I nodded. “Deal.” I glanced down and couldn’t help but smile just a little. “And Louis-Cesare—get some pants on.”

Geoffrey joined me a few moments later, as I was tying up something I’d fished out of the bushes. It was mostly tail and claws and a lot of bumpy protrusions. I’d eyed them with concern, but apparently they were just cosmetic, because nothing spurted or oozed out at me.

“We’re going to need more rope,” I told him, “a lot more. I found some in a gardener’s shed, but there has to be a hundred of these things roaming around, and ’Du doesn’t want us to kill any more than we have to.”

“I will bear that in mind,” he replied, and stabbed me.

I saw the blade coming. Unlike my own, deliberately dulled versions, he was using a nice, shiny one that gleamed like a beacon in the dim garden light. But I wasn’t quite fast enough to completely avoid it. It bit into the fleshy part of my side instead of hitting my heart, not that that improved my mood any. “You’re the traitor!” I said stupidly, stumbling backward.

“You should have died in San Francisco,” he said furiously. I tripped over a garden hose and fell against a birdbath, while barely avoiding being skewered again. As it was, I lost the sword, which went flying out of my hand like a silver arrow. Either Geoffrey was faster than he had any right to be at his age, or I was slowing down. Either way, not good.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I told him, and threw a heavy earthenware pot, complete with hibiscus, at his head. He dodged and snarled. It looked really odd on that usually stoic face.

“Or at dinner—how did you know not to eat?” he demanded. He seemed highly incensed that I’d been so hard to kill.

“You poisoned Stinky!” Okay, now I was pissed. I drove the plinth from the stone birdbath into his gut, hard enough to make him fall to his knees retching. I looked around for the basin, which would hopefully be heavy enough to finish him, but in the few seconds it took me to locate it, Geoffrey was gone. His knee prints in the dirt were still there, rapidly filling with water, but there was no sign of the vamp himself.

“The freak ate from your plate—it was intended for you!” He fell on me out of the branches of a dripping bottlebrush tree, knife flailing, but I skipped back. One swipe of his weapon ripped a gash in the peasant top, but missed my skin. I had a second to be glad it was Radu’s wardrobe being decimated this time, instead of mine, while Geoffrey went sprawling in the mud. Then he was up and coming at me again.

I brought up the basin like a shield, hearing the scrape of the knife on stone, then slammed it into his face and leapt back, skirting a trellis that ran along one side of the house. It created a small, very dark arbor, shadowed by grapevines as big around as my wrist. Something snatched at me from the foliage. I got a quick impression of a scaly body, a naked tail and a sharp snout with needle-thin canines. I retrieved my sword, which was still quivering from landing point first in the ground, and poked at it. It retreated, chittering in displeasure. Unfortunately, I didn’t think Geoffrey would be so easy to deter. After attacking me, he’d have to kill me, or Mircea would rip him to pieces.

I scanned the garden, sword in hand, but didn’t see him. The inside of the arbor was like a dark wound beside the brighter stucco—I couldn’t see inside it, and the rain and the ominous rustling of the vines meant that there was little chance of hearing him. If he was even in there.

I glanced around, but there weren’t many other hiding places in the immediate vicinity. The palm trio was still smoking, despite the downpour, and was no longer in a position to hide much of anything. The graveled path to the front was clear, and the nearest vineyard didn’t start for a couple dozen yards.

I saw something move among the vines, a black ripple that darted between rows, silent and dangerous. Slipping quietly on the wet earth, I moved out of the ring of lights circling the house and into the darker reaches beyond. It wasn’t as dark as I would have liked—the lightning had grown worse, flashing silver strobes across the landscape—but it was better than remaining silhouetted against the floodlit stucco, practically begging to be attacked.

The air quivered like something stretched beyond bearable tension as I slowly crossed the yard, closing in on whatever was hiding in the vines. These weren’t nearly as large as the venerable specimens in the arbor, which looked like the conquistadores themselves might have planted them. But they were mature enough to give decent cover. It wasn’t until I was almost on top of my prey that I realized what it was.

A figure stepped out of the vines, wreathed in shadow, its face only a pale smudge through sheets of rain. My hair was plastered to my skin, my tunic heavy and waterlogged, but around the newcomer a bright pennant of hair lifted on a gust of breeze. Eyes clear as water met mine. I gripped my sword tighter and thought some very rude things. Fey. Perfect, just perfect. Then the attack came, blindingly fast and unbelievably strong, and I didn’t have time to think at all.

My sword was struck aside in the first rush, and went spinning off across the vineyard. It had to have gone fifty yards, and in the dark among the dense planting, I’d never find it. Something slashed through my sleeve and I jumped back, behind a vine that suddenly leapt off its row to slither around my feet, dumping me in the mud. I rolled aside and something silver flashed down, quick as the lightning and just as deadly, missing me by maybe a millimeter.

And then everything stopped. “Heidar!” The voice was shrill. “What do you think you’re doing? Stop it right now!”

I sat up, and although mud and blood and a few bird entrails that I must have missed fell into my eyes, I didn’t need sight to recognize that voice. “Claire!”

“Dory—where are you? Freaking rain! It’s after nine in the morning and I can’t see shit.”

I got to my feet and eyed the very abashed-looking Fey in front of me. Lightning flashed, showing me blond hair and pale blue eyes. Not the one I’d been dreading, then. Claire burst through a gap in the vines and reinforced that impression by smacking him on the shoulder. He had to be six feet five and was surprisingly well muscled for a Fey, but he cringed slightly.

“What did I tell you?” Claire was furious, and in characteristic fashion, she decided to set him straight before bothering with the pleasantries. I leaned back against a fence post and waited it out. Luckily for Radu’s future harvest, the vine kept its leaves to itself.

A few minutes later she wound down enough that I managed to insert a sentence into the tirade. “I’ve been looking for you,” I offered mildly.

Claire’s forehead unknotted slightly. “I knew you would. I was only gone a couple of days, but the damned Fey timeline isn’t in sync with ours and . . . anyway, I hope you didn’t worry.”

I thought back over the last month, to the sleepless nights and the restless days, to the fights and the calls and the threats and the beatings, and I smiled. “A little.”

“I’m really sorry, Dory, but you won’t believe everything that’s—” She caught me peering at her face and grabbed her nose, looking mortified. “Oh, God! Am I morphing? Tell me I’m not morphing!”

“Uh. No. Are you supposed to be?”

“Only in Faerie, so far.” Claire looked relieved. “Don’t stare at me like that! It freaks me out.”

“Sorry. I just . . . aren’t you supposed to have pointy ears or something?”

“Vulcans! Vulcans have pointy ears. Do I look like an alien to you?”

“No, but you never looked much like a Fey, either.”

“I would like to apologize for my mistake, lady,” Heidar said, jumping in during the nanosecond pause in the conversation. He’d obviously been around Claire for a while. “I was under the impression that you were a vampire.”

“I get that a lot,” I said kindly. “I’m Dory.”

The Fey brightened. “Is this where I introduce myself?” he whispered in a loud aside to Claire, who looked horrified.

“Oh, God.”

“I have been practicing,” Heidar informed me proudly, then launched into a recital of what had to be fifty names, most with explanations.

“Never ask them their names,” Claire advised as Heidar rattled on. “Just. Don’t.”

“Okay. It seems you’ve been busy.” I poked her in the middle. “Anything in there I should know about?”

She blanched. It made her freckles stand out like spots on white paper. “How did you hear about that?”

“Are you kidding me? So far, I had that runt Kyle—”

“I hate him. I hate all vamps. That complete toad, Michael—”

“—tell me you were pregnant by a vamp—”

“—kidnapped me and—Kyle said what?”

“—and then a member of the Domi shows up and informs me—”

“The Domi sent someone here?”

“—that you’re actually pregnant by the late king of the Fey.”

“Late?!” Heidar squeaked.

I stopped and looked at him. His hair was miraculously still mostly dry, despite the downpour. Claire’s, on the other hand, was as wet as mine, frizzing and straggling around her face like a dead animal pelt. It was hard to believe they were both half-Fey.

“Let me guess, you’re Alarr?”

“It means Elven general,” Heidar enlightened me automatically. “But, please, lady, I beg of you, tell us what you know of my father.”

“I’m sorry, not a lot. Only that he’s missing and presumed dead.”

“That is impossible,” Heidar said with conviction.

I didn’t feel like arguing the point, especially when I suspected he might be right. “Okay.” I looked at Claire sternly. “You want to tell me what’s been going on?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Hit the highlights.”

“Well, Heidar and I met at work—he’d come to bid on something—only my boss—you remember Matt, the gorilla in a suit?” I nodded. Her former boss at Gerald’s did look frighteningly like a shaved ape. “He’d decided to sell me to Sebastian, who’d finally tracked me down, only it didn’t work out quite like they’d planned. Heidar and I escaped into Faerie, but the damned Svarestri attacked us. We got away—you don’t even want to know how—and made it back to New York, but when I stopped by the house, Michael grabbed me for the bounty—” She stopped suddenly, looking stricken.