As though the air had been sucked from the room, I gasped, and Nathan took a great, hissing breath at the realization the two vampires were likely connected.

"What could the Oracle want with the Soul Eater?" I asked quietly.

"What wouldn't she want with him?" Nathan replied grimly. "She has power, but she's been isolated for centuries. Think of what that would do to you."

Max nodded in agreement. "You'd definitely lose touch with a lot of your connections."

"And it would be easier picking up an evil coup in progress than starting your own from the ground up." My throat clenched. "My God… You don't think… "

Max looked from me to Nathan and back again, his jaw tight. "It would be handy to have a god in your pocket, and totally possible if you got in on the ground floor."

The door from the dining room swung open and Bella stuck her head in with a disgusted look. "I did say fifteen minutes, did I not?"

Max shot us a withering glance and mimed choking the life out of what I assumed was an imaginary werewolf.

Like the rest of the condo, the dining room was oversize and ostentatious. I had seen it only a few times—once on the tour, another when I'd become disoriented and taken the wrong door from the foyer. Max rarely used the room at all. He preferred to drink his meals in the stark, antiseptic kitchen, rather than mahogany-paneled, windowless grandeur.

Bella had set up at one end of the massive table, in the clean, golden light of one of the dual chandeliers. She seated herself at the head of the table, behind a miscellany of archaic-looking objects, some of which I recognized as items Nathan sold in the bookstore. The others—a piece of black, concave glass resting atop a wire stand, and a large collection of what appeared to be desiccated chicken bones—were totally foreign.

Max took the chair to her left and scoffed at the heap of bones. "Dinner?"

Nathan pulled out a chair for me on her right and sat between Bella and me.

Though she'd clearly heard his comment, Bella didn't give Max the pleasure of a response. "I tried diligently all day to make some kind of contact with my fellow assassins. Unfortunately, the werewolf contingency has all but fled Spain to return to our ancestral forests, and I know very few vampires."

"Surprise, surprise," Max muttered under his breath.

"I do not want to alarm you." Bella turned in her chair so she faced Nathan and me. "But I feel we are at a marked disadvantage against the Oracle. And I fear… "

"That she might be looking for the Soul Eater?" The question slipped automatically from my mouth.

She nodded, her expression hard, and continued. "I have pored over the meager library Max keeps—"