All Malevolent Masquerade was always our favorite holiday. She’d told me the party at the Rogaire mansion had gone off without a hitch, but I was still sour that I had to spend the night elsewhere. Duty came first, she’d said, but she’d also mused how she too would have much rather joined me on the one night a year the proper spilled into graveyards and disreputable bars, banging drums, running up tabs, puking on headstones, and cutting up roasted pigs while dressed as goblins and muskrats.

Somyellia lay in bed with her eyes shut. Some nighttime clamor out on Red Wolf had distracted her, but she’d resumed one of her fonder pastimes. She dug her hand through the jar of severed tongues. Pulling a shriveled one out and giving it a good lick, “Thee neighborly would be less incorrigible if it weren’t for those drat newcomers, by rights,” said Somyellia. One more, swollen and still holding its redness, proved to be decidedly male. “Not that bonnet, woman! Makes you look a frumpish bar trout,” she boomed, and then her voice returned to normal. “Lovely stuff.”

I stood there, drying my hair. “So we’re going to be swimming in silver soon for all this?”

“More to life than metal,” lidding the jar, “one as keen for stomach tubes and finger bones as you knows this,” Somyellia said. “Don’t sound too Chapwyn on me.” I tossed a severed hand that we used for intimate petting off the bed and flopped down beside her. “Mediocre in the many ways that he may be,” Somyellia continued, “Irion easily dominated the Rogaire prison master. Asking for a guard change and an escort out of that lovely dungeon was no harder than robbing graves in a blind man’s graveyard with a silent shovel.”

As she came up on her hands and knees, the window above our bed held the night. She studied the angle of the moon. I studied the sleek dip of her back and bare buttocks. “It’s almost time,” she said, staying me and hopping toward her wardrobe.

“It’s a wonder that termite-eaten box doesn’t explode,” I said. Rummaging through the clutter, she swung out ribbons of dazzling green before tossing it in the trash.

“Sexy lizard costume?” I snickered.

“Ansul’s ass, don’t make me relive it.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Told you, my beast, I introduced Irion and Morlia years ago.”

“Eight years.”

“You do listen. And soon, as you know, after they’d met they agreed Morlia’d approach that dim prison master. Who knows, it could have been my tasking if Morlia hadn’t been so insistent,” giving the rummage a rest, her eyes sparkled, “but, of course, I would have tactfully explained I was already so uncompromisingly taken. But I knew it would work well. The weak charm Irion drenched her in probably wasn’t even needed.”

“Seduce the warden?”