It was a naked, chilling warning, and Claire took it seriously. So, she saw, did Myrnin.

But Oliver had to drive it home. “If you do come back,” he said, “I’ll kill you before she gets you. It would be a kindness.”

Myrnin shook his head. “She’ll get you first, you know that.”

“I’m not as easy as all that.” Oliver held the door for them, and his eyes brushed over Claire, then came to rest on Myrnin. “You of all people should know.”

Then he let the door slam shut behind them.

“Let me see,” Myrnin said, in the sudden silence of the anteroom, and she realized he was asking about her hand. She unwrapped it and held it out, and flinched as his cool fingers touched her hot, bloodied ones. “They’ve swollen a bit, but that’s good. Your body is fighting the infection. You’ll be all right.” His hand came away with a smear of blood on it, and he looked at it, then sighed and wiped it on the towel. “That is a great waste.”

“What, the blood?”

“Of course not.” He sighed. “Amelie, of course. We shall not see her like again in these weak times.”

He set a wicked fast pace down the hall; Claire grimly trudged along for her enforced aerobic workout and wondered if her hand might feel better if she just hit him. He was so far ahead she almost missed which turns he’d taken; this building always got her turned around, as she suspected it was supposed to do. There were no signs, no names on doors, just those expensively generic paintings. She supposed that if she could tell one old masters landscape from another, she’d know her way around, but her brain wasn’t really wired that way.

“Slow down!” she finally yelled, as Myrnin disappeared around a distant corner. She was tired, shaky, and irritable, and the bruises she’d collected were making themselves felt, definitely. She also had a hot pinpoint headache forming in the center of her forehead.

Myrnin popped his head—just his head—back around the corner at a very weird angle to say, “Oh, just hurry up!” and then he vanished. If Claire had been in the habit of cursing like, say, Shane, she’d have scorched the carpet with it. Instead, she just set her teeth together, hard, and moved faster.

Amelie’s office, without its usual complement of guards, was halfway down the next hall, or at least that was the door that Myrnin was in the act of kicking open. It took several attempts, which must have meant that Amelie had built her security against vampires, not humans—sensible, really. Before Claire reached him, Myrnin had beaten the locks, and the heavy wooden door splintered open with a crash. “Faster would be better,” he said, “given that her guards are not fully off duty, and they may not appreciate that I took dire measures, even with permission. They have to fix the doors eventually, you know.”

He zipped inside, kicked open Amelie’s inner sanctum door with a few more violent blows, and by the time Claire got there he was at the desk, ripping open another (locked) drawer and removing a black box.