“A little early for you to be up and around, isn’t it?”

“My brother has no respect for my sleep cycle.”

There was something preternaturally sexual, she thought, about a vampire staring out from the cloaked light. Or there was with this one. “Hoyt had a rough one.”

“So I could see for myself. He looked ill. But then…” The smile was slow and deliberate. “He’s human.”

“Do you work on that kind of thing? The silky voice, the dangerous smile?”

“Born with it. Died with it, too. Are we going to come to terms, you and me?”

“I think we have.” She saw his gaze slide down to her hand, and the stake under it. “Can’t help it.” But she lifted the hand away, hooked her thumb in her belt. “It’s ingrained.”

“Do you enjoy your work?”

“I guess I do, on some level. I’m good at it, and you have to like doing what you’re good at. It’s what I do. It’s what I am.”

“Yes, we are what we are.” He stepped closer. “You look as she must have when she was your age. Younger, I suppose, she’d have been younger, our Nola, when she looked as you did. Women wore down faster then.”

“A lot of times vampires look to family for their first kills.”

“Home’s the place you go where they have to take you in. Do you think any of the others in this house would be alive if I wanted them otherwise?”

“No.” So it was time for honesty. “I think you’d have played along with them for a few days, maybe a week. Get some jollies out of it. And wait until they trusted you, let their guards down. Then you’d have slaughtered them.”

“You think like a vampire,” he acknowledged. “It’s part of your skill. So, why haven’t I slaughtered the lot of them?”

She kept her eyes on his, struck suddenly by the fact it was nearly like looking into her own. Same color, same shape. “We are what we are. I guess that’s not what you are, or not anymore.”

“I killed my share in my day. But excepting that I once tried to kill my brother, I never touched my family. I can’t say why except I didn’t want their lives. You’re family, whether either of us is comfortable with that. You come from my sister. You have her eyes. And once I loved her, quite a lot.”

She felt something—not pity, it wasn’t something he asked for. But she felt a kind of understanding. Following the feeling, she drew the stake out of her belt, keeping the point toward her, and handed it to him. A look of bemusement passed over his face as he studied it.

“I’m not going to have to start calling you Uncle Cian, am I?”

He managed to grin and looked pained at the same time. “Please don’t.”

They parted ways, with Cian going downstairs, then into the kitchen. He found Glenna fussing with tea trays. She looked a little hollowed out, he thought, and shadowed around the eyes.

“Have you ever considered having someone else play mother?”

She jerked at his voice, clattering the cup she was holding onto the tray. “Guess I’m jumpy.” She reset the cup carefully in its saucer. “What did you say?”

“I wonder why one of the others can’t deal with food now and then.”

“They do. Well, Larkin’s slippery, but the others do. Anyway, it keeps me busy.”

“From what I’m told you’ve been busy with things nondomestic.”

“Hoyt spoke to you.”

“He seems to enjoy waking me in the middle of the day. Which is why I want coffee,” he added as he moved to the counter to make it. When he saw her frowning at the stake he set beside the pot, he shrugged. “A sort of peace offering, you could say, from Blair.”

“Oh, well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

He shifted, caught her chin in his hand. “Go lie down, Red, before you fall down.”

“That’s what the tea’s about. It’s a restorative. We need it. Batteries dead low here.” She managed a smile, but it faded quickly. “She brought a storm, Cian. She has someone with her who has enough power to call a storm, to block the sun, so we need to recharge those batteries. Hoyt and I have to work, and we need to work with Moira. We need to pull out what she has, help her hone it.”

She turned back, began to arrange cookies on pretty little plates, anything to keep her hands moving. “We were separated today, the three of us on the high cliffs, Blair and Larkin below. They could’ve been killed, and we couldn’t have helped them, couldn’t have stopped it. We didn’t see it coming because we were so focused on the transportation spell. And when it came, when the power whipped around and slapped us down, we were already tapped out.”

Suffering for it now, he thought. Humans always would suffer for what they’d done, and for what they hadn’t. “Now you have a better idea of your limits.”

“We’re not allowed to have limits.”

“Oh, bugger that, Glenna.” He snatched up a cookie. “Of course you have limits. You’ve expanded them, and likely you’ll push the box a bit wider before you’re done. She has limits as well, and that’s what you’re forgetting. Lilith has weaknesses, and is neither invulnerable nor omnipotent. Which you proved today by slipping five of her trophies out from under her.”

He bit into the cookie as he got down a mug.

“I know I should think of the five we saved. Blair said to take the victory.”

“And she’d be right.”

“I know. I know. But oh God, I wish I didn’t see the ones we left behind. I wish their faces, their screams weren’t in my head. We can’t save them all, and I said as much to Hoyt when we were in New York. It was easy to say it then.”

She shook her head. “And you’re right, I need some rest. I have to take this tray up, see that the others get some of it inside them. You could do me a favor.”

“I probably could.”

“You could take this one into the library. Moira’s in there.”

“She’ll likely think it’s poisoned if I take it into her.”

“Oh stop.”

“All right, all right. But don’t blame me if she pours it down some drain.” He hefted the tray, muttering to himself as he left the kitchen. “I’m a vampire, for God’s sake. Creature of the damn night, drinker of blood. And here I am playing butler to some erstwhile Geallian queen. Mortifying is what it is.”