And something with hard bits that was wedged up my- I fumbled around underneath me until I found a stuffed werewolf that had been getting way too personal. And then I pried my body off the sofa and shoved the pillow under the little girl's face, soft side up. And stepped off the couch.

And froze.

Because my foot had just crunched glass.

It was everywhere.

Everywhere.

I suddenly realized that the balcony doors weren't open, they were gone, without even any shards left around the edges. Which probably explained why there was a guard out there, every two feet, smoking and drinking and testing the weight-bearing limits of Dante's architecture.

Considering who had built this place, I'd have been worried if I were them. But if they were, or if they were freaking out about the events that were just beginning to edge back into my consciousness, they didn't show it. Rico even winked at me, through a haze of smoke.

I tried winking back, but my eyelid was still gummy and it got stuck.

I sighed. And pried it up. And glanced around to see what else had changed.

Annnnnd it was a lot.

The coffee table was gone, too, with its glass top. And the pictures with their metal frames. And the sconces with their mirrored backs. Even the recessed lights were different, their shiny rims now covered in black duct tape.

I blinked at them for a minute, swaying a little because my butt was still asleep. The clock had been obliterated, so I couldn't see the time, but it felt like the middle of the night. Looked like it, too, with nothing but darkness and the distant glow of neon visible beyond the balcony. But somebody was cooking, nonetheless, and it smelled . . . oh so good.

I retrieved my slippers from beside the couch and shuffled my way into the lounge.

And discovered that it had been visited by the mad redecorator, too.

The TV was gone, and so was the light over the card table. The nice glassware on the portable bar had been replaced by red Solo cups, upping the I-live-in-a-frat-house ambience to something approaching 100 percent. But the real showstopper was the pool table.

Each of the little balls had been stuffed into somebody's socks, I guess because they were glass and kind of reflective.

"Don't you think this is a bit much?" I asked, toting one into the kitchen.

Rhea, who was at the sink, gaped at me for some reason.

"No," Marco said, not turning from the stove, where he was cooking something in a cast-iron skillet. It matched the black duct tape on everything from the stove knobs to the drawer pulls to the sink faucets. And coordinated with the heavy taupe and black zigzag blanket someone had affixed to the front of the fridge.

"Don't worry; she always looks like that in the morning," Fred told Rhea, looking up from chopping a slab of bacon on the cutting board.

"I do when I sleep on the sofa," I said, vainly trying to pat down my wayward hair. "By the way, why was I on the sofa?"

"Because you wouldn't let us move you," Marco told me, finally turning around. And giving me the once-over before shaking his head.

"I wouldn't let you?" I repeated. Marco didn't usually bother to ask for permission.

"The girls wanted to keep you with them, and when I tried to cart you off to bed anyway, you flailed at me."

"I did not."

"You did." He rolled up the sleeve of his golf shirt to show me a massive bicep and a nonexistent bruise.

"You'll be telling Mircea I abuse you next."

"I already tell him that."

I snorted. And opened my mouth to give him the reply he deserved. But then something was shoved into it.

Something wonderful.

"What-" I asked, after chewing and swallowing.

"Tochitura moldoveneasca." Marco rolled the sounds over his tongue lovingly, even though that wasn't Italian.

"And that's what?"

"This," Marco said, handing me a flimsy paper plate.

And a plastic spork.

"Oh, come on!"

"It's only temporary, until I can get somebody in to upgrade the wards."

"When will that be?"

"Couple hours. We had someone do a hatchet job last night, just in case Jonas managed to find-hup," he said, and quickly put another few paper plates under the first one, which was quickly soaking through.

"Just in case he managed to find . . . what?"

"Not what. Who," he corrected. "His boys. Who you shifted . . . where?"

I had a vague recollection of a bunch of angry, half-drowned war mages thrashing their way up a familiar, pebble-strewn beach. Bet it hadn't been a fun swim with all that hardware, I thought evilly. And then looked up to see Marco cocking a thick black eyebrow at me.

"Lake Mead."

"Ha!" Fred said.

"It isn't funny," I told him, trying not to grin. And it wasn't, really. This thing with Jonas wasn't likely to go away just because we changed the wards. Or sent his boys for a surprise midnight swim. I needed to talk to him, right after I figured out what the heck to say.

I sighed and put it on my list.

"You going to eat that, or admire it?" Marco asked me.

I looked down at my plate. There were thick, crispy bacon, lovely meaty sausage, eggs fried in what might be bacon grease if I was lucky, polenta, and some weird white crumbly stuff I couldn't immediately identify. But overall, an easy nine out of ten.

"Eat it," I said, and found a stool at the bar.

The crumbly white stuff turned out to be some kind of delicious cheese. Which went really well when mixed with everything else in a gooey mass of heart-attack-inducing awesomeness. I started shoveling it in.

"What did you say this was again?" I asked after a heady few minutes.

"Moldavian breakfast of champions."

"And you know how to make it why?"

"Horatiu taught me," Marco said, referring to Mircea's oldest servant. "It's from the old country."

"Old country my ass," a redheaded charmer named Roy said, coming in. "That's Southern cooking."

"Southern Romanian, maybe."

"Moldavia's actually to the north," Fred piped up.

"I don't care where it is," Roy said, bending over my plate. "That's bacon, eggs, and cheese grits. Half the South eats that for breakfast every morning."

"Well, I learned it from an old Romanian, and I'm pretty sure they had it first," Marco said, in his don't-argue-with-me-I'm-the-boss voice. And then he looked down, and his face changed. From hard-ass master vamp to . . . well, I didn't know exactly what that expression was. But it was soft and he was smiling.

At the barefoot cherub in a crumpled white nightgown who was tugging on his pants leg.

"Phoebe!" Rhea said, quickly coming around the table. "Don't bother the . . . the man. He's cooking."

She reached for her, but the little girl had already been swept up into Marco's arms, looking impossibly tiny next to my giant of a bodyguard. Whose bicep was bigger around than her whole body. He showed her the contents of the pan. "You want some bacon and eggs?"

She nodded enthusiastically.

"I-was going to make oatmeal," Rhea said, looking between the two of them.

Marco and the girl wrinkled noses at exactly the same moment, causing me to burst out laughing. And to almost swallow my damn spork. Rhea looked back at me in alarm.

"I don't think she wants oatmeal," I told her.

"It . . . it's just . . ."

"It's just?"

"That isn't very healthy," she blurted, looking at my plate. And then stood there, apparently stricken. And confusing the heck out of me.

Rhea seemed to have some kind of split-personality thing going on that I didn't understand. One minute, she was telling off dangerous master vampires and the head of the Silver Circle, and the next she was freezing up into Little Miss Meek Voice when she had to talk to me. It was disconcerting. It made me feel like Godzilla. It was also going to be a problem if she didn't get over it.

I decided to push her a little.

"So you think I shouldn't be eating this?"

"I . . . No." She looked startled. "No, I wouldn't presume to . . . I mean, what the Pythia eats is, of course, her own-"

"But it's not healthy."

"It's . . ." She looked at my plate unhappily. "It's just . . . well, there's no vegetables . . ."

"No vegetables in oatmeal, either," Fred pointed out.

"No, but it's a whole grain," she said, glancing at him. And looking relieved to have someone she could actually argue with.

"Polenta's whole-grain-"

"And oatmeal isn't cooked in bacon grease!"

"We could add a vegetable," I said, bringing her attention back to me. "Couldn't we, Fred?"

He looked at my plate thoughtfully. Vegetables were not Fred's strong suit. "Well, I guess I could chop up an onion-"

"An onion doesn't count!" Rhea told him severely.

"Or put half a tomato on the side," I said, thinking of all the breakfasts I'd seen Pritkin eat. He was supposed to be a health-food nut, and most of the time he lived up to it. But on Sundays he splurged on the most god-awful breakfasts on the face of the earth. I'd kind of gotten the idea that, lately, he'd been making them deliberately horrible just to mess with me.

"The court was in London," I added. "That's what the kids are probably used to."

"Yeah, the Brits got great breakfasts," Fred enthused. "With that nice thick back bacon-"

"And fried mushrooms-" I added.

"-and fried eggs-" Fred agreed happily.

"-and fried sausages-"

"-and fried bread-"

"You do realize that everything you've mentioned is fried?" Rhea asked him.

"-and scones swimming in butter," I said, piling it on.

"Oh, don't even go there," Fred told me. "'Cause then you're gonna need your strawberry jam and your orange marmalade and your clotted cream-"

"Clotted cream?" Rhea said, looking horrified.

"And cheesy Welsh rarebit," he said dreamily. And grinned at me, as if he thought he'd won.

As if.

"Baked beans and toast," I told him smartly.

"Toad in the hole," Fred shot back, the light of challenge in his eye.

"Fresh kippers-"

"Scotch eggs-"

"-deviled kidneys-"