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"No foolies?" I asked, following her Because otherwise, it didn’t count

"No foolies," she agreed soleh a wall

Technically that wasn’t fading It was also her patented get-out-of-jail-free card, since the child I had been couldn’t follow It hy she’d won, nine tias since the last tih the wall after her

Well, not exactly stepped I shifted, h the power of et us here It was a good trick, as Laura’s face shohen I rematerialized a couple feet behind her "How’d you do that?" she asked, eyes bright

And then she took off again, vanishing through a bookcase

I went after her, trying to remember the layout of these rooo incorporeal when I shift I just pop out of one place and into another, and popping into the middle of a chair or a table wouldn’t be fun Soeven before I pelted across another roo ht sight of Laura skipping straight through the ht, suddenly frozen

Not eous old spiral staircase, one of the house’s best features It was made out of oak but had been burnished to a dark shine by the oil on thousands of hands over hundreds of years But it didn’t hold a candle to the va it Well, one of theant master, would have probably made my heart race in plain old jeans I say probably because I’d never seen hiht was no exception A shiht hair fell onto shoulders encased in a tuxedo so perfectly tailored he ht have just stepped out of a photo shoot The hair was actually ht, but the broad shoulders, trim waist, and air of barely leashed poere no illusions

Still, he looked a little out of place in a house where his host was lucky if he remembered to keep his tie out of the soup Since Mircea never looked out of place anywhere, I assuo all out Probably the sa a faht

For a second I wished I could have seen Tony, his three-hundred-plus pounds stuffed into a penguin suit, for once as supremely uncomfortable at one of his dinners as everyone else But I wasn’t going to Because the vamp at Mircea’s side, the one with the dark curly hair and the goatee and the deceptively kind brown eyes, wasn’t Tony

Shit, I thought viciously, and backed swiftly into the roo to do

At least it was until they followed ht move, since there were no other doors out of there But shifting in a split second in a panic isn’t easy, and this tie it

Son of a bitch! I thought desperately, finding h-level master va again but went nowhere, alht have been because I was, I realized a second later Half of h the fireplace all nice and proper But the other half

The other half was still on this side of the wall, protruding through the blackened old bricks from just above the waist

I twisted and turned desperately but went nowhere And then I tried to shift again in a frenzy But half a dozen attempts in quick succession only left me dizzy and with a serious desire to throw up And no freer than I’d ever been

A glance down at my waist showed that at least I hadn’t been cut in two, like an inept ician’s assistant, which is what I’d always assu bunch of bricks had puddled up aroundfor space they weren’t finding And giving off the subtle grind of stone on stone in the process

I freaked a little at that, because if it was audible to my ears, it probably sounded like an avalanche to the vamps But when I looked up, only the fireplace screen was looking back at s with a hundred colors and a bunch of bug-eyed insects all over it

But there were no valy, they hadn’t noticed les, anyEither the darkness in the big old fireplace or the tackiness of the screen had shielded uessed the storm had covered any noise I made, or else I was still barely inside the sound shield Jonas had laid He’d linked it into a section of the house wards, and I wasn’t sure how far that extended

Not that itaren’t the only senses that are stronger for a va like a--

"It’s the girl, isn’t it?" the second va for a second, when it felt like evenhis companion a drink "She plays all over the house"

And then it started back up again

Of course the house ser self slept at the other end of the hall; ouldn’t it?

I sed and wondered, not for the first time, what the life expectancy was for Pythias

Why didn’t I think it was very high?

"No I meant, that’s why you’re here," the other vamp said, dark eyes narrowed in suspicion

That wasn’t unusual He could be as char as any of his kind, but unlike with Mircea, it wasn’t his job His na for Her Majesty, queen of England, to doing the sae of the dreaded North American Va most U S vaovernment But for me, it didn’t see one of the senators The one as currently looking with aave you that idea?"

"Don’t be coy I’ve seen you put less effort into char countesses--"

"Who nor brandy

"--than into that child ‘Why, isn’t that a pretty painting, Cassie? However did you do it?’" Marlowe mimicked