"Cassie?" Pritkin reached for me, but I shrugged out of his grasp. "Don't shift." His voice was grim. I was ashamed to admit to myself that I had been seriously considering doing just that.

Dammit. He knew me too well. Better than anyone else.

"Why didn't you tell me you suspected a geis had been cast on us?" I didn't get an answer. No surprise there. I was used to Pritkin only talking when it suited him.

And then it hit me. Pritkin liked me. The last few weeks were starting to make sense now. Every time I'd felt a flare of awareness between us, he'd picked a fight and we had ended up in an angry shouting match. The idiot couldn't accept that he was attracted to me. It was easier for him to believe we were the victims of a spell.

A small thought whispered inside my head. Pritkin's incubus side might be attracted to my power, but Pritkin the man mustn't think too much of me if he had to blame a spell for his feelings.

I forced myself to ignore that thought and stepped right up to him. He flinched, but didn't step back, so I ended up shouting right in his face. "I know everybody trying to kill me lately hasn't exactly left a lot of time to chat, but—" My finger poked his chest in time with my words. "Why. Didn't. You. Tell. Me?"

Pritkin swallowed. "I knew you would be upset."

"Upset! You think this is upset?" I raised my finger again, but he grabbed my wrist and closed the gap between us. Suddenly, I lost track of what I was about to say. Pritkin's eyes had once again grown dark as he looked down at me with a strange expression on his pale face.

"What do you mean you don't feel that way about Mircea?" He raised his hand to my throat and traced a line across my skin where Mircea's mark used to be. His thumb was rough from calluses earned being a crazy war mage, yet his touch was warm and gentle. I shivered remembering what his touch felt like on other parts of my body. "It really is gone." Pritkin whispered as his lips followed the path of his finger. Oh, God.

We had to talk before this got out of control. My hands came up to push against his hard chest. A low growl came from Pritkin and suddenly my back was pressed against the wall by that same chest and I was being kissed open-mouthed and hungry. Only Pritkin wasn't the only one who was hungry. I was kissing him back. I couldn't resist sliding a hand across the nape of his neck and threading my fingers into his soft, gravity-defying hair.

With an oath he pulled his lips away and slammed his hands against the wall on either side of my head. His body trembled as he fought his incubus side. I looked into dark eyes that struggled between hunger and horror. "What should I have told you? That you threaten my control? Your scent, your touch is all it takes to make me a danger to you."

Oh. I swallowed. Leave it to Pritkin to actually tell me what he was thinking. After a lifetime living among vampires and the art form they made of lying, it always came as a surprise to hear the truth. It was one of the things I loved most about Pritkin. There weren't any games when he finally decided to talk.

"You wouldn't hurt me. I know that."

He tensed at my words and I could see the self-loathing cross his face. "You're a foolish child if you believe that."

After all these years he still blamed himself for the death of his wife.

I laid my hand against his chest. "Stop it. You have to stop beating yourself up about something that happened so long ago. It was beyond horrible, but it wasn't your fault your wife died. You didn't know what could happen!"

"There was no one else there to blame."

Pritkin's eyes had a lost look. I knew he was seeing his dead wife in his mind. In that moment I felt the temptation of the power of the Pythia. I could go back in time and save Pritkin's wife. I could bring her forward to this time. If I could only convince the past Pritkin that his wife really died there would be just a tiny risk of affecting the time line... wouldn't there? And I knew I was kidding myself. Even for Pritkin, I could not take that kind of chance. I closed my eyes.

"I'm sorry. I can't fix this."

His fingers lifted my chin until I was staring at Pritkin's face at his scariest. "Do not even consider it!" Of course he had guessed what I was thinking. "Sara is gone. It is the natural order of life in this realm and I have accepted it. Your responsibility is to make sure the time line is protected no matter who is affected." I nodded as a shudder ran through me. What would I do if we were talking about Pritkin's life?

But we weren't talking about that today. And it was time for my partner to come to terms with his incubus side.

"Pritkin, it's not your fault your incubus half is attracted to my power." Rosier's words echoed in my head. All that power in such a pretty package. Pritkin couldn't help who he was. That a part of me wanted to mean more to him than an emergency source of power was a thought I ruthlessly pushed away.

He swore and grabbed my arms. "No! It's not like that!"

"Then what? What is it like?"

Hurt flickered across his face before he let go and took a step back. I didn't think he was going to answer but he surprised me again.

"When I saw your body on the ground underneath MAGIC I thought I had lost you. You weren't moving and with the red dust everywhere it was hard to tell the extent of your injuries. In that moment…something broke in me." He reached out and gently brushed one of my unruly blonde curls behind my ear. "I've lived a long time. I've lost a lot of people who were important to me. I thought I had figured out how to protect myself and knew how to keep people from getting too close." Those gentle fingers were back, touching me with an awe and wonder that had my knees weakening. "I was wrong."

Oh. Pritkin didn't just like me, he actually cared about me. "But why did you think there was a geis? I don't understand."

"You make me afraid. You make me happy. You make me look forward to the next day." He grabbed my arms again. "Do you know how long it's been since I've felt like that? I believed that part of me was destroyed with Sara. It had to be a geis." He shook his head in disbelief. "There was no other explanation for how you could have become so important to me so quickly."

And suddenly the cloud of fear and stress and tension that made up so much of my life lifted. I took a deep breath. That dark cloud would be back. I didn't have to be the Pythia to know that. But today, for now, knowing that the connection I had with Pritkin was real…it was enough. I smiled.

My expression seemed to surprise him. "What now?" he asked, an unfamiliar vulnerability in his voice.

"Pick me up at eight and wear something nice. We're going on a date." I was rewarded with a tentative smile from Pritkin. Then I shifted.

AN: Thanks for sticking to the end. I had fun with this and I hope you did, too.