The room smelled of vamp and blood and sex. It was an outer-wall room with a window, which was covered by steel, electronic blinds on the outside and a padded velvet board on the inside, and metal bands that secured the board in place, making it very hard to remove and endanger a sleeping vamp. It was a room for a low-level vamp because, even with the precautions, it was dangerous for vamps by day. Yet this room was clearly used as a lair, and by the scent, by Edmund. And Zelda. His sex and dinner partner. Edmund had fallen a long way from clan blood-master to slave, with an outer room at vamp HQ. I was still learning that story.

“Cut it off,” I said to Zelda. “You’re right.” To Titan Two, I said, “There are plastic braces at the joints, silver-over-titanium chain link everywhere, and some Dyneema. It’s gonna be hard to cut off.”

Titan Two held up a pair of leather snips, a pair of metal snips, and a box cutter with a new-looking blade. “Not my first time at this rodeo, sugar,” she said, trying a Texan accent and not making it work at all.

I sighed. “Yeah. Right.” Beast? I thought. She still didn’t answer. It occurred to me that since I had accepted the soul-binding between us, maybe what healed me healed her. Vamp healing coming up. Hope you like Edmund.

Beast chuffed back, the sound full of pain.

* * *

Getting the leathers off hurt. Hurt like I had never expected. It was a three-person job, Titan Two cutting and snipping, Zelda easing the leather back and ripping my damaged flesh off with it, and Edmund shedding his own blood and using his tongue to heal. Unlike other times I’d been vamp-healed, times when the wounding was finished and only needed vamp saliva and blood to make it feel all better and scar quickly, this time a rewounding was taking place at the same time as the healing, and the vamp saliva had no way to keep up with the pain. I screamed a few times. I cried all the way through, the nose-dribbling, sobbing, hiccupping, whining kinda crying. I smelled the stink of my burned and broken and torn flesh and the scent of my own blood and tears. It was . . . bad. Really, really bad.

When it was over, I fell asleep, my body so full of endorphins, adrenaline breakdown products, and Edmund’s saliva and blood that sleep was the only possible reaction. Only vaguely did I wake when someone bandaged my arm and later pulled a T-shirt over me. I knew by the smells that I wasn’t in danger, and so couldn’t bother to rouse myself before dreams smothered me back under.

* * *

The dream was an odd one, full of confusing images, of white and black wings and claws, as if a white bird and a black bird were fighting. Of rain and lightning and the sensation of being cold, so cold I knew I was dying. Of someone speaking Cherokee, the Tsalagi words for God, chanting, “Yehowa, Edoda,” words for Great Spirit. “Unequa, adanvdo.” And “Anidawehi,” the word for angels. “Yehowa. Edoda. Unequa. Adanvdo. Anidawehi. Unequa, anidawehi—help me, accept me as sacrifice, or set me free.”

I came to myself with a gasp of fear, lying in a bed, on clean sheets, still wearing my leather pants, my boots off, my upper body swaddled in a soft T-shirt that I recognized by feel and scent without having to open my eyes. The dream faded as the scents and sensations of the real world took over. The shirt was a fuzzy purple long-sleeved T with a colorful red-striped dragon on the front. It was my shirt, given to me by a vamp and a witch, with the power of healing woven into the fibers and into the dragon on the front. It was ugly, but the healing worked into it had lasted through several healings and repeated washing and drying. I loved this ugly shirt.

Edmund was cradled around me, his arms around my waist, which, with vamps, usually meant a need and request for sex, but he was so relaxed that he had to be sleeping. He sighed, relaxing further, a boneless slump, the breath telling me two things—he was asleep and probably dreaming of being human, and that he’d recently drunk fresh blood. It was Zelda’s, and I smelled Zelda on the other side of him. Oh goody. A ménage à trois sleepover.

The light was dim, and even with my eyes still closed, my time sense told me that the sun was still up outside. The feeling of well-being and the lack of pain told me that I was safe. I had time to rest and to think and to put things together. And time to worry.

I had gotten used to Beast being able to mute my pain with her own body chemicals, so accustomed to it that I no longer thought about how often I drew on her gift. If the new soul-binding, the fighting ability, and the time-bending powers of our half-Beast form were gonna make it harder to deal with a purely human injury, that was a serious drawback, one I needed to figure into any future fighting circumstances, along with the gut-wrenching downtime required when I was forced to use the time-bending / reality-folding gift that was new to us.

Or maybe today’s inability to use her pain-muting capacities was just because of the magical origin of the injury. I had to make time to meditate and check out Beast in my soul home. I could feel her there, and something wasn’t right. But before I could concentrate on me, I had a list of Enforcer stuff and vamp-hunter stuff to do.

First was to talk to the priestesses and see how to track Joses Bar-Judas and how to kill him. I had a feeling he’d be leaving a swath of dead humans in his wake unless I got to him first.

Second was to figure out where Leo had taken Adrianna and make sure she wasn’t going to cause problems on her own again. Second and a half was to find out what the magical jewelry that Mario and she had been wearing did, so I could counter it next time we met up. Third, once I had the Son of Darkness beheaded, was to research how she had known Joses Bar-Judas and make educated guesses on how Leo planned to use her brain-dead (hopefully) self.

Fourth was to check in on Del. Try a little girl talk.

Fifth was to talk to Jodi, my contact in the New Orleans Police Department. NOPD’s woo-woo room might have records I hadn’t found yet about Joses. Now that he was free and possibly a danger to the public, I needed to tell her about Joses and accept the figurative butt whupping I was likely to get for keeping his presence a secret. And . . . injured humans. There had been injured humans in the basement, and it was unlikely that they all survived being turned. I was supposed to report dead humans to the local law, and I’d been too hurt to think clearly about that. Now I had no way to determine if there were dead humans or not. Leo would never tell me, nor would his people.

Satisfied that I had a plan of action, I opened my eyes to see that a dim light came from a small electric lamp on the bedside table, cast from some form of metal, old enough to have a patina of verdigris in shades of green and brown, topped by a square, buff-colored shade. It was elegant in ways I didn’t usually appreciate, formed by an artist’s hand in a stylized shape of a woman holding a child. It sat on a green-veined, marble-topped table with metal legs of the same style and material as the lamp. A gilded mirror hung over the fireplace, which was faced with more of the green-veined marble, as was the mantel. The walls were a green so pale that they looked almost white, but for the white-painted moldings at the ceiling, door, and floor, which contrasted brightly. The floors were wood, with rugs tossed here and there in black and greens and tiny spots of red, as if blood had splattered across them. Everything in sight was really expensive, even to my untrained eye.