Devina turned around and wandered over to the bed. Bending down, she picked up his boxers and looked over the rumpled duvet and the tossed-around pillows.

“Messy, messy. Do you want to tell me exactly what you did to her, Vin? Or should I use my imagination? She’s had so much practice, I’m sure she satisfied you.”

Devina deliberately rearranged a pillow, returning it to a spot against the headboard. With her attention briefly distracted, Vin moved fast, pushing Marie-Terese backward into the bathroom and slamming the door shut. When the lock was immediately turned, he took a deep breath even though it was clear that Devina had no problems getting through Schlage’s best dead bolts.

Devina’s black orbs flicked up. “You do realize if I wanted to get in there I could.”

“You’d have to go through me first. And somehow I don’t think you can do that, can you. If you were going to kill me or her right now, you’d have done so the second you walked in here.”

“You just tell yourself that if it makes you feel better.” Leaning down, she took something off of the twisted duvet. “Well, what do you know. I believe I have—”

Devina froze in midspeech and swiveled her head around so that she looked out the windows. Abruptly, her brows screwed down over the black holes of her eyes, and the features of her face morphed briefly, showing a flash of what he’d seen of her real side: For a split second, all that gorgeous beauty was replaced with rotted, gray sheets of flesh, and he could have sworn he caught a whiff of dead meat.

Shit, maybe it should have freaked him out more, but he knew from experience that the unexplained and unexplainable were no less real for their being crazy. More important, Marie-Terese was on the other side of a thin door, and he was going to fight to the death to protect his woman—no matter what the fuck it was coming at her.

Human…demon…combo of the two. Definitions didn’t matter.

Devina looked back at him. Slipping something into the pocket of her coat, she said in an oddly echoing voice, “I’ll be seeing you both very soon. I have business elsewhere.”

“You’re going to get a facial?” he said. “Good call.”

With a hiss, like she wanted to claw his eyes out, she dissolved into a gray mist and ghosted out of the room, boiling across the carpet and down the stairs.

Vin jolted forward, slammed the bedroom door, and locked it, even though he had a feeling that in that form she could just gust right under the thing. Whatever, it was the best he could do.

He went right to the bathroom and knocked. “She’s gone, but I don’t know for how—”