Tempt the Stars

down. And then threatened to drag me if I didn’t go by myself.
    I’d managed to avoid being carted off like a sack of potatoes, but only just. And now the ceiling of my bedroom seemed to be pulsing in and out, even with me flat on my back. It was kind of trippy, but it was also disturbing.
    But not as much as what had just happened to Jules.
    Oh God, what had I done?
    It was a stupid question. I knew what I’d done. I’d stripped Jules of his master status, destroyed his position in the family, which was pretty much everything to a vampire, and reduced him to a servant at best, prey at worst.
    I hadn’t just ruined his life; I’d destroyed his death.
    And okay. He’d just finished saying how much he longed for a do-over, but that was
Jules
. He should have been an actor, because he was a drama queen and everybody knew it. And he’d been facing a situation where even a normal human life had probably looked pretty damned good by comparison. But tomorrow? The next day? The day he looked at his beautiful, unchanging face in the mirror and saw the first wrinkle?
    I tried to tell myself that it would be okay. Once the ceiling stopped waving around, I’d figure everything out. I’d sit down and take his hands in mine and . . . and do the opposite of whatever I’d just done.
    Except that I didn’t know what I’d just done.
    It seemed like he should be just a slightly younger version of a vampire. But I hadn’t been trying to shave off a little time; I’d been trying to lift a curse. And some people considered vampirism to fall under that category. So maybe my power, which frequently had a mind of its own, had misunderstood.
    And decided to lift
all
the curses.
    That would explain the imagery of the book, which had been so different from the less-than-creative calendar flip my brain usually showed me when I time-shifted. But a calendar wouldn’t be appropriate if I was regressing Jules through his life rather than just through time. So it got clever and came up with a biography instead.
    Okay, I could go with that.
    But that still didn’t explain how I’d done it.
    Or how to fix it.
    I put an arm over my face, trying to block out the room, trying to block out everything. But it didn’t help. I still saw Jules’ panicked face—his
human
face. Because whatever the reason, he was free of the disease that caused vampirism.
    So if I aged him, wouldn’t he age as a human? And what if I got another of those crazy power surges, like the one that had regressed him eighty years in a couple of seconds? He didn’t have immortality on his side anymore. He could end up an old man.
    Hell, he could end up
dead
.
    Like me, when Mircea found out.
    Because Mircea was going to
kill
me.
    And it wasn’t like he didn’t have cause. Sure, he could make Jules a vampire again, but he’d start out a newborn, wouldn’t he? Just like everyone else. And there was no way to know if the delicate cocktail that made a master vamp would come together for him a second time. Part of the equation was desire, and the first time around, Jules had had it in spades. But now? When he knew he’d only go so far and no farther? When he’d had time to be disillusioned?
    He might be lost to the family forever, thanks to me.
    And that was . . . that was a very bad thing.
    Jules hadn’t just been a vampire; he’d been a master. And master vamps weren’t exactly a dime a dozen. They were a precious part of any senior master’s property, more valued than money or land or virtually anything else except power, because almost anything else was easier to get. Any master could make a vampire, but to make another master . . . That was tricky.
    A huge number of things went into the process that led to some vampires transitioning to master level, but the power of the one who had turned them was a large part of the equation. It meant that low-on-the-totempole masters, like Fred or Rico or Jules himself, had only a very small chance of ever producing a master. So much so that most low-ranking masters preferred to remain with their families rather than to strike out on their own and form another family they might not be able to protect.
    But even in cases like Mircea’s, masters were still rare. Most vampires remained vampires, stuck as servants and errand runners, lackeys and paper pushers for all eternity. Having one transition to master status was a cause for celebration and a source of personal pride for his maker, and likely a status