“I do not think a healer would be able to help,” Rafe said slowly, his eyes brightening as no visible retribution was taken. I realized what he was up to as he looked at me eagerly. If he pretended he was talking about himself instead of Mircea, he could get around the prohibition. The thought drifted through my mind that Mircea must not be up to his usual standard, to have left such an obvious loophole.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, hoping to forestall a painful explanation. “If I could do anything, don’t you think I would have?” The geis that was putting me through hell was doing even worse things to Mircea. It strengthened depending on how long it had been in place, and due to a little accident with the timeline, he’d been dealing with it longer than I had. By about a century.

My former rival for the position of Pythia, a lunatic named Myra, had decided to remove the competition by a little creative homicide. She couldn’t kill me, because there was a rule prohibiting the murderer of the Pythia or her designated heir from inheriting. But being savvy about all things time-related, Myra had worked out an alternative. If Mircea died before Tony and I had our little blowup, it would remove his protection from me, allowing Tony to do the dirty work for her.

The only problem with her plan was that it required fiddling with the time line, and my power didn’t like that. It kept sending me back in time to prevent the assassination attempts. And during one of those trips, I met Mircea in a period before the geis was placed. The spell immediately recognized him as the other component needed to complete itself and jumped from me to him. That not only gave him the geis a century early, but it ensured that when he had the original spell cast on us, he ended up with two strands of it, not one. And, as I could attest, one was bad enough.

“But…there is no one else!” Rafe looked almost frantic at my refusal. He also looked surprised. I had a sudden rush of guilt, which was monumentally unfair. Mircea had started this, not me.

“If I knew the counterspell, I’d have cast it already,” I repeated, with a little more bite to my tone than I usually used with Rafe. What did he think I’d been doing for the past week, anyway?

The book containing the only known counterspell was the Codex Merlini, a compilation of ancient magical lore that had been lost long ago—assuming it had ever existed. Most of the people Pritkin and I had contacted had been of the opinion that the Codex was nothing more than a myth. It was like the rest of the Arthurian legend, we’d been assured by one supercilious mage after another. There’d never been a Camelot, except in the imagination of a medieval French poet. And there was no Codex.

The only exception was Manassier, who’d had his own reasons for sending us on a wild-goose chase. So far, everyone else had refused to talk, didn’t know anything, or was looking to get rich quick off a couple of desperate suckers. I’d been battling rising panic already, and Rafe’s distress wasn’t helping.

“Please, Cassie!” His voice cracked around the edges, and my stomach clenched at the almost heartbroken look on his face. If it had been anyone else—any vampire, anyway—that look would have had my paranoid instincts muttering furiously. But Rafe didn’t have that kind of deception in him. At least, he never had before. And I suspected his basic character was pretty set after more than four hundred years.

“I told you, I don’t have the spell,” I said, more gently. “Maybe in a few weeks—”

“But I’ll be dead in a few weeks!” he blurted out.

For a moment, the world tilted. There was a hollow roaring in my ears and the bar seemed to be closing in, with not enough air, not enough light. It felt like the heavy bass of Purgatory’s continuous pulse was suddenly pounding inside my skull.

Rafe stared at me soberly. “I am sorry, Cassie. I didn’t intend to tell you that way.”

For a moment, I just stared back, understanding whipping through my mind with a white-hot sizzle. I’d known the spell was vicious—my own reactions had been more than enough for that—but that it could go so far I’d never even considered. Mircea was a first-level master. There were only a handful of them in the world, and they were almost impossible to kill. The idea of his dying because of a spell, any spell, was crazy, but especially one that hadn’t even been designed as a weapon.

“There has to be some mistake,” I finally said. “I know you’re suffering, but—”

“Not suffering, mia stella,” he whispered. “Dying.”

“But if I go to him, it’ll only make things worse!”

Rafe flinched when I dropped the wrong pronoun, but it didn’t stop him. “The Consul has called in experts from around the world. And you know they would not lie to her.” No, I didn’t suppose so. The Consul headed up the Vampire Senate, and was easily its scariest member. “I heard one tell her that if you complete the spell, perhaps it will free…me. But he knew of nothing else that would.”

“I’ll find another way,” I promised, feeling sick.

Rafe looked genuinely puzzled at my refusal. Like asking me to risk a lifetime of slavery was no big deal. “I do not see what is wrong with this one. Mircea would never hurt you—”

“That’s not the point! How much have you enjoyed being Tony’s eternal errand boy?”

“Mircea is nothing like that bastardo Antonio,” Rafe said, appalled.

I shook my head in frustration. No, Mircea wasn’t Tony; despite the geis, despite everything, I knew that. But he was a vampire. And the one thing no vamp could resist was power. If the geis gave Mircea control over mine, he would use it. And, just like with Tony, I’d have no say about what he did with it.

Tony wanted me dead mainly because I’d set him up for the Feds. I’d had a number of reasons for helping them out, but top of the list was that he’d used my visions to point him to wherever disaster was about to strike—and therefore where an opportunity for profit was to be found. Young and naive, I’d believed him when he assured me that he wanted the information to warn the people who were soon to be in distress. When I found out what he’d really been doing with it, I’d sworn never to be used like that again. Not by him, not by anyone.

I swallowed, knowing this wasn’t going to go over well. But I had to ask. “Tell me the truth, Rafe. Did Mircea send you?”

If he really was dying, it would make sense for him to send Rafe to tell me so. Mircea had saved my life by refusing Tony his revenge. I owed him one, and I would have expected him to try to cash it in.

What didn’t make sense was why he would order Rafe to put on an elaborate pretense, to make me think he’d actually told him to stay away. But although Mircea looked to be in his early thirties, he was five hundred years old. And, like most of the older vamps, to call his thought processes Byzantine was a serious understatement. I’d discovered long ago that the easiest way to figure out what a vampire really wanted was to look for whatever would benefit him the most, and ignore everything else. And what would benefit Mircea was completing the geis.

Rafe blinked at me, and for a moment there was something lost and wide open in his expression, almost bruised. “You think I would lie to you?”

“If Mircea ordered you to, yes. You wouldn’t have a choice!”

“There are always choices,” Rafe said, offended. “Had I been ordered to tell you a lie—” He gave a small shrug. “I cannot help it if I am not so good an actor at times.”

“But you’re fond of Mircea. It might be an order you’d agree with.”

He sighed in exasperation. “Mircea has many fine qualities, Cassie. I know them well. But he has flaws, too—one in particular that I hope will not prove fatal. He is stubborn. Too stubborn to listen to the Consul’s experts when they tell him he cannot defeat this. Too stubborn to believe that even his power can fail. And too proud to admit it, even if he did believe!”

That did sound like Mircea. And I’d never really stopped to wonder how he would react to the geis’ malfunctioning. If anything, I’d assumed his only thought would be to use it to get me under his power. But while I’d almost become used to my life spinning out of control, it definitely wasn’t the norm for him. Mircea manipulated other people, used them to get what he or the Senate wanted. He wasn’t accustomed to having anyone, or anything, do the same to him.

“And consider this,” Rafe said urgently, “when you think on deception. Mage Pritkin has no reason to save Mircea. If he dies, the spell is broken. All he has to do is stall long enough for that to happen, and you are free.”

An automatic denial rose to my lips, but died before I could utter it. The Codex contained some mysterious spell that Pritkin didn’t want found. We’d agreed that once the book was located, I’d let him remove it before I searched it for the counterspell to the geis. But what if he didn’t trust me? I didn’t know enough about the magical community to know whom to ask for information. So all the experts we’d spoken with had been Pritkin’s. Had all that “you go, I’ll stay” stuff in Paris been about my welfare or an attempt to make sure I didn’t find anything? What if the real reason we kept striking out was because that was what he wanted?

“I almost forgot. I have something for you.” Rafe fumbled under the cloak for a moment, then brought out a small package wrapped in a piece of black felt. “The Fey returned them to Mircea. As your master, they assumed he could get them to you.”

I parted the felt and into my hands dropped a ratty old pack of tarot cards. They were dirty and creased, and more than a few were missing the corners. I was a little surprised to see them, since I’d lost them while on a disastrous trip to Faerie in search of Myra. I’d been happy to get out of there alive, and hadn’t worried too much about what I left behind.

A card suddenly poked up from the deck with no help from me. “The Magician Reversed,” a resonant voice began, before I shoved it back inside and slipped the pack into the pocket of my shorts. It did not add to my peace of mind.