“Amityville,” I muttered, but no one was listening.

“They were wrong,” Pritkin said shortly. He looked at me and frowned, then reached over and brushed my curls out of my eyes. I smiled at him blearily, which got a bigger frown for some reason. “You are certain it wasn’t a ghost?”

I nodded. It was about the only thing I was sure about.

“Can you describe it?”

“Didn’t you see it?”

He shook his head. “A dark cloud, nothing more.”

“I didn’t see much more than that.”

“Tell me what you can. Anything would help at this point.”

I tried to think back, but my head really hurt and the room was still swimmy and there just wasn’t that much to remember. “It was dark colored,” I said slowly. “Black or gray. Or really dark blue. And it had feathers—I think.” I racked my brain, but I wasn’t getting anything else. “It was big?”

“What about your servant? Did he see anything?”

It took me a second to realize that he meant Billy Joe. Pritkin had this weird idea that Billy was for me what an enslaved demon was for a mage—a capable, obedient servant who stayed unruffled in the face of adversity. When the truth was pretty much exactly the opposite. As soon as the crisis was over, Billy had fled into his necklace and I hadn’t seen him since.

I gave him a little poke, just for the hell of it, and got back the metaphysical version of the finger. “Billy doesn’t know anything,” I translated.

“Are you certain?”

Tell him to suck my balls!

“Pretty certain.”

Pritkin ran a hand through his hair. It was sweaty, and although he’d put on a pair of old jeans, they didn’t cover the marks from being hurled through a wall. He looked about as beat up as I felt.

A particularly livid bruise trailed up his rib cage and wrapped around his back—where he’d hit the wall, I assumed. He was standing close enough that I could reach out and touch it, so I did. It was hot under my fingertips—Pritkin was always a little warmer than human standard—for the instant before he moved away.

I let my hand drop. “You should get that seen to. You might have broken a rib.”

“It’s fine,” he said curtly, as another vamp came in carrying a phone.

“For you,” the man told me, his eyes already sliding south.

“Is there anyone in this apartment who hasn’t seen me naked?” I demanded, grabbing the sheet and the phone.

“I genuinely hope so, Cassandra.”

I sighed and let my head thunk down against the padded surface of the table. I could always tell how Mircea was feeling based on what version of my name he chose to use. When he was in a good mood, it was dulceață, the Romanian endearment that colloquially translated as “sweetheart” or “dear one.” When he was less happy, it was plain old Cassie. And when he was royally pissed but not showing it because he was Prince Mircea Basarab, member of the powerful North American Vampire Senate and allaround cool guy, it was Cassandra.

“Cassandra” was never good.

But this time, it wasn’t my fault.

“This time, it isn’t my fault,” I told him, wincing as Marco found another heretofore untortured cut.

“I am not calling to assign blame.”

“Then why the ‘Cassandra’?”

“You frightened me. For a few moments, I could not feel you.”

I frowned at the phone. “You’re in New York. How are you supposed to feel me?”

“Through the bond.”

“We have a bond?”

A sigh. “Of course we have a bond, dulceață. You are my wife.”

By vampire standards, I didn’t say, because that always got a Cassandra. The ceremony, if you could call it that, had been over before I fully knew what was happening. But that didn’t matter, because little things like the bride’s consent aren’t required in vampire marriages.

Except, that is, by me.

That was why Mircea and I were dating—or, at least, that’s why I was doing it, to figure out whether this whole relationship thing was something I could handle. He was doing it to humor me, when he remembered, although he clearly thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Mircea had been born in an era when men took what they wanted and kept it, as long as they were strong enough. And strength had never been one of his problems.

Listening, on the other hand . . .

“I listen,” a velvet voice murmured in my ear.

I bent my head and let my hair fall over the phone. It wasn’t much as privacy went, but around here, it was as good as it got. “Uh-huh.”

“And what does that mean?” he asked, sounding amused.

“It means ‘that’s bullshit,’ but I’m too high to think of a good comeback right now,” I said honestly.

“High?”

“Blitzed, baked, stoned . . .”

“I understood the term,” Mircea said, his voice sharpening. “My question was why?”

I hesitated. The truth was, I’d been pretty near hysterical when I woke up. I was getting better in crises, mainly because I’d had a lot of practice lately. But afterward . . .

I still had problems with afterward.

“Marco thought it best,” I finally said.

Mircea didn’t seem to like that answer. “I will speak with Marco,” he said grimly. “But for the present, I am more concerned about the attack this evening. I have heard my men’s report, such as it was. I would like to have yours.”

It was my turn to sigh. “I don’t know. It wasn’t a ghost; that much I’m sure of. And Pritkin swears it wasn’t a demon.”

“There are thousands of types of demons, Cassie. He cannot possibly be certain—”

“He’s pretty certain,” I said drily.

“—and you have recently had problems with several of them. A demon is the most likely culprit.”

“I think we should trust Pritkin’s judgment on this one,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else. That Pritkin was half demon himself wasn’t exactly universally known, but what type he was wasn’t known to anyone but me.

I intended to keep it that way.

“I am not so certain,” Mircea said, sounding sour. “But I would speak with the man. Can you put him on?”

I really didn’t think that was a great idea, considering that Pritkin and Mircea mixed like oil and water, only not as well. But I passed the phone over, anyway. I didn’t get much of the resulting conversation, both because it was pretty terse on Pritkin’s end, and because Marco had started the extraction process again.

“There can’t possibly be that many pieces of glass in my ass,” I gritted out, after a couple of agonizing minutes.

“Babe, it’s like you rolled in it.”

“It was all over the floor!”

“And when that’s the case, it’s best to avoid the floor,” he said drily, digging what felt like an inch into my tender rear.

“I’ll keep it in mind the next time I get possessed by an evil entity!”

“Demon,” Marco said, sounding final.

“It wasn’t a demon,” Pritkin argued, but I couldn’t tell if he was talking to Marco or Mircea. “Yes, I’m bloody well sure!”

Mircea.

“Okay, this is going to sting a little,” Marco told me, right before he set my butt on fire.

“Shit, shit, shit!”

“Gotta disinfect it,” he said imperturbably. “You’re not a vamp. You could get an infection.”

“In what? You just burnt my ass off!”

“He wants to talk to you,” Pritkin said, looking grim.

I took the phone back. “What?”

“Cassie?”

Mircea wasn’t accustomed to getting that tone from women, but I was too sore—in several ways—to care. “If Pritkin says it wasn’t a demon, then it wasn’t a demon. Goddamnit, Mircea! He ought to know!”

“And why is that, dulceață?” Mircea asked smoothly. And, okay, maybe I was going to have to revise that list. Because sometimes Mircea also used my pet name when he was being sneaky.

“He’s a demon hunter,” I said, forcing myself to calm down before I said anything stupid. Well, anything stupider, anyway. “It’s his job to know.”

“I will have my people check into all possibilities,” Mircea said, and I really hoped he was talking about the entity. “In the meantime, I need your promise that you will not leave the hotel.”

“Mircea, I was attacked at the hotel. How is staying here going to—”

“The guards will be doubled.”

“You could have tripled them—you could have had a guard per square foot—and it wouldn’t have made a difference! No one could have predicted—”

“We should have predicted it,” he said harshly. “We knew there would be an attack. I simply did not expect it so early. The coronation isn’t for another ten days.”

“But why wait until the last second?”

Mircea didn’t say anything, but the very pregnant pause made it clear that he didn’t think that was funny.

Of course, he didn’t find too much funny these days. He was currently trying to negotiate the first worldwide alliance of vampire senates. It was what he’d been working on all month, what he was doing in New York, where a lot of the senators had gathered for some kind of meeting prior to the coronation. But as formidable as his diplomatic skills were, there was no doubt that he was up against it. The senates had had centuries to plot and scheme and piss one another off, and they’d apparently done a pretty good job of it.

And nobody holds a grudge like a master vamp.

Add to that the ongoing war and now the coronation that was scheduled to be held at his estate, and it would have been enough to give anyone a headache. I didn’t want to add to his problems. And what he asked was easy enough.