Tempt the Stars Read Free Page A

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 place anywhere, I assumed there was a reason he had decided to go all out. Probably the same one that had Tony forcing a family on a strict diet to sit through a feast every night.
    For a second I wished I could have seen Tony, his three-hundred-plus pounds stuffed into a penguin suit, for once as supremely uncomfortable at one of his dinners as everyone else. But I wasn’t going to. Because the vamp at Mircea’s side, the one with the dark curly hair and the goatee and the deceptively kind brown eyes, wasn’t Tony.
    Shit,
I thought viciously, and backed swiftly into the room I’d just run out of.
    Which was absolutely the right thing to do.
    At least it was until they followed me in.
    In a panic, I shifted—also the right move, since there were no other doors out of there. But shifting in a split second in a panic isn’t easy, and this time I didn’t manage it. Or, rather, I didn’t
completely
manage it.
    Son of a bitch!
I thought desperately, finding myself trapped in the fireplace as two high-level master vampires walked into the room.

Chapter Two
    I tried shifting again but went nowhere, almost as if I was stuck. Which might have been because I was, I realized a second later. Half of my body was in the next room, having shifted back through the fireplace all nice and proper. But the other half . . 
    The other half was still on this side of the wall, protruding through the blackened old bricks from just above the waist.
    I twisted and turned