Free Touch the Dark by Karen Chance

— Alphonse would get a chance to seize control of the operation, and that worked for me. Alphonse and I weren’t exactly friends, but as far as I knew, he had no reason to want me dead besides the fact that Tony had ordered it. I grinned; keep talking, Tony. Unfortunately, one of the two huge vamps in leopard-skin loincloths that framed the Consul’s chair came forward and removed the mirror after a minute. Too bad; I’d started to enjoy myself.
    Pressure from Rafe’s hand warned me to keep a blank expression. Just as it wasn’t a good idea to show fear or weakness in a court situation — and this was pretty much the court of courts — it also wasn’t bright to show too much amusement. Somebody might take it as a challenge, and that would be very bad. I quickly readjusted my expression to the poker face I’d used growing up. It wasn’t hard: the little joy I’d been able to summon would have died anyway when I turned back to the Senate. With no more Tony around to distract them, everyone’s attention was suddenly on me, and it was unnerving, even to someone who had regularly attended family meetings. Tony had insisted, after his resident telepath was turned and lost her powers, that I be there, especially if rival families were going to send reps. I don’t know why. I can’t read minds and the odds of my Seeing something about anyone present were slim. I’d told him a hundred times, I can’t switch on the gift like turning on a TV, and when it does come, I don’t get to choose the channel. He’d ignored me, maybe because he liked the prestige of having his personal clairvoyant at his side like a trained dog. Anyway, after the number of very frightening people I’d seen, I had thought nothing could impress me. I’d been wrong.
    Besides the Consul’s, there were twelve places at the table. More than half were empty, but the ones that were filled made up for it. A dark-haired woman sat nearest to me, dressed in a long velvet gown. A little cap decorated with pearls as big as my thumb framed her face, and heavy gold embroidery traced its way up her burgundy skirts. Her skin had the opalescent sheen of naturally pale skin that hasn’t seen the sun in centuries, and was marred only by a ridge of scar tissue around her throat that a silk ribbon didn’t quite conceal. Someone had gotten close enough to this beauty to take her head but hadn’t heard that this alone won’t kill a vamp. If the heart is intact, the body will mend, although I winced at the amount of effort it must have taken to heal a wound like that.
    Next to her sat the only person at the table I recognized. I could hardly fail to do so since Tony boasted about his connection to the famous Dracula line at every opportunity, and had portraits of all three brothers on the wall of his throne room. He had been made not by Vlad III Tepes, the Dracula of legend, but by the great man’s elder brother, Mircea. We’d entertained him in Philly when I was eleven. Like many children, I loved a good story, which was lucky since there was little Mircea liked better than to go on about the bad old days. He’d told me how, when his younger brothers Vlad and Radu were in Adrianople as hostages — the Ottoman sultan didn’t trust their father to honor a treaty otherwise — Mircea encountered a vengeful gypsy. She hated his father for seducing and then throwing aside her sister, who’d been Dracula’s mother, so she cursed Mircea with vampirism. I think the idea was to end the family line, since a vampire can’t father children and everybody had assumed that the hostages weren’t coming back. But, as Mircea pointed out, she actually did him a favor. Shortly thereafter, Hungarian assassins working with some local nobles captured, tortured and buried him alive, something that might have been a real downer if he hadn’t already been dead. Under