“Don’t I know it,” Finn agreed. “I’ll drink to that.”

The two of them clinked glasses, then started chatting about all of the crooked businesspeople they both knew and all the fast ones that those folks had tried to pull on them over the years. But I just sat there, letting their cheery conversation wash over me, my elbows propped up on the cold surface of the bar while I cradled my glass in my hands and brooded into my gin. Normally, I would have enjoyed shooting the breeze with Finn and Roslyn, but right now, I couldn’t even muster up enough enthusiasm to down my drink.

Maybe Roslyn’s problems with her distributor were a coincidence. Maybe it was a complete fluke that the guy had decided to raise his prices today. Maybe it was just the cost of doing business in our corrupt Southern city, like my friends had said.

The only problem with all of that was that I didn’t believe in coincidences. Not really, and especially not now, with Madeline in town. Not when there was a chance, however small, that Madeline was pulling someone’s strings, even if it was to make trouble for Roslyn instead of me.

Then there was Madeline’s not-so-veiled threat at the dedication earlier, when she’d said that I wouldn’t be able to follow her to that library event tomorrow. Had she meant that I wouldn’t be there because I’d be trying to help Roslyn? But Finn was right. That seemed patently absurd, even for my exceedingly high level of paranoia. Roslyn didn’t need my help with her distributor. She could easily take care of something like that herself, just as she had for all the years she’d been running her club. Really, the guy would be a fool to deliberately lose her business, given how much liquor she ordered from him weekly.

Finn and Roslyn kept chatting, and I chimed in when necessary, but mostly I sat at the bar, trying to puzzle out what Madeline would get out of messing with Roslyn, other than the satisfaction of making the vampire’s life difficult. That would be more than enough motivation for Madeline, but maybe my friends were right. Maybe I was being overly paranoid and crying wolf, when there wasn’t really anything to be worried about.

But the thing about crying wolf was that the danger was always real and always waiting to gobble you up.

So despite Finn and Roslyn’s assurances that everything was fine, I couldn’t help but feel that Madeline had finally fired the opening salvo, shattering the delicate détente of our previously cold war.

*  *  *

Finn and I chatted with Roslyn for about an hour before her workers started showing up to get the club ready to open for the night. The two of us walked back to our cars, which we’d left in the Northern Aggression parking lot, and went our separate ways.

Finn headed downtown to his bank to put in the appearance of actually working today, but I’d taken the afternoon off from the Pork Pit, my barbecue restaurant, to attend the park dedication. Since I didn’t have to report in anywhere, I drove over to the Monroe family estate.

Yes, I was probably being paranoid, but it had kept me alive this long. No reason to stop now.

Actually, I didn’t drive over to the Monroe estate so much as I parked near it, steering my latest Aston Martin onto the side of the road at the next house over, a six-story mansion that belonged to Charlotte Vaughn. I stopped my car about a quarter mile down the road from the open iron gates that led into the Vaughn estate and stuck a white plastic bag in the driver’s-side window, as though something was wrong with the car, and I’d gone to get help.

I couldn’t exactly cruise down the street past the Monroe mansion, not without being spotted by one of the giant guards manning the closed gate there. But I’d trespassed on the Vaughn grounds many times before, and it was easy enough for me to scale the stone wall, drop down to the other side, and disappear into the thicket of trees that ringed the lawn. After that, it was just a matter of moving through the afternoon shadows until I could step into the dense woods that connected the Vaughn estate to the Monroe one.

Just before I entered the woods, I stopped and looked up at the Vaughn mansion. The white lace curtains were drawn back from the windows on the third-floor library, revealing a woman with black hair sitting at a desk, a phone cradled in between her ear and shoulder as she typed on a keyboard. Charlotte Vaughn, someone I’d helped and hurt in equal measures years ago. But I wasn’t here to see Charlotte, so I slipped into the woods and continued on.

Charlotte might be Madeline’s closest neighbor, but their respective mansions were still a couple miles apart, so it took me the better part of an hour to reach my destination—a couple of old, gray, weathered boards that had been nailed about thirty feet up in a sturdy maple and covered with a ragged, tattered camouflage cloth that had seen better days.

At first glance, it looked like a deer stand that some enterprising hunter had erected and then forgotten about long ago, but just a couple of weeks ago I had come out here in the dead of night and put together my makeshift tree house. Madeline had any number of anonymous, disposable minions whom she could send to the Pork Pit to spy on me anytime she desired, and I’d wanted my own way of keeping tabs on her.

I checked the ground around the tree house, looking for footprints, broken branches, and disturbed earth, but the bunches of leaves, twigs, and pebbles that I’d piled in strategic spots were undisturbed. As a final precaution, I reached out with my magic—my Stone power this time—and listened to the emotional vibrations and actions that had sunk into the rocks hidden in the leaves.

But the stones only whispered of the growing chill of the longer nights and the slow, steady approach of the winter they knew was coming. I probed a little deeper with my magic, but no dark, devious mutters, notes of worry, or trills of fear sounded back to me. Nothing bigger than a rabbit had been near my tree house since I’d been out here three nights ago.

Satisfied, I shimmied up the tree, hoisted myself up onto the boards, and checked the black duffel bag full of supplies that I’d left here a few days earlier. Binoculars, bottles of water, chocolate granola bars, a digital camera, a directional microphone, some sniper scopes. All the tools an assassin would need to do some serious recon on a target.

And Madeline was definitely my target, just the way that I was hers.

I seated myself in a comfortable position, picked up the binoculars, and peered through them. This particular tree stood on a rise, and my little house was situated high enough in it to give me a clear view of the back of the Monroe mansion, which featured an Olympic-size swimming pool surrounded by a patio. Despite its being October, the pool hadn’t been covered up for the season yet, and the rippling blue water provided a colorful contrast in the heart of all that gleaming gray granite.