“Um.”
“That isn’t why you came?”
“Not . . . exactly.”
“But you will, won’t you?” He squatted down in front of me, but because Jules was over six feet tall that still left us almost on a level. “You can ask,” he told me urgently. “They’ll let me go if you ask!”
“Let you go? But you’re a human. They don’t control you anymore.”
“Tell them that!”
“You mean they’re keeping you here? Like some kind of prisoner?”
“They’re . . . I don’t know. They say I can leave eventually, but they won’t tell me when. And in the meantime I’ve been here, right here, since just after you changed me. They were afraid of people seeing me at the hotel, so they brought me here—”
“Where is ‘here’?”
“I don’t know. The consul’s place, I think. I just know I went to sleep and woke up here and haven’t been out of here since! I asked to go outside, just to see the sunrise, but they wouldn’t let me. Said somebody might see me, and—and you’ve got to get me out, Cassie. Promise me you’ll get me out!”
“I will,” I said, trying to calm him down. Because he’d finally settled on an emotion and it was panic.
And I didn’t get that. I glanced around the room, but it didn’t seem so bad to me. No windows, of course, but presumably this was a vampire residence, so no big shock there. And everything else seemed comfortable enough. There was even a small TV.
And he’d been here only a couple of days.
Of course, Jules wasn’t exactly the most stoic of guys. Jules tended to freak out over a hangnail. But still.
“What’s so terrible?” I asked, honestly puzzled.
“Everything!” He lowered his voice; why, I don’t know. It wasn’t like Mircea couldn’t have heard him half a mile away. “Nothing. I don’t know.” His eyes darted around. “It’s creepy!”
“Creepy?”
“This place is crawling with vampires!”
“Jules. You used to be a vampire.”
“Yes, but I’m not one now. And they don’t look at me the same way anymore. All of a sudden, I’m not a person. I’m . . . lunch. Or a lab rat or—I don’t know. But they’re planning something, I know they are, and I need to get out of here before they figure out what!”
“A lab rat? Why a lab rat?”
He looked at me incredulously. “Cassie. Don’t you get it? Don’t you know what you did?”
“Made history,” Mircea said from the door.
I looked up and oh, goody, Kit had come, too. He looked even more rumpled than before, because he’d found an overcoat that had apparently been at the bottom of a laundry hamper somewhere. Or possibly been towed behind a van. With his wrinkled clothes and messy curls and sharp, dark eyes, he looked like a slightly better-looking Columbo. Or maybe more than slightly better, if he hadn’t been standing next to a shirtless Adonis.
And frowning at me.
“Mircea . . .” I said, starting to get creeped out, because I wasn’t imagining it. Kit’s dark eyes were boring a hole into mine.
“I let him into my mind,” Mircea explained. “Not into the spell,” he added, at my look of alarm. Because the last thing I needed was the Senate’s chief spy probing around my cranium. “I don’t control that; you do.”
“My mother did,” I corrected.
But Mircea shook his head. “She may have laid the spell, but she wasn’t powering it. You were. And unless this magic runs counter to every other kind we know, the one who powers a spell controls it.”
“But I haven’t been controlling it. I don’t know how to control it.” I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and didn’t even know how to get home.