“But I am surprised your friend does not,” Louis-Cesare said. “Do fey princesses not rate help?”

“If by ‘help’ you mean wilting noblewomen who wrinkle their noses at everything and don’t lift a hand.” They’d lasted less than a day. Claire didn’t play like that.

“The fey do not have kitchen help?”

I sighed. “Yes. But it’s the whole hierarchy thing. The soldiers were okay with the noblewomen being housed inside, since apparently they’re too delicate to face the rigors of the backyard.” He grinned. “But the regular servants couldn’t be put in better housing than the soldiers, because the soldiers outrank them. And we couldn’t fit the soldiers in the house, even if they doubled up, since there aren’t enough free rooms. So—”

“So no help.”

“No.”

Louis-Cesare looked thoughtful.

“Well, except for the twins.”

“The twins?”

“Sven and Ymsi. But while they’re good at picking up the couch so we can vacuum, they aren’t so good with the more delicate tasks. We lost eight windows when they tried to wash them and ended up obliterating them instead. And they’re not any better at cooking.”

“Given their size, I find that surprising,” he said drily.

“Yes, well. It’s not so much that they can’t cook, as what they cook. Trolls eat, well, I’ve never found anything they don’t eat, at least not so far.”

“Do I want to know what that means?”

I thought of a memorable dinner a few weeks ago. And shuddered. “No.”

Thankfully, he didn’t ask, just moved on to table number two. Which didn’t last any longer than table one. In a blink, the new plates were stacked neatly on top of the old ones, with the assorted accoutrements wedged perfectly alongside. If the whole master vampire thing didn’t work out, I knew some restaurants that would snap him up in a second. And then he got cocky and moved the overflowing bin to table number three.

As if.

“Where are your servants?” I asked with a grin, wondering if there was a whole family of crazy vamps out there.

“Some are working with Lord Marlowe. The Senate is shorthanded, and I was asked to have my masters lend a hand.”

“And the others?”

“Some are at Les Pléiades, my court in France. And some are here, in New York.”

“Here? Then why haven’t I seen any?”

“They have been busy looking for a house for me.”

“You’re buying a house here?”

“Hm. For some reason, I find New York to be more…attractive…than I remembered.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I didn’t say anything. I just followed behind him, stuffing paper goods in the garbage bag and closing up half-eaten trays of bakery rolls. Some of them hadn’t even been opened, but the others would probably be stale by tomorrow. Not that that was a bad thing. Claire’s bread pudding with whiskey sauce was almost as good as an orgasm.

Almost.

I grinned at that, and Louis-Cesare saw it. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

And it wasn’t. Nothing important, anyway. Or dangerous. Or death-defying or, well, anything. And that was the point.

Is this how normal people live all the time? I wondered. I didn’t know. I’d never been normal. I would never be normal. But I got to visit it once in a while, and it was…nice.

“By the way,” he told me, “my majordomo would like to know your favorite color.”

I blinked. Both because that was kind of out of the blue and because he’d somehow just stacked every damned dish off the third table onto the teetering pile.

“Why?”

“I informed him that I would like the decor to be pleasing to you.”

I just stood there, getting further behind on the trash as I attempted to process that. “Why?” I finally repeated.

“For when you visit,” he said, like of course I would. And like I would care about the decor if I did. I’d never even owned furniture, and he was worried that I wouldn’t like the color scheme?

It was bizarre.

But he was standing there, looking at me like he expected an answer. Which I didn’t have because I’d never thought about it. “I…don’t have one.”

He frowned. “But everyone has one. Mine is blue; Radu’s is yellow. Your friend Claire’s is green, judging by the amount she wears it.”

And yes, it sounded reasonable when he put it like that, but it still didn’t change the fact I didn’t know. And clothing choices weren’t likely to help me, because mine had always been more about expediency than anything else. I wasn’t worried about looking good. I was worried about what I could afford, because my lifestyle tended to be hard on clothes. I was worried about the best possible camouflage to do the job, because the harder you are to see, the harder you are to hit. Or shoot. Or stab. And that usually boiled down to dark blue, which is actually more difficult to see at night than any other color, or black, because it’s the urban uniform pretty much everywhere.

“Dory?”

“I…Black?” I guessed, because I had to say something. Or God help me, he might decide it was pink.

“Black?”

“What’s wrong with black?”

His lips twitched. “Nothing. And it should provide Georges with an…interesting challenge.”

He’d finished piling up the rest of the dishes as he spoke, into a towering, trembling mountain, like the preparation for some weird kind of circus act. Somehow, they were all in there—or on there, since most weren’t actually touching anything but other dishes and air. But it wasn’t going to do us any good, since they clearly weren’t going anywhere else.

Louis-Cesare saw my expression. “You think I can’t get them safely into the house?”

“I know you can’t.” For one thing, I doubted they’d fit through the door.

The eyebrow made a reappearance. “Are you willing to bet on that?”

“Bet what?”

He gave me a slow smile, the kind that said that money wasn’t likely to be involved here.

Which was just as well, since Mircea had just fired me. But that wasn’t the point, since I could afford other things even less.

“I don’t think so,” I opened my mouth to say, only my tongue had other ideas. My tongue chirped a cheerful “okay” before I could stop it.

And Louis-Cesare didn’t give me a chance to recant. He took off for the house, weaving through the yard’s obstacles like a dancer—or what he was, an expert swordsman—with that ridiculous pile of dishes on one shoulder. And somehow he didn’t drop a single one.

I hadn’t really expected him to.

Chapter Seventeen

He was gone a long time. Well, okay, it was probably more like five minutes, but it felt like a long time when you’re busy arguing with yourself about how stupid you’re being and not getting anywhere. My brain was pissed, but my body clearly wasn’t on board. My toes kept trying to tap and my face kept trying to grin and on the whole, I thought the body might be winning.

I decided to go stand near the fey, so I’d at least have a reason for looking like an idiot.

Things had gotten to the jam stage, and they were really going at it. The neighbors had brought the usual—drums, a tambourine and Jacob’s guitar. The fey instruments were a little different, but still sort of familiar—flute-type things, lute-type things, and one collection of oddness that looked like an octopus had mated with some bagpipes.

What took me a few minutes to notice was that the fey without instruments were playing, too.

The breeze rustled through the treetops like a brush on cymbals. Water dripped out of a bamboo fountain with the regularity of a metronome. Wind chimes tinkled on the edge of the house with a suspiciously convenient rhythm. The flapping of a neighbor’s flag, the rumble of distant thunder, and the crickets sounding off in the hedge all got in on the act. Even the annoying bird from this morning, which should have been long asleep, was busy warbling out a tune.

It wasn’t obvious, not at first. But after standing there a few minutes, it was hard not to notice. The whole yard had become an instrument.

“How are they doing that?” I asked Claire, who had come up beside me, the tired lines in her face smoothing out as she watched the dancers.

She shook her head helplessly. “Magic?”

And yeah, it was. Not the kind I was used to, the kind bought from shady dealers in back alleys, the kind used to hurt. But magic nonetheless. Happy and joyful and humming over my skin. It cut through the fatigue, making me want to dance like some of the girls were already doing, their bodies blocking out the firelight in intervals, flickering like images on a silent-film reel.

Only they weren’t faded pictures in black and white, but glorious, living color. Bright scarves fluttered, long hair flowed, eyes sparkled, and jewelry caught the light in dazzling flashes that also, somehow, seemed to be in time to the music. Or the magic, because the whole yard breathed with it, in and out, in and out, like the heartbeat of a giant creature laughing and spinning and whirling in the night—

And then so was I. Someone slid an arm around my waist and I looked up to see Louis-Cesare’s eyes gleaming down at me, bright as sapphires—for a second. And then we were off.

And it was magic, or something very like it. My feet seemed to know the steps, complicated as they were, and the rhythm that was pounding up through the ground instead of the other way around, like the earth itself was directing the dance. And the earth seemed to be in a good mood, because soon almost everyone was caught up in it, even Claire, who was laughing and shaking her head and pulling back from the fey trying to coax her into the dance.

Which only ensured that she fell into the arms of the one behind her.

He swept her into the widening circle before she could tell him no, not that she looked like she wanted to. Her bright red hair bounced around her shoulders as she laughed and spun and leapt in steps I don’t think she knew, either, but that were suddenly instinctive. It was like breathing or—no, I realized.