Tempt the Stars

you!”
    “—and to verify that the vampire Antonio had not lied about your father’s fate merely to torture you.”
    Which he totally would have done, I realized. Tony and I had had what you might call a suboptimal relationship. “But he didn’t.”
    “No. For once, it seems, he told the truth. Which means we must return this,” Jonas said, shaking the paperweight at me, “lest Antonio realize its importance and alter his actions in the future. Then we may never find it!”
    I said something unladylike, which he didn’t hear because it was becoming impossible to hear anything. I felt like screaming right along with the wards, if I’d had the breath and if it would have done any good. But it wouldn’t—just like using the last of my energy to shift us to the office, where we’d be trapped all over again, because I wasn’t going to be doing this twice in close succession. Not the way I felt right now, and not carrying two. And that was assuming I could manage to do it at—
    “Cass! Get ready to shift!” Billy’s panicked voice cut through the din.
    “In a minute,” I said irritably, rubbing the back of my neck.
    “Not in a minute!
Now
. Now, now, now, now, now, now, now!”
    My head came up. “What is wrong with you?”
    “You know how you said if I ran into problems to come back? Well, I’m coming back. And I got problems!”
    “What kind of problems?”
    “What kind you think?” he snapped. “I’m trying to lose ’em, but they know this place better than I do and I think they’ve finally found a reason to work together—”
    “Wait.” I glanced around. Narrow corridor; isolated part of the house; nobody around but us and a couple of more-or-less indestructible vampires. “Don’t try to lose them.”
    “What?”
    “Just get back here—now.”
    “You don’t get it, Cass. When I said
problem
, I meant—”
    “I got it. Just do it.” I stood up.
    “Cassandra?” Jonas was watching me narrowly. “What is it?”
    “Um,” I said brilliantly, since explaining this sort of thing usually didn’t go well. But it didn’t matter because I didn’t have time anyway. A second later, a horrible wail cut through the air, making the shrieking wards sound like a melody in comparison.
    I whipped my head around, but there was nothing to see. And Jonas didn’t look like he’d noticed anything. Until the air suddenly became thick and cold and hard to breathe, and the hallway started to shake perceptibly, and the light fixtures overhead blew out, one after the other in a long line.
    “Cassandra?” Jonas said, a little more forcefully this time.
    “I think it’s time for the midnight express,” I said, hoping I hadn’t just made a really big mistake.
    “And what does that mean?” he demanded.
    “It means choo-choo, motherfucker!” Billy screamed, swooping out of the ceiling. And right on his tail was a train, all right—of what looked like every damned ghost on the property.
    Holy shit,
I didn’t say, because I was busy grabbing Jonas and throwing us at the nearest door, just before the unearthly wind slammed into the hallway like a tornado.
    We crashed into the floor on the other side as it hit, boiling down the hall like a freight train of fury. Merely the wind of its passing was enough to rip light fixtures off the walls, to puff a week’s worth of ashes out of the fireplace, and to send china figurines plummeting to their doom. Half a dozen books went flapping madly through the air over our heads, only to tangle in the wildly twisting drapes as I dragged myself back up.
    Jonas lifted his head to stare at me. “What the—”
    “Ghosts!” I told him, staggering for the door.
    My ankle hurt, my lungs were still crying out for air, and my neck was on fire. But I didn’t stick around to assess the damage. I didn’t even wait until the storm was over. I stumbled out into the hall with Jonas on my heels, the two of us being buffeted here and there by late-arriving spirits.
    And then I stopped for a second in awe.
    Because there were no ghost trails here. The corridor in front of us was a solid rectangle of pulsing, angry green. There was no furniture dam anymore, either, just random bits of wood sticking out of the plaster like quills on a porcupine.
    There was also no pissed-off vamp.
    The one behind us was okay, judging by the renewed sounds of destruction battering the mound. But whoever had been on this end . . . well, I didn’t know where he had ended up. But I