At least I didn’t scream, I thought, clutching the door. Six months ago, I would have been screaming my head off, and flailing my way out of the open carriage we were in despite it being freeze-your-ass-off degrees outside. And slip sliding my way back down the icy bridge, hoping that none of the finely dressed monsters in the carriages behind me were hungry.

My name is Cassie Palmer, and six months ago, I was a down on my luck secretary who read Tarot in a bar. I clipped coupons, shopped yard sales, and knew fifteen different ways to dress up ramen. Had anybody told me that, by December, I would be Pythia, the chief seer of the supernatural world, and on my way to a vampire ball full of traitors, I’d have either laughed or edged slowly away, depending on how crazed they looked.

I wasn’t laughing now.

I was swallowing blood and looking up to find my second companion on his feet, his dark hair flying out behind him on the wind, his hand gripping the back of the coachman’s seat. “Where?” he demanded.

“By the portcullis,” Pritkin said, his voice tight. “You see?”

I assumed it was a rhetorical question, since a vampire’s eyes didn’t miss much, especially this vampire's. Mircea Basarab was a first-level master, the highest vampire rank, which came with a lot of nifty bonus features. That included eyesight with a telephoto ability that I’d found out about recently when Mircea and I had briefly shared power.

In fact, that was the whole reason I was here, freezing my silk covered ass off: Mircea had discovered a spell that allowed two or more people to share magical gifts, assuming that they were lovers—or in our case, had recently been lovers.

It sounded like a nifty idea—until you learned the catch. The spell wasn’t really about power sharing; that was just a byproduct. It was about soul sharing, linking you to someone else at the deepest level, which also didn’t sound too bad.

Until you realized: at that level of connectedness, when one of you died, you both did.

Yeah.

I wasn’t a fan.

People had been trying to kill me ever since I got this job, because we were at war and a Pythia was a formidable opponent. Especially a young Pythia who wasn’t frail and half dead from poison like the last. And then completely dead, because they’d gotten Agnes in the end, despite the fact that she was as wily as they came.

But they hadn’t gotten me.