“Mircea!” I laughed in spite of myself. “I want a bath before we eat!”

His eyes, glinting in the discreet light of the suite, met mine. “If you’ll indulge me.”

“I’m not bathing with you,” I told him firmly. I’d never get any dinner that way.

“Of course not,” he said, in pretend shock.

“Then what?”

He let a single finger trace down my cheek to my jaw, to my neck, to my . . . necklace? “Is your ghost in residence?”

“No.” I hadn’t felt the need for a chaperone. “Why?”

“Because I have a recurring fantasy of you dining with me wearing this.” That warm finger slowly traced the outline of the baroque monstrosity. “And only this.”

I made a small sound and closed my eyes.

Goddamnit.

Despite appearances, I was trying, I was really, really trying, to have a relationship with Mircea, not just to jump his bones every time we had five minutes alone together. And I’d been doing pretty well lately, mainly because he’d been in New York and I’d been in Vegas and my plans always sounded a lot more doable when he wasn’t pressed up against me and—

“Stop that,” I told him, as he rotated his hips sinuously, because the damn man had no shame at all.

“Then give me an answer,” he said, laughter in his voice.

I looked up, intending to say no, but those dark eyes had an unmistakable glint of challenge sparkling in their depths. As if he thought I wouldn’t do it. As if he was sure I wouldn’t do it. Because I wasn’t a vampire, wasn’t adventurous like . . . certain other people. Who probably didn’t have a problem sashaying around covered in nothing but that long, silky black hair, those almond-shaped, dark eyes peeking coyly back over her dainty shoulder as she—

Goddamnit!

But it wasn’t that easy for me. Not because I had a problem indulging him, although nudity wasn’t my favorite thing. But because I was human. And Mircea, like a lot of vampires, had the bad habit of assuming that whatever he wanted from a human, he would get.

It didn’t help that he was usually right.

And centuries of that sort of thing had messed with his head, to the point that he rarely saw the need for debate with said human, or compromise or negotiation or any of the sort of things he would do with one of his own kind. He’d claimed me; therefore I was his. End of discussion, had there been a discussion, which there hadn’t been because I was human and some days, most days, that attitude just really made me want to tear my hair out.

So here I was, trying to see if a relationship would maybe, possibly, in some sort of way work despite the fact that the mages were absolutely going to hate it and the Weres weren’t going to love it and I was also going to take flak from the vampires after they realized that “relationship” didn’t mean “ownership” in my vocabulary, and what was Mircea doing?

Acting like there was nothing to discuss, of course.

Only there was. There so very definitely was, like five hundred years of history I knew next to nothing about. Like the fact that almost all I did know was that he was fiercely loyal to his family, had a horrible sense of humor, and when he walked into a room, he made my breath catch.

And, yeah, that was definitely something, but was it enough to base a lifetime on? I didn’t know yet. All I did know was that if I kept giving in, kept doing what he wanted, kept acting like we were already together and the decision had been made . . . then pretty soon, it would be.

And I didn’t know yet if it was one I could live with.

“Cassie?”

I looked up to find him regarding me with exasperated eyes. “Do you really have to think so hard about this?”

“It’s . . . complicated,” I said fretfully.

“No, it really isn’t.”

“Yes, it is! It really, really is, and you know it is and—”

He stopped me with a hand on either side of my face. “When are we?”

“What?”

“The year.”

I frowned. And my power sluggishly called up the date: “Nineteen sixty-nine.”

“And that means you haven’t been born yet, doesn’t it?”

I nodded.

“We haven’t met yet—am I right?”

“Well, not unless you count that time in—”

“Cassie.”

“No. Not . . . technically. But I don’t get what you’re—”

“I’m saying that nothing that happens, or doesn’t happen, tonight will have any bearing on our relationship once we return. No implications. No consequences. Think of this as . . . a night out of time.”

“A night out of time?” I repeated doubtfully, because I didn’t get those. Time caused me problems; it didn’t solve them. Not even for one night.

His forehead came to rest against mine. “A night out of time.”

I licked my lips and thought it over. “The servers will see.”

“And if I arrange it so they won’t?”

I looked up at him, and it was a mistake, because he was grinning that little-boy grin, the one he never showed in public because it would completely trash his image as big, bad Vampire Senate member. But I got to see it every once in a while. And it never failed to be devastating.

“Just dinner,” I heard myself say, before I could bite my tongue.

“Just dinner,” he agreed softly, stroking the lines of my cheekbones with his thumbs.

And then he let me go.

Chapter Thirteen

The bathroom of the suite turned out to be as impressive as the rest. Golden marble with thin veins of burnt umber running through it covered everything from the floors to the ceiling to the double sinks to the spa-like tub, all polished to a high gloss. There was a plush dark orange rug, matching towels, and a basket of expensive toiletries all done up in cellophane like the Easter bunny had just delivered it.

And there were mirrors, lots and lots of mirrors.

Almost every surface that wasn’t covered in marble had one, and all of them informed me that I looked like hell. My makeup was long gone, my hair was a freaking disaster, and my body was smeared with mud and various other substances I didn’t want to think too hard about. I sighed and peeled the laddered foot of what had been an expensive pair of stockings off my filthy feet. My polish was chipped and my toes . . . well, they looked like you’d expect after being dragged across cobblestones.

I contemplated my shredded toes and sighed. One day, one fine, fine day, I was going to be in peril in a damn pair of sneakers. Of course, I’d settle for not being in peril at all.

Not being in peril at all would be good.

I grabbed a couple of sinfully plush towels and got my beat-up, grimy self into the nice, clean shower. I didn’t even try for a bath, because I’d immediately turn the water black. Kind of like the evening’s entertainment had done to me.

After I got clean enough to be fairly sure that whatever was left wasn’t dirt, I took stock. I had a swelling bruise on my ankle, another on my hip and a third, long and horizontal and rapidly darkening, on my lower stomach, probably where I’d hit down on the damn carriage ride from hell. Add that to the bruises I was still carrying from the bathtub incident and, oh yeah, I looked sexy.

Not that I wasn’t happy to be alive in any shape. I just didn’t understand why I was. Particularly not if Mircea’s theory was correct about what we’d been fighting.

It had seemed crazy when he said it, because demigods weren’t exactly thick on the ground. The gods, or the creatures calling themselves that, had been banished a long time from Earth, and most of their by-blows had either gone with them or been rounded up by the Circle. And because I couldn’t imagine what a bunch of half gods could want with my mother.

But now that I had a chance to think, it did explain a lot. Like how resilient the mages had been, not bothering with shields but bouncing back from blows that should have left them a smear on the concrete without them. And why they’d seemed so damn strong.

Pritkin had once told me that war mages never used a hundred percent of their power for attack. In battle, the standard ratio was seventy-thirty, meaning that seventy percent of a mage’s power went to defense—to the shields and wards needed to keep him or her alive—with maybe thirty percent leftover for offensive stuff. Particularly powerful magic users could hedge on that a bit, maybe taking the total needed for defense down to sixty-five or even sixty percent, because their excess power made up for it. But nobody went completely unprotected. If they did, the first spell to so much as nick them might take them out of the fight—permanently.

Pritkin himself regularly used only about a quarter of his power for defense, although he didn’t admit as much to the Circle. But what if someone could shrug off being trampled under horses or slung against buildings or dragged half the length of a street, despite not using shields? Being able to put everything toward attack would make even a low-level mage look pretty damn impressive. And if he or she was already extra-strong to begin with . . .

Well, that mage might look something like what I’d just seen. But as reasonable as that sounded, it couldn’t be right. Because my mother couldn’t have fought off four demigods and a crazy-ass kidnapper all by herself.

Could she?

It seemed ridiculous. But, then, if the answer was no, why was I still here? If the mages had killed her or the kidnapper had carted her off, or anything had happened to keep her from meeting my infamous father, then I should have vanished. And other than for the rather large amount of skin I’d left in the road, I hadn’t.

And that was . . . well, that was kind of an epiphany. The whole damn night had been, really. Because I’d never seen the Pythian power used like that. In fact, I’d rarely seen it used at all, which was one of the reasons I’d been having so much trouble mastering it.

Jonas did his best to help me, but he wasn’t a Pythia. He’d overheard some of the stuff Agnes had said when training her heirs, and he’d seen a lot of what she could do. But trying to harness time with his help had been like building a car from a set of oral instructions when you’ve never seen one and the guy giving them has only a vague idea of what one is supposed look like.