both our existences was literally out of this world, hiding somewhere in Faerie. "He couldn't have forbidden you to see me—unless it's an old command."
For a long moment Rafe held himself unnaturally still, the flickering lights of the bar the only movement on his face. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, his head moved side to side. I glanced at Billy Joe, who had drifted off a few feet. The flames filtered through him eerily, gold and red and translucent umber. He pushed his Stetson up with an insubstantial finger. "Well, that sorta narrows it down."
I nodded. With Tony gone, there was only one person left whose commands could make Rafe choke at the mere thought of contradicting them: Tony's master.
The bar was hot and humid with too many bodies, but chills shivered down my arms anyway. Unfulfilled longing swept through me, blood and bone and skin stretched paper thin as part of me yearned, reaching out for someone who wasn't there. I glanced up at the sign over the bar: LEAD ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION; THAT WOULD MEAN BACKING UP. No freaking kidding.
Rafe was looking at me with big, concerned eyes. I could only think of one reason for him to be here: to ask me to see Mircea. And wasn't that just all I needed. I bit back the urge to scream. My nerves had a perpetually scraped-raw feeling these days, but it wasn't Rafe's fault. "You may as well go back," I told him unsteadily. "There's nothing I can do."
Rafe shook his head in a wild, negative motion, causing his dark curls to dance madly about his face. He looked around the room, eyes shifting in sudden darts as if he thought someone might be sneaking up on him. His nerves were showing, something he'd never been able to completely control, even at court. It had cost him more than once.
His gaze returned to my face, and there was desperation in it, but also determination. "I am not well," he said, and paused, as if waiting for something.
I blinked, fairly sure I was missing the point. Vampires don't get sick. Shot, burned, staked, yeah; the flu, not so much.
"I can summon a healer," I offered. Dante's was more than familiar with little accidents. A couple of hungry gargoyles had decided to snack on some of the animal acts the night before, only to discover that the trained wolves weren't wolves at all. The result had been a near apocalyptic battle in the lower levels that had given the on-site medical staff something to do for the rest of the night. And that sort of thing wasn't exactly unusual.
"I do not think a healer would be able to help," Rafe said slowly, his eyes brightening as no visible retribution was taken. I realized what he was up to as he looked at me eagerly. If he pretended he was talking about himself instead of Mircea, he could get around the prohibition. The thought drifted through my mind that Mircea must not be up to his usual standard, to have left such an obvious loophole.
"It doesn't matter," I said, hoping to forestall a painful explanation. "If I could do anything, don't you think I would have?" The geis that was putting me through hell was doing even worse things to Mircea. It strengthened depending on how long it had been in place, and due to a little accident with the timeline, he'd been dealing with it longer than I had. By about a century.
My former rival for the position of Pythia, a lunatic named Myra, had decided to remove the competition by a little creative homicide. She couldn't kill me, because there was a rule prohibiting the murderer of the Pythia or her designated heir from inheriting. But being savvy about all things time-related, Myra had worked out an alternative. If Mircea died before Tony and I had our little blowup, it would remove his protection from me, allowing Tony to do the dirty work for her.
The only problem with her plan was that it required fiddling with the time line, and my power didn't like that. It kept sending me back in time to prevent the assassination attempts. And during one of those trips, I met Mircea in a period before the geis was placed. The spell immediately recognized him as the other component needed to complete itself and jumped from me to him. That not only gave him the geis a century early, but it ensured that when he