“I’m not sure what you’ve noticed,” I said meekly, “but I’m not great with standing up for myself. I’m so used to being bullied that it doesn’t bother me half the time.”

Callie shifted her weight and a frown creased her brow. “You’re too easygoing for your own good. But do you know what?”

Dizzy’s face fell again. He didn’t know what, either.

“Being easygoing and being a pushover are not the same things,” Callie said, and Dizzy nodded. “The Rogue Natural didn’t push you around, did he?”

“Even now, when there is no real relevance, he’s brought up—”

“When you took over, he stepped out of the way.” Callie nodded and resumed resting her fists on her hips. It was her default stance. “You’re easy to get along with, but you aren’t easy to push to the side.”

I sucked in a breath to speak, because I was often pushed to the side, sometimes bodily. Emery had only stepped to the side because of mutual trust and respect. But I held my tongue. The last thing I felt like doing was arguing over a guy who thought a couple rocks every now and then would ease the sting of his abandonment.

Great. I was officially a woman scorned. Perfect.

“So when you sit at that vampire’s table tonight, you look him straight in the eye,” Callie said. She held her pointer finger between her eyes, and I ended up looking at her nose. “You discuss what comes next, and you remember that if he doesn’t work out as a business partner—because that’s what this is, a business relationship—you can get a different business partner. Got it?”

Dizzy and I nodded together.

“Now.” Callie glanced at the table before looking at the house. “Penny, Dizzy and I need your help constructing a better ward. One of those sneaky devils came into the house to leave my gift. No one picks my locks, magically or otherwise, without getting one hell of a shock for their efforts.”

9

At midnight, I stood in front of a massive house in the French Quarter, which all the ghost tours claimed, accurately, had once been owned by a vampire. It sat on a corner lot in a mostly quiet area, if any part of the French Quarter could be called quiet, and rose three stories into the sky.

I smoothed my lilac dress down my stomach and contemplated walking away.

As the power holder, that was in my power, right? I could turn around (hopefully not as stiffly as I was standing there) and trudge back the way I’d come.

But that ultimately wouldn’t solve my problem of freezing up in battle. Whether I liked it or not, I needed someone other than the Bankses to teach me, and at the moment, everyone thought Darius had the answer. He was all I had.

I took a deep breath and stepped forward to knock as a strange awareness washed over me. Goosebumps coated my body, hinting of a presence lurking close by. Not long after, an itch between my shoulder blades flared to life, my body’s way of telling me someone was watching.

I spun, half expecting to find a vampire on the other side of the street, watching to see that I actually approached the house. Dark shadows coated the walls of the houses and spilled onto the sidewalk. The leaves of the few small trees rustled in the cool night air.

The itch grew stronger and I took a step backward, toward the door. The soft scuff of a shoe on cement interrupted the still night. Another footfall, someone slowly sneaking my way from the other side of the street, obscured by the corner.

Heart in my throat, my failure the night before rode heavy in my thoughts. Was a vampire about to attack me? Had the Mages’ Guild finally stepped up their game?

I turned quickly to knock, but the creator of the footfalls staggered into view before my fist could land.

All the breath left my lungs as the man noticed me.

“What’s up, pretty lady?” the trendy guy in his mid-twenties slurred from across the street. He held up a tall plastic cup, half-full, with a long bendy straw sticking out of it. Noticing that I didn’t immediately turn away, he staggered to a stop, his body tilted to the side.

We stared at each other for a moment.

He straightened, bent in an arc the other way, and leaned in the opposite direction again, fighting gravity.

“It’s not a great idea to pass out on the street in this area,” I said. Delivering a fair warning seemed the neighborly thing to do. “Or…any area, I guess, but especially this one.”

His lean came around to the front before he started—or burped, I couldn’t really tell. “You care about me?” He’d barely formed the words before bringing up the drink hand to tap himself in the chest. He snorted and bent backward, at odds with gravity no matter what position he was in, and staggered back. His head hit the wall of the house behind him and he ducked like the sky was falling.

“What was that?” he muttered, looking upward at a very strange angle. A moment later, he finally lost the battle for balance. He staggered forward, but his feet couldn’t catch up with his increasing momentum and he fell, face first, onto the sidewalk. His hands caught up a moment later, and he scraped the edge of his cup against the cement.

“Ugh,” I heard in a long moan, his cup dramatically tilted but not spilling. “Noooo,” he groaned, looking like a guy after a bad hit-and-run accident. “Didn’t spill.”

Small miracles.

I turned back to the door, finding a black maw in place of the wood. A shape loomed in the darkness, tall and wide and full of muscle.

“Hah!” I flung out my hand, and a shot of red zapped from my palm. The ol’ zapper never let me down. Except when I was trying to kill rodents. Those buggers were fast.

The shape in the doorway dove to the side.

“I will save you,” came a collection of grunts from across the street. The man was fighting gravity again.

As I backed up, knowing the reflex attack was almost certainly my bad, Darius’s assistant, Moss, who I’d briefly met in Seattle and had been one of the vampires at the training the night before, reappeared in the doorway with a surly expression, a ruined suit jacket, and a burned arm beneath. How bad the wound was, I couldn’t say because of the shadows draping him, but it was more than a skim.

“Miss Bristol,” he said in a less-than-enthusiastic voice. “How good of you to come. Please, come in.”

The man across the street was braced on his forearms, staring my way. “Isn’t that place haunted?” he asked, apparently to himself.

Inside, gorgeous furniture graced the well-appointed and spacious rooms. Fresh flowers sweetened the air and oil paintings hung on freshly painted walls.

“Wow,” I said, taking it all in. Callie and Dizzy’s house was really nice, but this took luxury to a whole new level.

Moss led the way up a winding staircase with strings of flowers draping down from the banister.

“Are those flowers magic, or…?”

Moss didn’t so much as glance to the side. “We are not in the Realm.”

“Is that a no, or…?”

“Those are real flowers.”

“Right.” I nodded, breathing in their fragrance. “Is it to mask the smell of death in here, or…?”

This time he did glance back at me. With a frown.

“I mean, you know”—I waved my finger at him and then around—“vampires. You smell good with cologne, but in your other form… Does that form smell as swampy as it looks, by the way? I’m usually too caught up in the moment to notice.”

At the second-story landing, Moss paused and turned to me, his face expressionless in the low light.

“Is this a taboo subject?” I asked, suddenly unsure. “It probably is, isn’t it? Sorry.”

“This way.”

I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a vampire stiffen, despite the whole “being dead” mythos, but Moss came awfully close.

“Do you get the flowers delivered fresh every day?” I couldn’t let go of the flower situation. Why Darius, or whoever arranged it, wanted them draped on the banisters, I didn’t know. Vases would do just fine for overall appeal, and the flowers wouldn’t die nearly as fast. What a waste of money and plant life. “Oh!” I snapped, the light bulb clicking on. “The flowers lost their lives, just like you, but they’re still beautiful. It’s symbolic, right?”