“Maybe not,” Jackson said, “but as you’re inclined to remind me, it’s a better option than being dead. Besides, it means I now have a whole new and very exciting means of enjoying your lusciousness.”

I laughed. “Trust you to put a sexual spin on it.”

“Something I can hardly help given that’s how the experience panned out for me.” He pushed upright, walked over, and offered me a hand. “Feel free to ask for a feed anytime you feel the need.”

I clasped his hand and allowed him to haul me upright. “You might have gotten your rocks off, but it really is a dangerous thing for me to do. I have killed people that way in the past.”

I might have done so under attack, as a last-ditch effort to save myself, but that was beside the point. I’d drained life from people before, and I’d undoubtedly do it again, especially if my reserves got too low and the rapture too great to ignore.

“It was fierce enough this time—I know, because I felt it.” He brushed a sweaty strand of hair from my eyes, his touch gentle. “But you didn’t. Maybe this connection between us means you can’t. Maybe in sharing your life force you really have made me something more than a dark fae, but something less than a phoenix.”

“That’s a whole lot of maybes.” And far too many to contemplate now—not when there was still so much to do, and people to save. I stepped away from his touch. “We need to call PIT and get some of their medics here.”

“The inspector is not going to be happy to learn the cloaks remain a threat.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Especially if Rinaldo really is in control of them.”

“I don’t think he is. Or, at least, he wasn’t in charge of this lot. They were chasing after Frederick, and Rinaldo certainly wouldn’t have ordered that. I think the attack on us was an afterthought.”

Jackson snorted. “If that’s true, how the hell did they get out of Brooklyn? We destroyed all their exit points, remember.”

“Brooklyn might have been Luke’s main base, but he had at least one pocket of cloaks stashed in a sewer junction under the city, remember.” A fact we’d become aware of when we were hunting for Grace’s missing coven friends. We’d not only found them far too late to save their lives, but had almost fallen afoul of the trap Luke and his not-so-tame witch had waiting for us there. “And if he’d had one such bolt-hole, what’s to say there aren’t more?”