“Yeah, but—” I was going to say that Bethany wasn’t a smart, lonely teenager. She’d had a slutty reputation long before she’d become a blood-slut. But the truth was, I hadn’t known her then. I didn’t really know her now except as Jen’s troubled older sister. Maybe she had been smart and lonely. Maybe she’d been a wannabe theater geek who couldn’t get taken seriously because everyone in school knew she’d given her first blow job when she was fourteen. Of course, that didn’t excuse the fact that she’d tried to brain Cody with a light fixture tonight, not to mention abducting a minor. “Never mind. Are you okay?”

He tested his throat, clearing it. “More or less. You?”

“I’m fine.”

“You were pretty tough in there tonight, Pixy Stix.” Cody gave me an appraising look. “I hope you meant what you said to Lady Elvira, because if anything like this happens again, I’m not playing by her rules.”

“I know,” I said. “I meant it.”

“Good.” He nodded. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

My pent tail twitched uncomfortably. “I’m not on anyone’s side, Cody. I’m just trying to keep the peace.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I echoed.

He gave me a little sidelong grin, one of his wolfish ones. Light from the convenience store windows glinted on his bronze stubble. “Anyway, it was a pretty good fight, don’t you think?”

I smiled back at him. “Yeah, it was.”

Leaning across me, Cody reached to open the door of the cruiser. “Look, I’m still on patrol. Take care, partner.”

I got out. “You, too.”

So that was that. I stood in the parking lot watching the taillights of Cody’s squad car vanish down the highway, feeling a little alone, a little melancholy. Also, a little hungry, since my dinner had been cheese and crackers at the Fabulous Casimir’s house. I went into the convenience store to buy a frozen pizza, then home to my apartment, where I baked and ate said pizza, sitting on the futon and watching reruns of Iron Chef America with Mogwai winding around my ankles and purring.

I thought about Sinclair, wondering if he felt he’d found a path he could follow in Casimir’s coven. And I thought about Cody, wondering if there would come a time in his life when his own nature put him on the wrong side of the law and what he would choose if that ever happened.

Letting my thoughts roam, I thought about Stefan Ludovic with his father’s fourteenth-century parade shield on display in his twenty-first-century condominium, wondering what untold stories lay behind his oblique facade. I thought about Cooper and the fierce passion of the unexpected diatribe he’d unleashed on me.