“Hey!” I said, staring. Because that wasn’t an ordinary bracelet. “Give that back!”
But the only response was some chittering from atop a curtain rod over some fake windows and a flash of scary-looking teeth.
“That is why,” Mircea told me. “Claude put too much magic into it—of the wrong kind.”
“The wrong kind?”
“That is what I want to show you,” he said, as I ran around, trying to catch the little thief. Which stayed just ahead of me, only occasionally pausing to look back over its shoulder with beady little eyes.
But it was paying too much attention to me, and not enough to Mircea. Who snatched it out of the air as it leapt past, going from side table to sofa. A moment later, I had my bracelet back, and Mr. Handsy had been dumped onto his jacket again, where he continued to watch me malevolently from underneath a banana leaf.
“Great for kleptomaniacs!” I said, scowling.
“It’s a bit more troublesome than that,” Mircea said, looking down at his desk.
He’d spread out a cloak on it, a pretty standard thing in black, with a high neck and a white satin lining. It looked like the sort of thing you’d wear to the opera, or to a costume party if you wanted to do a high-end version of Dracula. But I was guessing that it was more important than that, because Mircea was gazing at it like it was a sacred relic.
“Stay here and watch this,” he told me.
“Watch what?” I asked, as he took another cloak, a ladies’ one this time, and walked back into the bedroom with it.
He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t sure what it was in the jungle of items spread around that I was supposed to be watching. A bear with real fur and little beads for eyes watched me with distrust from a painted forest and sent three adorable cubs scrambling up a tree for protection. A school of dolphins chased each other around a dress that shimmered like sunlight on water and splashed what felt like real droplets at me as the pod raced by. Another dress boiled red and gold and black, like lava, with the “crust” on top making ever-changing patterns on the mesmerizing surface.
And then I felt something crawling up my hand.
I shook it instinctively and stumbled back, but the small creatures running up my arm didn’t come off. Which was alarming, because they looked like small golden beetles. Exactly like.
Crap!
I danced around some more, but it didn’t help. And now they were inside my tee and scurrying over my skin, and I got a sudden flashback to The Mummy and freaked the hell out. But they weren’t trying to eat me, I realized a moment later. They were trying to—
“Oh,” I said, catching a brief glimpse of myself in a mirror. But not of my messy hair. I walked over to the wall to get a better look, and yeah, that’s what I’d thought. They were styling it.
I stared at them as they scurried over my head, tossing aside my scrunchy disdainfully and working quickly to form an elaborately braided hairstyle. It was sort of a twenties bob crossed with Heidi, which they formed and then clamped off, using their bodies like jeweled hair pins to keep it all in place. It was a gorgeous updo, the sort of thing I’d never worn, and I suddenly wished I had someplace to show it off. I turned this way and that, watching the “pins” glitter and gleam. It was beautiful!
“Cassie?”
“What?”
“Do you see it?” Mircea asked, from the next room.
“See what?”
“See me,” he answered strangely—or maybe not. Because when I glanced around again, the interior of the cloak was no longer white, but looked like a TV screen, if TV screens could drape over a desk.
I moved closer and found myself looking down into a dizzying view of the bedroom. It was skewed because Mircea was holding something up at an angle—presumably the other cloak, since the view had folds in it. He threw it over the bed after a moment, and the room skewed even more, showing me a flash of the open bathroom door, the wall, and, finally, the ceiling.
“Do you see?” he asked again.
“I see the bedroom,” I said, and saw part of his head nod.
A moment later he came back into the living room, and strode across to join me. “That’s the problem,” he told me.
“The problem is that I can see the bedroom?”
“No, the problem is why you can.”
He indicated a chair, so I took it, and he did a double take at my hair. His lips quirked. “What?” I said defensively, my hand going automatically to my new do.