“I don’t know how you can drink this,” he said, his voice toneless. “Stuff smells like gasoline.”

“Put it over some ice and let it sit for a moment.”

“That makes a difference?”

“Yeah. All the girls like drinking it that way.”

He cracked a small, faint grin, and she sensed it melting some of the tension between them.

“Sure,” he said, and got to his feet, his knees cracking. “Why not?”

He returned from the kitchen with a glass packed with ice. Ellie had studied his face during their talk, and she studied it now as he poured, saw how calm it was—how calm he was. Like he’d already known all the key details before she had shared them. Or was he trying to be strong for her? Supportive?

“You didn’t seem surprised by what I told you,” she said.

“About the shooting?” Cody looked at her, perplexed. “I told you what’s-her-name, Vickers, called me. By that time, I already knew most of the details. My lieutenant had already made some phone calls for me.”

“I meant Kelly coming by here.”

“Oh. That.”

The missing pieces came together, and she straightened a bit. “You spoke to him, didn’t you?”

Cody nodded. “He called me. Told me about the shooting, that you were okay. I thought it was a bit odd, the commissioner calling, and then he explained how you helped him ID the two vics in Brentwood. Then we spoke for a bit about your remarkable ability to remember shit and your interest in the blood world.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you’ve been interested in the inner workings of the blood world for as long as I’ve known you. Then he asked me if I wouldn’t mind staying away from your place until he had a chance to talk to you.”

“So you knew about why he was coming here. What he wanted.”

Cody nodded and leaned back in his chair.

Ellie put her glass on the floor. “When, exactly,” she asked, feeling a hot coil of anger digging its way behind her left eye, “were you going to tell me this?”

He caught her tone, saw the expression on her face, and said, “I wasn’t not going to tell you, if that’s what you mean. I wanted to listen to what you had to say first—see if you want to say anything at all or just—”

“He asked you for permission, didn’t he? See if you had a problem with me going undercover.”

“He didn’t use those exact words.”

“Oh? What words did he use?”

“Ellie, we’ve been in a serious relationship coming up on, what, almost two years? It’s not a secret.”

Ellie shook her head as she looked out into the distance, her eyes hot with anger.

“The guy was being respectful,” Cody said, like it was no big deal—and to him, it wasn’t. He was a privileged white male, and still, after hundreds of years—even here, in California, the most liberal and ethnically diverse state in the nation—white men were considered the ruling class. “He just wanted to see how I felt about it. Truthfully, I thought it was a pretty classy—”