“Kicked him in the balls,” I’d answered promptly, which I guessed was not the hoped-for response, judging by the fact that I did not receive pudding that night.

Pudding, I thought, while crawling determinedly for the hallway door. It had been Eugenie’s catch-all phrase for dessert, because I guess British people really like pudding. She’d called it the pudding course, although sometimes it was actually cake or trifle or pie.

Pie. My brain latched onto the idea with enthusiasm. I could really do with some pie. I was absolutely ravenous for some reason, although pudding—

Somebody snatched me off the floor.

—would be nice, too, I decided, dangling from a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“Hello, Marco.”

I was having a problem focusing suddenly. The big, handsome face of my chief bodyguard kept doing the mambo, shifting back and forth every time I tried to catch it with my eyes. Focus, shift, focus, shift, like it was dodging my eyeballs. It was making me woozy, and I guessed I must have looked a little weird, because he shook me.

Urp, I thought again, and tried not to retch.

“Mage Pritkin!” he yelled.

“I am here as well,” Mircea said, sounding slightly aggrieved. Maybe because Marco used to be his vamp, not so long ago. But the former gladiator had thrown in his lot with me, deciding that my court needed more help than Mircea’s did, and making me joke that I’d got him in the divorce.

That wasn’t true, of course. There’d been no divorce, since Mircea and I had never been married in the human sense of the word, and since such things didn’t exist in vamp land, anyway. But even if it had, Marco wouldn’t have been divvied up. Not because he was a person instead of a tchotchke—vamps tended to view their servants and their furniture on something of a par—but because he was a master, too. A second-level one, in fact, one of the most powerful tiers, and the kind who often had their own courts.

Marco could have left Mircea’s service years ago, but he hadn’t seen the point when it wouldn’t get him out of the dog-eat-dog vamp world, but just set him up with a new set of headaches. So, he’d stuck around, telling me once that everybody serves somebody, and that Mircea was a better master than most. But then he’d seen a chance to join a different kind of court, where he made the rules, at least where security was concerned.