"I thought it was merely an interim appointment."

Casanova smiled slightly. "That's why I'd like to see him."

Several other vamps made tentative movements towards us, as if they were thinking of joining the party. Most didn't get a chance to see Mircea very often, and with Tony under a cloud, they probably planned to do a little groveling. And blame everything on the fat man before the big boss gets any ideas, Marcello added in my head.

Stop that, I thought back.

"How brave of you," Marlowe said genially. "He's not in the best of moods, these days. Most people have been keeping a somewhat…safer…distance." The newcomers scattered so fast I almost didn't see them leave.

"Just you two, then?" It was still very friendly. I felt cold sweat breaking out all over my borrowed body.

"We'll convey everyone's best wishes," Casanova said, apparently unfazed. Marlowe glanced at me. I didn't say anything, but I didn't leave, either.

He shrugged. "If you insist."

We followed him down a long hall to a large bedroom/sitting room combo. I could tell by the fist-sized hole in the door that it was Mircea's. It looked like things hadn't improved since my last visit.

Unlike the muted colors that predominated in the public rooms, it was awash in color, something I'd failed to notice on my previous visit because the lights had been off. They still were, but Marcello's eyesight was a lot better than mine, and easily picked out the bright turquoises, reds and greens of traditional Romanian folk art in niches and painted on a huge carved wardrobe. The pieces should have looked gaudy and cheap next to the rich but understated brown and cream decor, but they didn't.

Other than the colorful art, the first thing I noticed was the bed. The broken post was still listing to the left, and the covers were still rumpled but no one was in them. A quick glance confirmed that Mircea wasn't lurking in any of the room's dark corners, either. But someone else was.

"Tami!" It was out before I could stop it. Tami looked confused, Casanova gave me an "I can't take you anywhere" expression and Marlowe grinned.

"Thank you. I was wondering how to tell which of you it was," he told me pleasantly.

I was too busy goggling at Tami to pay him much attention. She looked older than I remembered, more so than should have been true for seven years, and she was too thin. Even more of a worry were her clothes—a rumpled tan suit with torn pantyhose—which would have told me something was wrong even if her expression hadn't already said that she was on her last nerve. Tami had always taken pride in her appearance, never flashy but always neat and clean. The fact that it looked like she was still wearing the clothes they'd nabbed her in really bothered me. But she was alive.

Casanova sidled up, probably wanting to be in position so I could shift us out. That had been the plan, in case anything went wrong. Too bad it wouldn't work now.

"Don't bother," I said, to get him to stop elbowing me in the ribs. "She's a null."

"What?" Casanova frowned at Tami and she frowned back, fear starting to replace the confusion on her face.

"It's okay," I told her quickly, hoping I wasn't lying. It didn't seem to reassure her much, probably because she didn't know who the hell I was.

"In what definition of the term is this okay?" Casanova demanded.

I shot him a look, but he had a point. Since my power follows my spirit, not my body, it had seemed simple enough to slip in to see Mircea in disguise and shift him out. Even if the Senate had rigged a null bomb to prevent that, it wouldn't be triggered by Marcello. I should have remembered: nothing was ever simple where the Senate was concerned.

"It was a good plan," Marlowe said, almost as if he'd been reading my mind. He tried to look sympathetic, but that grin kept popping back out.

"Except for the part about it being a complete failure?" Casanova inquired.

"How did you get Tami?" I asked Marlowe.

"We heard that the mages had a null in their holding cells and asked to borrow her for a time," he told me readily. "We thought it would be cheaper than using up a bomb every time you visit."

And damn it, I should have thought of that. Parking a null beside Mircea's bed was the perfect solution. Unlike a bomb, Tami was «on» all the time. And the fact that a live null's power was effective only over a very limited area wouldn't matter if she was sitting right next to him. She was just as secure this way as in one of the Circle's cells, and her presence ensured that, if I showed up again, I'd be trapped until the vamps could nab me.

Like right now, for instance.

"I didn't know until we started chatting that the two of you were acquainted," Marlowe added.

I said one of Pritkin's bad words. No wonder Marlowe looked so damn happy. The Circle had handed him a major lever to use on me without even realizing it.

I decided to just skip the part where we did the threats and the bargaining and the arriving at the obvious conclusion thing. "If she's a loaner, the Circle is going to want her back," I pointed out.

If possible, Marlowe looked even more pleased. That damn grin was going to crack his face pretty soon. "We'll think of something," he assured me. "Shall we?"

I sighed. It was a good thing that I'd dressed Billy up for the occasion, because it looked like we were going to see the Consul after all. "Yeah. Let's get it over with."

Tami stopped dead when we entered the Senate hall and just stared. There was plenty to look at, from the huge red sandstone cavern to the knife-edged chandeliers to the colorful banners that hung behind the ornate seats that clustered around the huge mahogany slab of a meeting table. But I didn't need to wonder what had caused her mouth to drop open like that. It was hard to concentrate on anything else when the Consul was in the room.

I thought at first that, just for a change, she had decided to wear something that wasn't still alive. But then the gold and black snakeskin print on her caftan undulated, sending a tide of glimmering scales rolling up and down her body. And a huge snake's head rose behind her face like a hood, with gleaming black eyes that watched me malevolently. I realized with a start that she'd skinned what looked like the granddaddy of all cobras, but somehow kept it alive. Augustine, I decided faintly, would have had fits.

Billy moved to meet me, and I was relieved to see that at least he'd solved the breast issue. Augustine's creation fit me like a glove down to the waist, where it billowed out in a bell skirt with a slight train. I wasn't into antique fashion, but I'd seen enough period movies to argue with him about authenticity: it didn't look like something Marie Antoinette would have worn to me. He'd only sniffed and informed me that (a) styles had quickly changed after the queen's head went for a meander without her body, (b) we were talking about magical fashion here, not human and (c) I was an idiot. It was kind of obvious why Augustine wasn't exactly a household name. You had to really want the clothes to put up with the guy.

But damn, he could sew. Or conjure or whatever. I hadn't really appreciated his skill back at Dante's, what with the near asphyxiation that went with it, but despite the fact that I was never going to outshine the Consul, I thought I looked pretty good.

The basis of the dress was deep midnight blue silk, but it was hard to focus on that because of what was happening on top. Or, rather, what appeared to be happening inside the dress, because the more you looked at it, the harder it was to remember that this was fabric and not a night sky, and that those were jewels and not an unimaginable swoop of stars. Somehow, Augustine had created a rotating band of diamonds that looked an awful lot like the Milky Way.