“Except for the part about it being a complete failure?” Casanova inquired.

“How did you get Tami?” I asked Marlowe.

“We heard that the mages had a null in their holding cells and asked to borrow her for a time,” he told me readily. “We thought it would be cheaper than using up a bomb every time you visit.”

And damn it, I should have thought of that. Parking a null beside Mircea’s bed was the perfect solution. Unlike a bomb, Tami was “on” all the time. And the fact that a live null’s power was effective only over a very limited area wouldn’t matter if she was sitting right next to him. She was just as secure this way as in one of the Circle’s cells, and her presence ensured that, if I showed up again, I’d be trapped until the vamps could nab me.

Like right now, for instance.

“I didn’t know until we started chatting that the two of you were acquainted,” Marlowe added.

I said one of Pritkin’s bad words. No wonder Marlowe looked so damn happy. The Circle had handed him a major lever to use on me without even realizing it.

I decided to just skip the part where we did the threats and the bargaining and the arriving at the obvious conclusion thing. “If she’s a loaner, the Circle is going to want her back,” I pointed out.

If possible, Marlowe looked even more pleased. That damn grin was going to crack his face pretty soon. “We’ll think of something,” he assured me. “Shall we?”

I sighed. It was a good thing that I’d dressed Billy up for the occasion, because it looked like we were going to see the Consul after all. “Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”

Tami stopped dead when we entered the Senate hall and just stared. There was plenty to look at, from the huge red sandstone cavern to the knife-edged chandeliers to the colorful banners that hung behind the ornate seats that clustered around the huge mahogany slab of a meeting table. But I didn’t need to wonder what had caused her mouth to drop open like that. It was hard to concentrate on anything else when the Consul was in the room.

I thought at first that, just for a change, she had decided to wear something that wasn’t still alive. But then the gold and black snakeskin print on her caftan undulated, sending a tide of glimmering scales rolling up and down her body. And a huge snake’s head rose behind her face like a hood, with gleaming black eyes that watched me malevolently. I realized with a start that she’d skinned what looked like the granddaddy of all cobras, but somehow kept it alive. Augustine, I decided faintly, would have had fits.

Billy moved to meet me, and I was relieved to see that at least he’d solved the breast issue. Augustine’s creation fit me like a glove down to the waist, where it billowed out in a bell skirt with a slight train. I wasn’t into antique fashion, but I’d seen enough period movies to argue with him about authenticity: it didn’t look like something Marie Antoinette would have worn to me. He’d only sniffed and informed me that (a) styles had quickly changed after the queen’s head went for a meander without her body, (b) we were talking about magical fashion here, not human and (c) I was an idiot. It was kind of obvious why Augustine wasn’t exactly a household name. You had to really want the clothes to put up with the guy.

But damn, he could sew. Or conjure or whatever. I hadn’t really appreciated his skill back at Dante’s, what with the near asphyxiation that went with it, but despite the fact that I was never going to outshine the Consul, I thought I looked pretty good.

The basis of the dress was deep midnight blue silk, but it was hard to focus on that because of what was happening on top. Or, rather, what appeared to be happening inside the dress, because the more you looked at it, the harder it was to remember that this was fabric and not a night sky, and that those were jewels and not an unimaginable swoop of stars. Somehow, Augustine had created a rotating band of diamonds that looked an awful lot like the Milky Way.

When Billy got up close, Marlowe flinched and stepped back. It took me a moment to realize why: stars are essentially millions of tiny suns. That probably explained the faint, disco-ball effect that the dress seemed to be throwing on the cavern floor, shedding a puddle of tiny prisms all around the hem.

“Cassie?” Tami was looking at Billy in disbelief, and I decided that switching back would make more sense than trying to explain at this point. Possession was not a skill I’d had when she knew me.

I slipped back inside my own skin and Marcello sighed in relief. Apparently, he hadn’t enjoyed the cohabitation any more than I had. “About time,” Billy muttered as he headed straight for my necklace. The tone clearly said that I’d be hearing about this later.

“It’s okay, Tami,” I told her, ignoring both of them. “I know you didn’t do anything wrong. This is just a mix-up.”

Marlowe laughed. “Mix-up? I don’t think so.” He’d apparently recovered from the singeing, although I noticed that he stayed a little farther back than before. There were tiny burn marks on his hose, the size of pinpricks, that I could swear hadn’t been there earlier. “She’s guilty as hell.”

Tami had recovered enough from the initial shock to send him a pretty good glare. It looked real familiar, maybe because I’d been on the receiving end of a carbon copy very recently. “Jesse! He’s your son, isn’t he?” I would have gotten it before, only she hadn’t had a kid of her own when I knew her. Or, at least, she hadn’t mentioned one.

Tami’s head jerked back to me. “Where is he? Is he all right? Are the others—”

“They’re fine. They showed up a few days ago. I have them somewhere safe.”

“Oh.” She visibly sagged, and for a moment I thought she was going to end up on the floor. But she recovered in time to give me a hug that forced whatever air Augustine’s contraption had left me out of my lungs. “Thank you, Cassie!”

“It’s no big deal,” I gasped. “You did the same thing for me once, if I remember. Although next time it would be kind of nice to get, oh, a phone call? You knew where I was.”

“But not what you’d say. And it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”

“You know me better than that!” I couldn’t believe she’d actually thought I’d say no.

“I used to know you better than that,” she corrected. “But times change. You got out of that life. Made a new start. And besides, paranoia is a damned useful quality.” We said the last together, laughing in spite of everything, because it had been the Misfit mantra that Tami had drilled into our heads practically every day.

Tami quickly sobered, however. “I was so worried, Cassie…the war mages wouldn’t tell me anything, and I didn’t know…Jesse’s smart, but so many things could have gone wrong and I—”

“Nothing went wrong.” I grinned ruefully. “Except that he wouldn’t tell me anything, either. Not that it surprises me now. He’s his mamma’s boy. Only I didn’t know you had a son.”

“I didn’t plan to get pregnant. When I found out, I hid it, and when Jesse was born…I had a talk with his father and he agreed to take him. His wife couldn’t have kids, and he somehow persuaded her to swear the baby was hers. We thought that, as long as Jesse took after him and didn’t show any signs of, of anything, he could get an apprenticeship one day, have a normal life. But when he was eleven—” she swallowed. “There started to be all these fires.”

It took a second before it hit me. “He’s a fire starter? Wow, that’s really…rare.” I caught myself, but it didn’t fool Tami.

“And really bad,” she said, her mouth twisting. “It put him straight on the Circle’s shit list, and they locked him up. His father spent two years petitioning to get him out, hired good lawyers, did all the right things. But they finally had to tell him it was hopeless. Something else, something minor, yeah, maybe they could have helped. But not for Jesse.” Her eyebrows drew together. “And I wasn’t going to put up with that shit!”

“You got him out.”

Her chin jerked up. “Hell, yeah, I got him out. They always treat us nulls like we’re useless, but when I walk up to a ward, it damn well goes down! But he’d been in there two years! He told me all kinds of things, how they live—like they’re in prison—how nobody ever touches them—like they’re contagious—and the rumors.”

“What rumors?”

“You haven’t heard? The Circle is talking about starting mandatory operations, as soon as the kids are old enough.”

I frowned. “For what?”

“To make sure they can’t reproduce, can’t pollute the precious gene pool, even if they somehow get loose!”

“It’s a charge the Circle denies,” Marlowe put in mildly.

Tami whirled on him in a fury. “The goddamned Circle wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on the ass!”

Only Tami wouldn’t think twice about telling off a master vampire in front of half the Senate, I thought, as Marlowe backed up a step. He raised his hands, mouth quirking in a smile he mostly managed to conceal. “I never said I believed them.”

“But why are you here?” I asked. “I mean, I know you broke the law, but it wasn’t anything that serious.” Locking up a den mother in the most secure prison they possessed seemed a little overkill, even for the Circle.

Marlowe arched an eyebrow at me. “Blowing up half a dozen of the Circle’s educational facilities isn’t that severe? Oh, but I forgot to whom I was speaking.”

I frowned at him, and then the rest of what he’d said registered. I transferred my frown to Tami. “Wait a minute! You’re the Vixen Vigilante, aren’t you?”

She scowled, running a hand over her creased skirt. “Do I look like a vixen to you?”

Considering what she’d been through, I thought she looked pretty good. But that didn’t mean I agreed with what she was doing. “What on earth were you thinking?”