"We can try a memory charm," Nick said, regarding them doubtfully.

"It won't hold," Pritkin argued. "Not with their training." He looked at Nick, his eyes shadowed with concern. "It seems you just joined the resistance openly."

I blinked, but it didn't help. The mask was absolutely perfect. I'd grown up around creatures whose emotions were often shown in the barest flicker of an eyelash, in an infinitesimal pause in conversation. I'd thought I knew how to read people, but even concentrating with everything I had, I couldn't find a flaw.

The sleek, deadly predator I'd just seen was simply gone. In his place was a pale, tired-looking man with plaster powdering his skin and clothes. Pritkin ran fingers through his hair, which, already wet with sweat thanks to the ovenlike temperature in the apartment, gummed into punk-rock spikes. At least he'll have to wash it now, I thought blankly.

Pritkin noticed me, and the touch of his eyes was enough to make my skin prickle. "Did you find him?"

I stumbled over to lean heavily against the wall. My heart was pumping against my rib cage, hard and fast enough that I could feel the pulse in my neck. "No." I closed my eyes as if in weariness, because Pritkin had proven able to read them all too easily in the past. But I was proud of my voice. It was the one I'd cultivated at court, the one designed to tell even vampires exactly nothing. I forced my heart rate to slow down, my breathing to even out. "It seems that djinn are like vamps; they don't leave ghosts."

"You said you found something." I opened my eyes to see Pritkin coming toward me. Okay, maybe there was a flaw, I decided. The walk was the same. He had the deadly fluidity of a fighter, all leashed strength and readiness. He stopped a little too close for comfort, those clever green eyes searching my face.

He's Tony in a mood, I told myself sternly, looking for someone to bleed because he's having a bad day. You feel nothing, no fear, because that attracts his attention better than anything else. You are calm, dreamy, serene. You feel nothing. "There was a ghost trail in the bathroom, but it wasn't from the djinn," I said casually. "Someone else died here, a while ago."

"Are you sure you're all right?" Nick came up alongside me. His eyes were on my dress, which had retreated from hopeful dawn into foggy night, with little tendrils of white creeping cautiously across a murky background.

"Fine," I said steadily. "The sink missed me on its way to destroy a cab."

Pritkin stared past my shoulder at the ruined bathroom and his scowl deepened. "We need to go. There's nothing for us here, and the human authorities will arrive soon."

I couldn't make myself touch his hand, so I twisted a fist in his coat, which was back to the old battered brown. I wondered where he kept the cool clothes. I held out my free hand to Nick and prepared to shift us all back to Dante's. "Yeah," I agreed, my eyes on Pritkin. "We're all done here."

Chapter 9

Casanova had pointed out that it would be unwise for me to occupy a suite, in case the Circle had spies on the lookout for long-term guests. Instead, he'd stuck me in what had once been a small storeroom in back of the tiki bar. I still had several cases of cocktail umbrellas in boxes under my bed, and barely enough room to turn around. Pritkin had it worse, being stuffed into the dressing room once reserved for the club's famous dead performers. It was larger, since it had once held their coffins, but he swore it still had a certain…odor. At the moment, that thought cheered me up considerably.

I finished pulling the oversized T-shirt I was using for a nightgown over my head as Billy drifted through the wall. I brought him up to speed on my conversation with Saleh while he sat on the edge of the bed and rolled a ghostly cigarette. "We need a team," I concluded.

"We are a team."

I was tired and I ached, in more ways than one. I hugged my pillow, which had all the comfort of one issued by an unusually stingy airline.

"The Cassie and Billy show might have worked for staying a step ahead of Tony," I said. "It isn't going to be enough to let us burgle a Black Circle stronghold."

"And we've had such great luck with partners."

"We can trust Rafe."

"Cass, I know you like the guy, but come on. A great warrior he ain't."

"We don't need a warrior," I said irritably. "I'm not planning to attack the Circle!"

"And your plans always work out perfectly, huh?"

"Are you trying to be a pain in the ass?"

"Nope, it pretty much comes naturally." He lit up and regarded me through a haze of ghostly smoke. "There's always Marlowe."

He meant Kit Marlowe, the onetime Elizabethan playwright. He was now the Consul's chief spy. "Yeah, that'd be healthy."

"You'd be saving Mircea as well as yourself. I'd think that would cancel a few debts," Billy argued.

"It might, if they didn't blame me for getting him into this mess in the first place."

"But he put the geis on you—"

"Which, as my master, he had every right to do. I'm the one who had no right to double it, even accidentally." I saw the objection trembling on Billy's lips. "And yes, I think their reasoning sucks. I'm just saying."

"I don't like them any better than you do." Billy sounded aggrieved. "But who else is there? We keep meeting these powerful types, but they're all freaking nuts."

"I'm not taking anyone back in time I can't trust. Or anyone incompetent. Or who has their own agenda."

Billy let out an exasperated sigh. "It's gonna be a little hard to assemble a team if you keep to those kind of standards. Someone loyal and strong who doesn't want anything? Come on."

I found myself getting furious all over again at Pritkin, who was supposed to be exactly that. I'd started to let down my guard with him, just because he was smart and brave and sometimes strangely funny. I should've kept in mind that none of that meant he was on my side. When I give my word, I keep it, he'd once told me. Yeah, right.

I toyed with the bedspread, blue and gold brocade with scratchy lace. Not for the first time, I wished for something less flashy and more comfortable. I'd had a soft cotton coverlet at Tony's that I'd used for years. It had faded in the wash, its bright, cheap flowers turning to soft pastels over time, like an English garden. It had gotten a little ragged around the edges, but I'd never let my fastidious governess change it for anything else. I'd liked it the way it was, flaws and all. But like the rest of my stuff, like Eugenie herself, it no longer existed.

"Cass?" Billy suddenly sounded awkward, something almost novel for him. "You know Pritkin was a jerk, right?" A jerk who also happened to be a friend, a tiny voice at the back of my mind whispered. Stop it, stop it. "Cass?"

The lump in my throat had grown enough to be almost painful, and my eyes had started prickling embarrassingly, and wow, was it time for a change of subject. "I know."

"Okay, then. We're better off. I never trusted him."

"I don't trust anybody," I said fervently. It was the only thing I was sure of these days.

"Anybody except me," Billy corrected. "So what's the plan?"

"I have to get the Codex," I said, starting with the one thing on which there was no argument. Pritkin had said it wouldn't help, but I guess I'd just seen how much I could believe him. "Only I can't bring it back here. It's been roaming around for over two hundred years; who knows what taking it out of the timeline would do?"

Billy looked confused for a moment, and then his eyes got wide. "You can't be thinking what I think you're thinking."

I scowled at him. "If the mountain won't go to Mohammed—"

"Mohammed wasn't an insane master vamp!"

"Mircea's not insane." Not yet, anyway. "He's…tormented."