okay. He had all the ID and the papers, though God knew how he’d gotten them. I didn’t care. All I

knew was that he was there, and that things were going to be all right.

And that I didn’t want to let him out of my sight ever again. Not if I could help it.

Not unless he made me.

Jealousy

CHAPTER FIVE

By the time I was finished, I’d taken down enough coffee and orange juice to float a small battleship, and my throat was scraped raw from talking. I wanted a bathroom and a long, long nap.

Of all of them, the redheaded Kir reacted the most. His face went through incredulousness, puzzlement, comprehension, and finally anger. It stayed at “anger” for awhile, a thundercloud over his

forehead and his aspect on, filling his hair with a wild golden curl and sliding his fangs out from under his upper lip.

I kept half an eye on him.

The blonds—Ezra and Marcus—did most of the questioning, with Bruce interjecting every now and

again. Mostly they just let me talk and explain and digress and get nervous, and every once in

awhile Hiro would reassure me. “It’s all right,” he’d say. “We know you’re telling the truth.”

Which kind of made me wonder. It’s not the sort of thing you say to someone you believe. And so I

instinctively stuck to my decision to leave out little things—like the flushes and cold spells that

went through me when I thought of Christophe. And not so little things, like the fact that he’d bitten

me. The marks pulsed erratically on my wrist when I got nervous. I kept my sleeves pulled down as

if I was cold.

It was unlike any other visit to the principal’s office I’d ever had. I mean, you’d think being called

into a room with a bunch of older guys who ran a huge vampire-fighting organization would be like

the principal’s office, right? But instead it was . . . weird. It was like they just wanted to listen to

me.

They looked at me funny, too. As if I was a mythological creature they couldn’t quite place. I would

glance up from my food, away from Kir or away from whoever had asked me a question, and see

one of them frankly staring at me. Which made the food kind of turn to a wad of chewable cardboard in my mouth and made me wonder if I had something on my face. It would be just like me to

have a bit of egg stuck on my chin while talking to a bunch of bigwigs.

“Then we got here,” I finished lamely. “And after a little bit of confusion, Benjamin and his crew

showed up and took me to the room. They say they’re my bodyguards.”