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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 roo--just Abrupt ht 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 es are still hu 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 estured 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--"

"You give your vampires too much credit, Cassie," he told e, always bet on theto point out But I didn’t because I wanted him to shut up already I’larize the booby-trapped office of a va that now That was Jonas’ thing I was here for so nervously back at the girl

Mercifully, she was still there, even a bit ed around by the hair had taken on a pinkish hue, and her dress, part of which disappeared through the floor, was now a pale shade of blue I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding

The ghost’s naether as kids, back when I called this place horown up and shewell, she never would

It’s one of the hard facts about ghosts: when you die, you prettyif you’re a one-arhost; it’s just the way the energy manifests Mostly, they learn to roll with it Beetlejuice style, throwing severed heads at unsuspecting tourists--the ghostly ter diseory train

Humor tends to take on a macabre bent after death

But the downside is that, if you die at five years old, you stay five You ain wisdom of a sort But it’s a kid’s wisdo like an adult

Even after more than a hundred years you don’t

That was a problem, since I needed information, and I needed it badly Specifically, I needed to talk to uest, too But who had died when I was younger than Laura appeared now

Of course, visiting a dead woht? Only I never get easy I’d spent the better part of a week looking for her, and come up with zilch But I had to find her; a friend was in trouble and Moht kno to help hiood chance that Laura knehere she was

But if I re her cooperation was likely to be tricky