“Maybe,” he said. “Like I said, I’m busy.”

“Thank you for your time.”

I walked off.

“Now what?” Ascanio asked.

“Now we go to the office and bathe.”

I was sitting in the office, with my beastkin feet on the desk and a bottle of Georgia Peach Iced Tea, custom-made for me by Burt’s Liquor, where I’d made a strategic stop before arriving at the office. Outside the barred window, evening had dimmed the sky to a deep purple. Ascanio was in the back, trying to scrub himself clean in the office shower. He’d caught a nap on the way back to the office, so I expected him to emerge in his human shape and at least semi-conscious.

I sipped my drink. All in all, a productive day. A hell of a lot of excitement.

Footsteps. I twitched my furry round ear, listening. Light stride, sure steps…Kate.

The door swung open and Kate walked in. Her jeans and T-shirt were splattered with blood and she was carrying a severed vampire head. The T-shirt had a smiley face on it.

In my natural untanned state I was pale. If you put me into a pitch-black room, my face would probably light up like the moon. That’s why I cultivated a sun habit that resulted in a mild pigment formation in my skin. I liked to call this tan golden brown. My favorite cosmetics company, Sorcière, which had a slightly cannibalistic tendency to name all their foundation skin tones after food, liked to call my tan “cream.” Cream was only a couple of shades darker than the palest “milk.” If I really baked myself, I could get all the way to “vanilla blush,” which meant pale beige. Woo-hoo.

Kate would need “dusky honey” at the very least. I knew this because a few weeks ago I had to explain to her what concealer was and why she couldn’t use it by itself on the strange rash we got after clearing some odd rat-critters from an old warehouse. Putting concealer and foundation on Kate turned out to be a losing proposition, because after the first five minutes it bugged her and she kept rubbing her face until she looked like a clown who got painted up in the dark.

Her hair, put away into a long braid, was chocolate brown and her eyes were dark too, framed in dense black eyelashes, and oddly cut, large, but slightly elongated with curvy corners. The first time I saw her, I had stared, trying to figure out what the heck she was. There were shades of India there, or maybe Arabia, or possibly a touch of Asia. She could twist it any way she wanted, depending on makeup, which she rarely wore.