Tempt the Stars

“Billy,
please
. I don’t know what else to do!”
    He scowled. “That’s not fair.”
    And it really wasn’t. We sniped and argued and bitched at each other all the time, worse than an old married couple. And that was okay; that was standard in the families both of us had grown up in. But we didn’t handle the softer emotions so well, because we hadn’t encountered them too often.
    Billy had been part of a raucous family of ten kids, and while I got the impression that his parents had been affectionate to a degree, there had been only so much to go around. And he’d often been lost in the shuffle. And as for me . . 
    Well, growing up at Tony’s had been a lot of things, but affectionate wasn’t really one of them.
    As a result, both of us preferred to stand aloof from the softer stuff, or to ignore it entirely. So yeah, teary-eyed pleading was kind of cheating. But I was desperate.
    Billy made a disgusted sound after a minute and looked heavenward. Why, I don’t know. He’d been actively avoiding it for something like a hundred and fifty years now. Then he took off without another word, but with an irritated flourish that let me know that I’d pay for this eventually.
    That was okay. That was fine.
    I’d worry about the fallout later.
    Right now I just needed to
find her
.
    “Come on,” I wheedled, trying to sound calm and sweet. “I’m out of practice.”
    Nothing. Just a dark, echoing room, crossed and crisscrossed by ghost trails. So thick and so confusing that the Sight was no damned good at all.
    “Damn it, Laura!”
    And, finally, someone giggled.
    It was hard to tell where it came from over the sound of the wind and rain, but patience had never been Laura’s strong suit. A second later, there was an extra flutter next to the long sheers by a window. I lunged as she ran, too relieved to be careful, and slipped on a rug. And ended up falling straight through her.
    “No fair fading!” I gasped, hitting hardwood.
    She laughed, skipping merrily through the half-open door and into the hall as I scrambled to my feet. But she nodded. “No fading.”
    “No foolies?” I asked, following her. Because otherwise, it didn’t count.
    “No foolies,” she agreed solemnly.
    And then she stepped through 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 was why she’d won, nine times out of ten, when we played this game. But I’d learned a few things since the last time, and a second later, I stepped through the wall after her.
    Well, not exactly stepped. I shifted, moving spatially through the power of my office, just like I’d moved through time to get us here. It was a good trick, as Laura’s face showed when 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 rooms as I ran. Because unlike Laura, I do not go 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. So my nerves were taking a beating even before I pelted across another room, shifted through a fireplace, barely missed skewering myself on a poker, and darted out into the hall—
    And caught sight of Laura skipping straight through the middle of a couple of men headed this way.
    Or no, I thought, suddenly frozen.
    Not men.
    At least, not anymore.
    They were coming down a gorgeous 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 vampires using it. Well, one of them, anyway.
    Mircea Basarab, Tony’s elegant master, would have probably made my heart race in plain old jeans. I say probably because I’d never seen him in anything so plebian, and tonight was no exception. A shimmering fall of midnight hair fell onto shoulders encased in a tuxedo so perfectly tailored he might have just stepped out of a photo shoot. The hair was actually mahogany brown, not black as it looked in the low light, but the broad shoulders, trim waist, and air of barely leashed power were 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