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Chapter One

“You gots big”

The sirl in the doorway She was hard to see, shih her, and overwritten by the hazy, graffiti snarl of ghost trails weaving through the air I felt some of the muscles in my neck unclench

And then tense back up when a too-loud voice called from a nearby room, “Cassie?”

I refrained froht scare her, and I couldn’t afford that now “Be right there,” I said softly, sirl

“What?” the voice asked, louder this time

I looked behind me to see the hite head ofout of an office door With the crazy hair and the pink cheeks and the Coke bottle glasses, he looked like Einstein on acid But, despite appearances, he deserved his position as the de facto leader of the ical world Jonas headed up the powerful Silver Circle, the largest organization of ic workers on earth

But greatthing well Like when he refused to put a hearing spell on himself because the rest of us just talked too softly Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for him

“There’s no need to whisper,” he bellowed “I assure you, the shield will hold”

“So you keep tellingspell he’d cast to keep any noise weout into the rest of the house That was kind of i on train-wreck territory here Of course, that pretty much described my life lately

My name is Cassie Palmer, and I’m the newly crowned Pythia, aka the world’s chief seer That sounds a lot more i taxi rides through ti killed As I was currently a couple of decades back, trying to rob uy who e

But my nerves didn’t think so

Maybe that’s why the spotted mirror over the fireplace showednervous fingers through theh to make my freckles stand out starkly, and wide, startled blue eyes And a T-shirt that proclaiht

Let’s hope so, I thought fervently

Fortunately, as vauy who had been the Renaissance equivalent of white trash But Tony had one hard-and-fast rule: nobody missed dinner I wasn’t sure why, because vampires don’t need to eat—food, anyway And old standard for va taste buds

Maybe it was tradition, so to in death Orhis usual asinine self and just wanted to enjoy his dinner in front of a bunch of people who mostly couldn’t Either way, it meant that Jonas and I should have an hour before anybody interrupted us

Assu the spell held, anyway

Jonas didn’t look too worried “You could dance an Irish jig in here,” he boasted, “in clogs, and no one would hear”

“No, but they ht feel the reverberations—”

“In this?” He gestured around at the creaks of Revolution-era floorboards, the lash of rain against centuries-old s, and the inter shadows leaping across original plaster walls Tony lived in a historic farmhouse in the Pennsylvania countryside, which was usually picture-postcard pretty

This wasn’t one of those times

“Or scent us,” I added

“From across the house?” Jonas scoffed “They’re not superhuman”

I blinked “Well, actually—”