"I'm not laughing at you. I like...arguing with you."

I snorted.

"I do. It's so..."

He grabbed me and, for a second, I thought we were about to start round four. But then his hold relaxed and drifted to my lower back, pulling me to sway against him.

"It's nice, to talk like this without..." He gestured toward the door. "...interference. And it heartens me to know that you're still pa.s.sionate about the things you loved before, that my preferences aren't overriding yours. It's...refreshing."

It clicked all at once. Vampires interacted with their agendas and rank firmly in mind. And humans, even if they weren't intimately involved with vampires, would soon start to roll over to their influence, their power. While I could be-had been-manipulated and scared and charmed, I was immune to glamour. Being with him hadn't changed me, except where my feelings for him were concerned.

"How long's it been since you've had someone to argue with?" I asked. How long had it been since he'd been in a relationship where he could trust the other person's feelings to be genuine?

"A long time. And then I didn't know enough to appreciate it." He kissed me, one hand tightening on my nape, the other entwining with mine. "If you wish," he murmured against my lips, "we will visit the Automotive Hall of Fame. But you should know that, if you start moaning about the cla.s.sic cars, that's going to be the end of the electronics there."

"Hmm. It'll be a quick trip then. We can go to all the places that Diana Ross sang at before she got famous."

"The Supremes? I thought you were a Shinzu Cormera girl, first and last."

"Look who's been paying attention." Maybe it made me grin like an idiot, the fact that he knew what I liked. Maybe I didn't mind being an idiot, not when he looked at me like that. "What about you? Where do you want to go?"

"It's hard to come up with a good second, what with majestic Detroit being the first option." He brushed my hair back from my face. "Shanghai. It's at its best at night."

"You've been there already?" I tilted my head when he nodded. "Why not go somewhere new?"

He hesitated, then his chin jutted out a bit. "I want to see you seeing it for the first time."

My heart squeezed itself tight then expanded into a running rhythm. Malcolm kissed me, his fingers winding into my hair, and my entire being lifted toward him. Running around the world together was a fantasy, but the idea of it lit me up. He broke contact and stroked the backs of his fingers down my cheek.

"I'll be back before night falls," I said, "for a real good-bye."

He slipped away and I felt a part of myself unfurl in his absence. Le sigh. I straightened up the room. Put the cushions back on the couch. Righted the coffee table. Used a towel to sweep up the gla.s.s from a frame that had fallen off one of the surfaces we'd collided with.

Petr and Thurston arrived, forming an odd couple of small, grinning human and big, somber vampire.

"Did Chev catch you doing vampire first aid on her human floor?" I asked.

"She actually preferred that we did it there," Petr said. "Her human guests are less likely to be riled up by weakened vampires."

Oh yeah, that old thing where they took each other down while injured in order to gain status.

"Master Bronson appreciated your prompt update," he added. "He's eager to receive your next report."

"There's no way he's responded to my message already. I only wrote it a couple hours ago."

"I called it in and his secretary delivered it to him and called back with his response. Couriers are for strangers and supplicants. He wants more."

Friends had been glamoured, burned out, and been killed in the years I ran Bronson's mail. And for what? Stuff he considered insignificant. Junk mail. I'd been yelled at and spit on by anti-sucker humans. My hands fisted. Petr noticed.

"Pleas are important," he said. "And most alliances begin through couriered missives."

"Good to know." But it didn't help. What good came from consorting with vampires?

Petr smoothed his short-sleeved blue shirt. He'd b.u.t.toned it all the way up, the little nerd. "He asked that I remind you of your payment."

"My payment?" I snapped.

"It wasn't my place to ask what you bartered for," he said, pressing a hand to his chest, "but you should know that he doesn't sh.e.l.l out for partial results."

I swallowed all kinds of nasty words. Malcolm was my payment, his continued safety. Bronson felt the need to remind me of that, but hadn't defined what a full result would be. So much for good-faith dealings.

"Sure," I said. "I'll scale the wall, disable the alarm, ninja in and out, and have dossiers on all the offenders by dawn."

"Try not to leave fingerprints." Petr began humming as he left the suite. I flopped across an overstuffed cowhide chair and stared at the ceiling.

"Why's everything gotta be so hard, Thurston?"

"You're inside the empire of a master vampire. Why would you expect freedom of movement?"

I opened my mouth to protest, but even if I'd been able to put my frustration into words, there wouldn't have been any conviction behind them. Even though I resented it-with one ma.s.sive exception-I wasn't on the fringe of the undead world anymore. I hadn't been for a long time. I'd only pretended I was. What else was I fooling myself with?

He crouched, and picked up the pieces of a chair leg that had splintered. I grabbed the trash can and knelt next to him.

"Do you still feel like you?" I asked. "Being...pushed from one master to another?"

"Sometimes." He tested the other chair before he sat. "Sometimes, in this existence, it's better to accept the joy you're given than seek your own."

"I'm sorry for your situation, Thurston. Can I..." How did you take care of someone who expected severity? "What would improve things for you? Is there anything you want to do?"

"The hopeless require nothing."

Oh, for the love of... "You should write greeting cards. Seriously. That's like, wow. Gets me right here." I tapped my heart, then rocked to my feet and clapped my hands together. I'd try this again later, when I'd developed superhuman patience and gotten a degree in psychiatry. "I need food. Do you know if Mickey's back?"

"She's on the roof, with the other humans. She needs a family to..." He narrowed his eyes as he searched for the word. "Thrive." He nodded to himself, then pulled a magazine out from a stack. It was a travel rag, with a bright glacial lake on the cover. Homesickness. .h.i.t me like a dart to the soft belly. Hiding out in Alaska would be fun. It would also give me the opportunity to tell my employer I wasn't dead and touch base with my mom. She would have been notified of my missing-presumed-dead status, but there'd been no pings on my email, and no obituary. No mention of a funeral in the papers from home. Maybe she'd been disappointed, sacrificing herself to vampires to raise me, only to have me lose myself while working for them.

If I closed my eyes, I could still remember her slipping into the apartment. Leaning over me and smoothing my hair away from my face as I pretended to be asleep. She smelled of cold and antibacterial ointment, sometimes like gin if one of them had bought her a drink. I took a long breath and let it out slowly. Now who was being all sad and hopeless?

"I'll take you there sometime if you want," I said, tapping the picture. "Maybe not that exact place, but to a glacier-fed lake. Do the hopeless like to go hiking?"

A foxfire sheen rolled through his eyes before disappearing, but the feeling he emitted wasn't hostility. It was thin, bitter. He didn't believe me.

"Don't answer too fast," I said, heading for the door. "Take a few days to think it over. I expect to hear your full fantasy. The wildlife you want to see. The berries you want to pick. Every sordid detail."

"You are generous, mistress," he said, his voice flat.

"Yep, that's me. The generous mistress." I chewed on my lip. He was grieving. In a melodramatic way, but he was grieving. And clearly having trouble adjusting. Surely another vampire could help him. They'd all had to deal with loss, over and over the longer they existed. Maybe he needed to talk it through. I'd once overheard a counselor talking about how most of his patients simply wanted someone to listen. But it wasn't like Thurston sat around waiting for someone to meet his eye so he could unroll his tongue like an unwelcome red carpet.

"You can get over this, Thurston. You're not hopeless. Far from it. You have more power and...greater potential than you did when you were human." I raised a hand when he stood. "Don't say anything right now. But think about what it means, what it could mean."

I took my time climbing the stairs. The hotel felt like an asylum, a riot of vampire energy compartmentalized by the heavy walls and doors, by the division between human and vampire s.p.a.ces. Even though it was still hot, heat lingering in the air and wafting off the stone and metal, outside was still refreshing.

The pool was covered with a white plastic sheet, and that was weighed down by a layer of mud. It must have rained here after the dust had blown through. A few humans, including Mickey, had circled up to a round table covered in candles. Across the deck, a couple of men hosed off the rest of the chairs. It was the first imprecise, dirty thing I'd seen at Tenth World.

Mickey waved, and I waved back before joining her. She needed a hive, a family, even if n.o.body was related. Or, in this case, even if it was composed of brand-new acquaintances. I felt a little guilty. The trip hadn't turned out how she'd wanted it.

"Hey." I perched on the arm of her chair and she wrapped a thin arm around me and laid her head on my shoulder.

"Have you heard the news?" she asked.

"About what?" I asked, startled. I'd heard all kinds of news, but wasn't sure what might have trickled up to her.

"Another intrusion," one of the guys said. Shay-Mickey's diver-sat beside him, messing with his cuticles. A line of empty gla.s.ses fanned out on the table beside him. "A foreign vampire approached two of the girls while they were at lunch."

"During the day?" I asked.

"At the mall. They said he was c.o.c.ky. Walked right up and propositioned them. Luckily his glamour was weak."

"He could have been thrown out into the sun," Mickey whispered.

"I think there are laws against that, even here," I said. "Did anyone recognize him?"

"Judging by the accent, he was part of that sect that got kicked out of Quebec." The woman who answered was blonde, with darker brows and thick, dark eyelashes. Small white scars peeked out from beneath billowing white sleeves. She was smooth and vibrant, but carried herself with the a.s.surance of an older woman.

"What do they think they're doing?"

"They don't understand that we aren't available at their whim." Shay sighed.

"Why don't they come here?" I asked. There had been a couple of polite notices in the hotel room advising that drinking from unregulated feeders was a no-no in Arizona. Chev didn't want her guests breaking the law outside her reservation and, if memory served, Arizona wasn't known for its leniency. But why bother soliciting outside of the resort? Guest Services seemed pretty d.a.m.n accommodating.

"Tenth World is above their price range," the blonde said, earning a few smug laughs.

Talk turned to the amenities and luxuries handed to them, to how much better things were here than other places they'd worked. I caught Mickey's eye and tilted my head toward the door. We tumbled off the chair in opposite directions, then circled around to each other.

"She's Chev's companion," Micky whispered, one hand half covering her mouth as she pointed to the blonde. "Laura. She's almost sixty. Can you believe it?"

I wouldn't have pegged her at more than thirty-five, a d.a.m.n good thirty-five at that. "Impressive."

"How old are you really? Fifty?" She looked me up and down with mock seriousness.

"Eighty. When I met Mal, my b.o.o.bs hung down to my knees."

"Some guys are a.s.s men, some are low b.o.o.b men."

I snickered, then cleared my throat and pushed her into the stairwell. "Look, things are about to get gnarly around here. I'm going to work tomorrow, but then we're taking off. Let's pack tonight. We'll head for Montana-"

"Can we stop at Disneyland?"

"Uh, sure."

"And Las Vegas?"

I pulled up the map in my head. "Yeah, that's doable. Might as well engage in some sanctioned debauchery after you make all your childhood fantasies come true."

"Yes!" She raised a triumphant fist. "What about Thurston?"

"Dr. Downer?"

"What downer? He's always smiling. Such a funny guy. I think we should bring him with us."

Thurston at Disneyland. I would actually pay to see that.

Chapter Ten.

"You're early," Lil barked.

I threw my hands out. "I'm on time!"

"HR emailed. Said they weren't changing your shift for two weeks, so now you're early." She wore a cream-colored uniform shirt that brought out the jaundiced tone of her skin.

"Well, if you don't have any work to be done..." I turned as if to leave, and smiled to myself when she grumbled.

"Get your scrawny a.s.s in here."

"So, what's on the agenda today? More sweet videos?" I'd be able to clock out by three, which would give me enough time to launch a minor a.s.sault on the key-card-guarded labs, say good-bye to Mal, and drive off before the sun set. Not quite as dramatic as driving off into the sunset, but survival was more important than making a sweet scene.

"You were supposed to ride with Hernandez but he called in sick."

"I hope he feels better."

"There's nothing wrong with him. He just don't want to drive. Probably because he gets lost and the guys make fun of him. Or he loses the van in a parking lot and I make fun of him. D should cover for him, but-" She raised her voice a couple of decibels, turning all nearby heads. "He went and got himself a U and an I to add to that D."

"What kind of a truck is it?" I asked. "Does it require a commercial driver license?"

"It's a Savana."

Standard cargo van. That was doable, and way better than safety videos. "How many drops?"

"One at the airport, one to FedEx." She checked her clipboard. "Seven to locals."

"Any priorities or rush status? Anything refrigerated, fragile, or perishable?"