their master also considered himself mine, and he liked to keep an eye on his property.

Mircea Basarab had been born a nobleman in fifteenth-century Romania, when one’s woman was almost as prized a possession as one’s horse. They were also treated about the same: dressed up and shown off on important occasions, and petted and pampered and kept under careful watch the rest of the time. And although he had since modernized his wardrobe, his vocabulary and his job description, his attitude toward women was remarkably constant.

Not that I was his woman, as I’d mentioned several times. By coincidence, it was the same number he hadn’t been listening. I somehow had the feeling that something similar would happen if I brought up getting rid of Marco and friend. For someone who could hear a pin drop three rooms away, Mircea could be amazingly deaf.

It wasn’t that I objected to the idea of protection—quite the opposite, in fact. Far too many people had my name on their to-do-nasty-things-to list. But while vampires are formidable opponents—especially the masters, which judging by the power he was leaking all over the place, Marco definitely was—they tend not to perform so well against certain kinds of opponents. Like revenge-minded ancient deities. For what I was facing, I needed something a little more subtle with a lot more punch. Not that I had any idea what that was yet.

I heard the elevator outside the penthouse ding and went into panic mode. I fled to the bedroom, followed closely by Marco. His buddy must’ve remained in the living room to greet the master—and hopefully to stall him.

“Tell him I’m not up yet,” I said, trying to wriggle under the bedclothes.

Marco shook his head. “That ain’t gonna work. You knew he was coming. He’s gonna expect you to talk. He’s gonna expect some quality time. And if there’s cuffs involved, he’s gonna expect them to be his.”

I shut my eyes, trying hard not to think about Mircea and handcuffs. And got an inspiration. “The bathroom. Hurry!”

We ran into the gray and white opulence of the adjoining bath and I slammed the door. “Quick! Fill the tub. And get me out of these cuffs!”

Marco didn’t ask questions, just started hot water flowing into the huge soaking tub and threw in half a container of bath salts. Bubbles foamed up everywhere as he bent to examine the restraints. After a few seconds, he said a bad word. “These are magical cuffs,” he told me so softly I could hardly understand him over the rushing water. I guess he was worried about vampire hearing. “They ain’t gonna come off easy. We’re gonna need a mage.”

Pritkin would have normally been my first choice, but he already considered my intelligence to be sadly underutilized. If he saw me like this, I’d never hear the end of it. Not to mention that he’d demand to know where I’d been, and I hadn’t had time to come up with a good lie yet.

“Find Francoise,” I whispered. She was a witch and a good friend. There was an outside chance she wouldn’t laugh at me. “And get my bra off, fast!”

Marco shied back, and for the first time an expression broke through that tough demeanor. It was terror. “You’re cute, but you’re the master’s woman. And ain’t no woman alive worth that kind of—”

“I’m not propositioning you!” I hissed. “I need to be in that tub with my cuffs hidden under the bubbles until you get back, in case Mircea pokes his head around the door. And I can’t wear a bra and pull that off!”

“Then add more bubbles or something, because ain’t no way in hell—”

“Help me out here, Marco. Unless you want him to know you lost track of me for most of the night?” Truth be told, I wasn’t thrilled with that idea myself. Mircea was already of the opinion that I should be hidden away somewhere for my own protection, and I didn’t need anything adding fuel to the fire. The Pythia’s power wasn’t absolute, and he was damn tricky.