A thick, cracked, yellow toenail stared me in the face. It was attached to a foot with knobs and warts and skin as hard as a rock, all held together by some sort of greenish yellowish fungus and a lot of dirt. My last conscious thought was to decide that, all things considered, having a troll foot in my face was the worst thing that had happened to me all day.

I awoke an indeterminate amount of time later to find myself in my own bed with rain lashing the window and a note fluttering on the door. A glance down showed that someone, probably Claire, had stuffed me into a T-shirt and wrapped my wrist. But judging by my general filthiness, she’d stopped short of an actual bath.

I drew one in the tub for myself with a lot of bubbles, a rare luxury, and got in, taking the note in with me. It was a two-pager. Claire hadn’t been able to leave me one for so long, she was making up for lost time.

Who is this Marlowe guy anyway? He’s an ass. Threw him out. Threatened to have Ysmi sit on him if he returned.

I grinned. I’d really needed the sleep, but damn… I was sorry to have missed that.

How did no vampires turn into a houseful of them? You have weird friends. That Christine freaks me out. Put her in the large closet in the first-floor guest room because there are no windows. Okay?

I was sure Christine appreciated being bedded down in the closet. On the other hand, the only other rooms without a view were the pantry, which we no longer had, and part of the basement, which was full of trolls. On the whole, I thought she’d gotten the better deal.

Why are there two severed heads rolling around the house? Cats tried to eat one. Mostly prevented.

I wondered what “mostly” entailed. Decided I didn’t want to know.

Headless guy is in hallway broom closet with head that I think is his. Hosed body off in backyard; it was filthy. Head cussed a lot. But not as much as Radu when he found out you didn’t include a new car in your deal with this Cheung person. He said to call him.

Oops. I knew we’d forgotten something. I made a mental note to avoid ’Du for the near future. Maybe for the distant future, too. I wondered if there was any way to claim a Lamborghini on my expense account with Mircea. Probably not.

FYI, Olga cut a new portal. Well, not new. It’s a new destination on the old one. Two colors now: green goes to Faerie, blue goes to beauty shop. But she’d started it only today and we had no way back unless opened from this end. Sorry. Next time we’ll send somebody small through first.

Knock on my door when you get up.

That last line sounded ominous, but it wasn’t like I could avoid Claire, too. I sloshed my way out of the bath and checked out my bruise collection. I hadn’t added as many as I’d expected, all things considered. I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of soft gray sweatpants and padded down to Claire’s room, trying to dry my hair with one hand.

I couldn’t have been out long, because it was still dark outside. Claire was up, or at least there was a strip of light under her door. I knocked and she opened up, her long red hair done up in fabric rollers. It looked like she’d put her time at the beauty shop to good use.

“We didn’t know you were home, or we’d have waited for you,” she told me earnestly before I could say anything. “But when we heard the commotion from the wards—”

“You mean they actually did something?” I’d begun to wonder.

“For about a minute. Until the damn Svarestri deactivated them!”

She moved aside and I came in. She’d moved a twin bed in here, and Aiden and Stinky were bedded down in snoring heaps. Or, at least, Stinky was snoring, sprawled out at the head of the bed like a drunken sailor, hairy limbs akimbo. Aiden was curled up at his side like a cherub. A thumb-sucking one, I was glad to note. Stinky had never done that. If he couldn’t eat it, he wasn’t interested.

“The Svarestri had to have altered the wards from the inside,” I said, sitting on her bed. Wards could be overwhelmed from outside, but they could be taken down only when someone had access to their source of power. “How did they manage to reverse the portals?”

Claire sat on the vanity chair, propped her foot up on the quilt and continued what she’d been doing, which was to paint her toenails. “I’ve been thinking about that. Manlíkans are usually used for scouts into Dark Fey lands and as training dummies on the practice field. Not as warriors. I don’t think subrand intended to use them to fight us, but rather to find him a way into the house. I should have wondered what the rest of those things were up to while a handful kept us busy.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to have them take down the wards?”

She shook her head. “Wards ignore Manlíkans. As far as they’re concerned, they don’t exist. But a portal is a different kind of magic, and the Svarestri somehow knew there was one in the pantry—”

“subrand saw it the last time he was here,” I said, recalling how Louis-Cesare and I had once escaped him using that very portal.

“I had wondered; they aren’t that easy to detect unless you’re right on top of one. Anyway, they managed to reverse it, but by that time they were exhausted from the storm and the struggle with us—”

“So they waited to break in until tonight, when we were asleep,” I finished for her. It made sense.

“Yes. Attacking women and children in their beds—that’s what subrand calls honor!”

Personally, I thought it was what subrand called smart. I didn’t like his tactics, but from a purely military standpoint, it had been a flawless plan. And if Cheung hadn’t shown up, it might well have worked.

I said as much, only to have Claire frown savagely. “Caedmon should have killed him when he had the chance!”

I blinked. It was pretty much where my thoughts had been going, but it was a little disconcerting to hear it from her. The woman I knew had planted marigolds in the garden to keep the bugs off the plants because she didn’t like swatting them. She wouldn’t talk to me for a week once after seeing me beat a rat to death with a broom handle. She’d been a tofu-eating, fur-hating, plastic-shoe-wearing pacifist, but it looked like things had changed.

She flushed, but she didn’t drop her eyes. “It’s true. You know it is!”

“No arguments here. What I don’t get is why subrand waited so long to attack. His odds would have been better had he struck sooner, before I got home with reinforcements… so to speak.”

Claire looked up from putting a piece of cotton between her final two toes. “Yes, about them…”

“I know you didn’t want vampires in the house,” I said, marshaling my arguments.

“I’m warming up to the idea,” she said, surprising me. “It looks like we need all the help we can get. I’m just not sure about these specific vampires. That Cheung guy was parked outside the house for hours, waiting for you to get home. And he didn’t look friendly. I tried calling you half a dozen times to warn you—”

“I didn’t have my phone on me most of the night.”

Claire raised an eyebrow, but didn’t ask. “I assumed you must have seen him and that’s why you hadn’t come back. I left you a message and we went to bed once it became obvious he couldn’t get through the wards. But now all of a sudden you trust him to guard us?”

“I don’t trust him,” I told her, stretching out on the bed. “I trust the system. It’s pretty harsh on masters who get out of line. And Cheung gave his word.”

“And that means something?”

“If given to you or me? No. But he gave it to a Senate member, and that’s a very different thing.”

“You mean he’d face some kind of punishment if he broke it?”

“And then some. Before the Senates, there was almost constant war between vamp houses, with constantly shifting alliances and backstabbing and betrayal. Think Italy in the Middle Ages, with every little city-state grasping at its neighbors, wanting to expand its lands at their expense. It was pretty much unrelieved bloodshed, and decimated whole houses. Once the Senates got organized, the rules they laid down were made harsh on purpose, to make even the richest prize not worth the price.”

“So Cheung can be relied on to help?”

“For the next several days, yes. And by that time, Heidar should be here.” I sat up, a giant yawn splitting my face. I needed to go to bed before I fell asleep right here. But I needed something else first. “Speaking of help, do you still want to do something to assist the investigation?”

She brightened. “Yes, although I have to say, things haven’t been as boring around here as I’d expected.”

“We’re a lively bunch.”

She snorted. “What do you need?”

“I need you to write me a note.”

* * *

Rain. It had started on the way, but he’d bowed his head and pressed on, his horse’s hooves churning up the mud. It had slowed him down; there wouldn’t be much time until morning. Until others arrived to wonder and stare, to lament and question, and to obliterate what little evidence might remain.

The rider dismounted, the sound of his spurs the only noise in the unnaturally still night. The moon was up, bulging half-full with watery light, turning the world into stark silvers and blacks. To the left, an old apple grove fractured the dark sky with darker traceries of branches. They were bare, the season now over, the few remaining leaves plucked by the cold wind and rattling against the bark. The ones that had drifted over crackled under his feet, dead like everything else here.

He tied his horse to one of the trees, keeping it well out of harm’s way, and moved forward. The coming dawn tugged at his consciousness, but it was impossible to move quickly. It would feel irreverent, like laughing in a graveyard.

To the right was the chapel, still partially protected by a slate roof. He paused at the door, or where it would have been. It had burned down to the hinges; his foot uncovered the old iron pieces in the sifting of leaves and sodden ash on the cold stone floor. The roof had gone, too, having been built of wood, as had the altar. But the crucifix remained, in a way. Its silver had dripped down the walls, painting the old stones with a smear of beauty.