Tempt the Stars

vent to once in a while about the absurdity of visiting dead parents or stopping time or
going to hell
 . . . ?
    It was driving me crazy, and I’d only had the job a few months. How had Agnes done it? And for decades?
    Of course, she hadn’t exactly been the poster child for normal. And that was despite having Jonas to help her. And while I doubted she’d told him everything, or even most things, I knew they’d talked. He wouldn’t have been able to train me otherwise.
    And suddenly, stupidly, I felt a sharp stab of jealousy for a dead woman.
    And okaaaay. That was enough for one day.
    I scraped the last of the guac out of the little plastic cup. “I’m think I’m gonna turn in,” I told Marco. “What was it you wanted to ask me?”
    The dark head tilted inquiringly.
    “Fred said there was something?” I prompted.
    He grinned. “Oh yeah. I wanted to know what you did to those witches.”
    “Why?” I asked warily.
    “’Cause they just called asking for an appointment tomorrow.”
    “Um.”
    Dark eyes narrowed. “Is there a problem?”
    “Better make it the day after. I’m . . . planning to sleep in.”
    He still didn’t ask. “Get a bath,” he told me, tapping the side of his nose.
    And then he ruined it by stealing the rest of my nachos.
    Bastard.
    I was washing out the damned T-shirt when I got a text message. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand before it vibrated off the edge and saw a big black question mark staring at me. I stared back at it for a moment, and then texted
2moro
.
    I waited to make sure it went through.
    Shit.
    Yeah. It went through.
    I left the tee to soak and got my weary butt in the shower. After washing an acre of Tony’s back forty down the drain, I leaned my head against the water-slick tile, wrapped a hand around my neck, and tried to relax. It didn’t work. I was tired, really, bone-achingly tired, to the point that I was surprised I didn’t just fall asleep right there.
    But I wasn’t tired enough.
    Not to relax, not to forget, not to just let it all go for a while and stop the whirlwind in my head
.
Lately, it had felt like one of those carnival games with the big spinning wheel and the barkers telling you to pay your money and take your chances. Only with my wheel, there was no point. Since every damned segment just held another problem.
    And the space the little clicker landed on this time was labeled Mircea.
    God, Mircea. No wonder Marco was being nice to me. He probably figured I was in for it already.
    I kind of figured that, too. Vampires think differently than humans about a lot of things, but I didn’t think seeing your girlfriend making out with another guy on your lawn was one of them. Not when it had been caught by some of the cameras on-site to record my big moment, which had ended up being different than expected.
    Not that that had stopped them from broadcasting it to the whole freaking world.
    I’d been expecting to hear about that—it was one reason the breakneck pace of the last week hadn’t bothered me. I preferred being somewhere else. But sooner or later, Mircea and I were going to have to talk, and wasn’t that going to be fun? When I couldn’t even tell him what had been going on, because that would out Pritkin as part incubus? And that so-sharp intellect wouldn’t take long to put two and two together, not when there’d only ever been one incubus-human hybrid in all history.
    I wondered which would bother Mircea more, me making out with a war mage or with the guy the world remembered as Merlin?
    Of course, I wasn’t the only one with secrets. Like that whole thing with the Pythias I’d half overheard. What the hell did Mircea want with a Pythia so badly?
    I knew what the senate wanted: having the Pythia in their corner gave them power in the supernatural community to rival that of the mages, something they’d never really had. And it didn’t hurt their efforts in the war, either. But this hadn’t been about the senate, had it? This had been about Mircea personally.
    So what had he wanted?
    Maybe it was only what I already knew—his brother Radu had been imprisoned by the Inquisition and tortured into madness. Going back in time to save him had been almost the first thing Mircea asked of me once we met again as adults. And it was certain that he loved his brother. He talked about him all the time. . . 
    But he didn’t talk about that. He didn’t talk about the centuries-long campaign he’d waged to save him. I