"Because I'm a woman?" I asked quietly.

"Because you will be the only person in the fight who hasn't been trained as a killer. I have seen my mother and my grandmother on the battlefield. Any vampire with half a mind knows better than to stand between a woman and her chosen target. When a man takes up arms, he does so for many reasons. Sometimes to punish, sometimes to intimidate or frighten. But when a woman picks up a weapon, she means to kill. So please do not take this as an insult."

He leaned toward me. Suddenly the space between us shrank.

"I will do everything in my power to ensure your survival, and should the need arise, I will put myself between danger and you." His voice was quiet and intimate. "Do not hesitate to use me as your shield."

His voice sent tiny shivers through me.

Wow. He was something else.

Arland smiled again, showing me his fangs. Vampires smiled for many reasons, but when a vampire male smiled at you from this distance with that kind of look in his eyes, it was done for one purpose only: to impress. Look at my big teeth. I'm an apex predator. My genetic material is awesome.

I had to say something. "I'll keep that in mind. Now if you excuse me, I have some preparations to make."

I picked up my broom, went outside, pulled the cart out with my magic, stuck the broom into it, and started toward the clearing. The cart rolled behind me.

No, this wouldn't do. I had to keep at least some semblance of normality and I was getting sloppy. Appearing normal even when nobody who mattered could see us was how innkeepers had kept up our disguises for so long. I sighed, circled the cart, and put my hands on the handles.

Vampires have been hitting on me since I was about fifteen. Mostly vampire boys. Vampires, as a species, lived to conquer. Their cultural identity was wrapped up around challenges, and both male and female vampires went after their targets with single-minded precision. As the daughter of innkeepers, I was off-limits and therefore irresistible. Nothing had ever come of it, and I was used to it by now, but something about Arland, the way he looked at me, or the way he smiled, sent a shiver of alarm through me. It wasn't unpleasant, which was troubling. Being involved with the Marshal of a Holy Anocracy House wasn't on my agenda. They didn't do "involved." They only did total and complete victory. I had to nip this in the bud.

Where could Sean have gotten off to? If that suit had strangled him and he now lay dying somewhere, I wouldn't even know. Idiot werewolf.

I reached the edge of clearing. Here the short, stocky trees parted to encircle a clear field. The boundary of the inn ended about twelve feet ahead. I took the broom from the cart, turned it into a narrow shovel, and thrust it into the ground. The hole grew around it, wider, deeper...

Little more.

Hmm. About a foot deep should do it.

Okay, good enough. Now I just had to make thirty-one more.

I turned and almost walked into Sean. His face was slicked with a faint sheen of sweat. His cloak was gone. He wore a T-shirt that left his arms bare, and the same damp sheen covered the carved muscle of his biceps. He stared at my face, his eyes so light they almost glowed. I looked into them and saw the wolf looking right back at me.

Every cell in my body went on full alert. My broom sprouted a blade.

Sean smiled, a feral grin like a wolf panting. "Dina." He practically purred.

"Are you okay?"

He glanced at my broom, amused. "What are you doing here, all alone?"

This was reminding me of Red Riding Hood. If he asked what was in my basket, he would regret it. "I'm not alone. I have my broom."

He leaned forward, closing the six inches between us. The dark tattoo designs slid up and down his neck and chest. The wolf in his eyes beckoned.

Oh no. No, no, no. We were not going there, into those dark woods.

I touched the tip of my spear to the underside of his chin. The heat coming off his skin warmed my hand.

"Ooh." He wrinkled his nose at me. "Sharp."

"I think your new outfit got you a little too excited." I began to pool the magic under him.

"I'm going to kiss you," he said.

"What?"

He pushed my spear aside with his fingers and bent down. His hand slid into my hair. His mouth closed on mine.

Kissing Sean Evans was like drinking a shot of the strongest liquor in the world while it was on fire.

His tongue touched my lips, stroking, teasing, not attacking but seducing; confident but subtle. Excitement shot through me like an electric shock and some sort of vital switch in my brain malfunctioned, fried by the burst of need. I opened my mouth and let him in, our bodies perfectly in tune. He wanted me and I kissed him back.

We broke apart. My body was hot, my head was dizzy. The wolf eyes laughed at me. He looked like he was about to repeat that kiss.

Sean leaned forward.

I pushed. The ground under him yawned and he sank into it up to his hips.

He grinned. "Was it that good for you?"

I dropped him another eighteen inches.

Sean laughed.

"You're interfering with my work. Don't make me bury you."

"If you bury me, you'll have to dig me up for the fight."

"Maybe I'll just leave you in the ground."

I made another hole, took a pearl, which was about the size of a honeydew melon, from the cart, and slid it into the soil.

"Why?" he asked.

"You'll see tonight." I made another hole and planted the next pearl in it. "That suit has gone to your head."

"It's not the suit, buttercup."

"I don't do pet names."

"Do you do werewolves?"

"Okay, I'm not talking to you anymore. I'm going to plant the rest of these, and if you stay very quiet, I might find a drop of compassion in my heart and dig you out before you sprout roots."

He grinned and strained. Muscles bulged on his chest.

"Very impressive, but --"

Sean shot out of the hole and took off into the trees.

Whoa.

I tracked him with my magic. He was running like a madman, bouncing up and down off the tree trunks.

First Arland, now him. Was it something in the air? Maybe fighting the dahaka had gotten them all excited. I didn't know and quite frankly I didn't care. I wanted to kill the dahaka and send both of them home.

Dahaka... Thinking about the fight opened this gaping hole in my stomach that refused to close. Maybe the two of them thought they were going to die and this was their chance to go out strong. I really hoped not.

It was a nice kiss. Very... memorable.

If he came near me with that look again, I'd hit him upside the head and claim self-defense. No jury in the world would convict me.

*** *** ***

The day slowly burned down to evening. I had set the kitchen timer and it told me it'd been exactly six hours and thirty-five minutes since I planted the pearls. They would hatch in nineteen minutes.

In the foyer Arland sat on the loveseat, sipping mint tea. The vampire wore a full set of armor; the breastplate and the raised pauldrons made his shoulders and chest appear enormous. His weapon, a giant blood mace, lay next to him on the floor, its head solid black and crossed by glowing red lines.

Sean sat across from him in a chair, Beast curled by his feet. Sean wore sweatpants and a dark shirt. His bare feet rested on the floorboards. He planned to go into wetwork shape and he said boots hindered his mobility. Two large machetes rested next to him. Well, one was a machete. The other looked like a hybrid of a gladius and an oversized bowie knife.

"So crosses don't do anything against your kind?" Sean asked.

"No," Arland said. "There is no mystical force repelling us."

"Then why?"

"We're forbidden to kill a creature in a moment of prayer or invocation of their deity. Well, we can, technically, but you have to do penance and purify yourself and nobody wants to spend weeks praying and bathing themselves in the sacred cave springs. The water's only a fraction warmer than ice. When one of you holds up a cross, it's difficult to determine whether you're praying, invoking, or just waving it around. So the sane strategy is to back away."

"What about garlic?"

"That comes from gravediggers," I told him. "When they exhumed bodies, they would wear garlands of garlic to keep from gagging."

"Holy water?" Sean asked.

"That charming practice originated in Byzantium," Arland said. "Your churches stored a lot of gold, so to keep the undesirables away, the priests would keep quicklime powder on hand. We're positive there were other ingredients in the powder as well, but quicklime was present in abundance. They'd toss a handful of quicklime in your face and dump holy water on you. The water reacts with quicklime, igniting and turning extremely corrosive. But no, I've dipped my hand in your blessed water before and by itself, it does absolutely nothing."

"Where did you get the holy water?" I asked.

"My cousin brought it as a souvenir. I did it on a dare. Logically, of course, I knew it wouldn't melt my skin off, but one can never be certain."

I pictured a bunch of teenage vampires standing around a basin. "You touch it." "No, you touch it..." Of course, he would put his hand into it.

My timer went off.

"Is it that time?" Sean asked.

I nodded and petted Beast one last time. "Guard the house. Stay inside."

Beast whined softly. I didn't want me to go either, but I had no choice about it.

We went out the door. Sean carried a blade in each hand. Arland carried his mace. I carried my broom. The sun had set, but its wake still diluted the sky's purple to pale yellow in the west. The moon rose, bright, huge, like a silver coin in the sky. The scent of grass and the weak aroma of burning wood from someone's fire pit swirled around me. Noises came in clear: the faint sound of our feet, the distant barking of a dog, a siren somewhere far away... The world seemed so sharp somehow. I was wearing jeans during a Texas summer evening, and still I felt cold.

I really didn't want to die.