Her neck was bruised, and she held herself like her bones ached. I tried not to show that I noticed she was missing the last two fingers on her right hand. Her hand was healed, but the scars were still red and angry.

Marsilia, the Mistress of the Tri-Cities’ vampires, had used Stefan, her faithful knight, to oust traitors from her seethe, and part of that involved taking his menagerie—the humans he kept to feed from—and making him think they were dead by breaking his blood bonds to them. She seemed to think that torturing them had been necessary as well, but I don’t trust vampires—other than Stefan

—to speak the truth. Marsilia hadn’t thought Stefan would object to her use of him and his menagerie once he knew that she’d done it to protect herself. He was, after all, her loyal Soldier.

She’d miscalculated how badly Stefan would deal with her betrayal. From the looks of it, he wasn’t recovering well.

“You’d better get out of here, Mercy,” Rachel told me dully. “ ’Tisn’t safe.”

I caught the door before she could shut it. “Is Stefan home?”

She drew in a ragged breath. “He won’t help. He doesn’t.”

At least it didn’t sound like Stefan was the danger she had been warning me about. She’d turned her head when I stopped her from shutting the door, and I saw that someone had been chewing on her neck. Human teeth, I thought, not fangs, but the scabs climbed the side of the tendon between her collarbone and her jaw in brutal relief.

I shouldered the door open and stepped inside so I could reach out and touch the scabs, and Rachel flinched back, retreating from the door and from me.

“Who did this?” I asked. Impossible to believe Stefan would let anyone else hurt her again. “One of Marsilia’s vampires?”

She shook her head. “Ford.”

For a moment I drew a blank. Then I

remembered the big man who’d driven me out of Stefan’s house the last time I was there. Half-changed to vampire and mostly crazy with it—and that had been before Marsilia had gotten her claws into him. A very nasty, scary guy—and I expected he’d been scary before he’d ever seen a vampire.

“Where’s Stefan?”

I have very little tolerance for drama that ends in people getting hurt. It was Stefan’s job to take care of his people, never mind that for most vampires their menageries existed as convenient snacks, and all the people in them died slow, nasty deaths over a period that might last as long as six months.

Stefan hadn’t been like that. I knew that Naomi, the woman who ran his household, had been with him for thirty years or more. Stefan was careful.