“Flirt on your own time, Lieblings,” advised Zee. “I am too old for it—you could give me a heart attack.”

“You’d have to have a heart for that threat to work,” I said, and happily settled in for a game of insults with Zee.

—

We parked next to Thomas’s car. It was nearly full dark—close enough to it that the vampire had discarded his hoodie and stood, looking elegant, in his usual bright-colored silk shirt. This one was an iridescent pearly blue, with an embroidered dark blue or black dragon crawling over his shoulder and down his arm.

He opened the door for Margaret and stood watching her struggle to get out. He didn’t move a muscle, but I could feel the willpower it took not to help. Adam was right, Thomas was a goner. People who say that vampires don’t care about anyone except themselves are mostly right—but sometimes they are very and lethally wrong.

Margaret’s pain was too private to watch, so I looked up at the hotel.

In downtown Seattle, the Marcus Whitman Hotel wouldn’t stand out, but in Walla Walla, it was about a hundred feet taller than anything else around it. From the bones of the original structure, it had been built in the late nineteen twenties. Several colors of brick and the very modern entrance evidenced more than one renovation over the years.

“All right,” Margaret said, her voice a little husky from pain. “There are supposed to be three Gray Lords meeting with me, and I’m allowed to bring my people with me. I had intended it to be just Thomas, but they allowed me six. With your permission, I’m going to give you, Adam and Mercy, a little glamour, nothing fancy—just something that will help them dismiss you as thugs numbers one and two. If you do something to draw attention, the glamour won’t hold.” She looked at Zee. “You, I expect, can do your own and be thug number three.” She turned back to Adam and me. “It won’t hold if they really look at you, but it should give us the element of surprise. And any advantage is to your favor—they’ll respect you for it.”

“Fine,” said Adam. I nodded.

Her magic settled over me like a cool mist. Sometimes magic doesn’t stick to me, but this time it seemed to.

“Thomas?” I asked.

“He doesn’t need it,” she said. “He can do it without magic. When he doesn’t want people to notice him, they just don’t.”

I rubbed my pleasantly tingling skin, and said, “You’re just going in to tell them ‘no,’ right? Which you could do with just Thomas. The glamour is to help us?”

She smiled. “It’s fun. I don’t like them. Don’t like the games they are playing. I’m happy to help. Now hush, someone could be listening.”