She reached out and ran her long fingernails musically over the welded metal mesh. I noted that she had a French manicure, though the nail on her little finger was broken raggedly.

She whispered, “Mercy has no place here, except that she is locked behind bars of steel and silver and magic.”

As if no one had ever had clever things to say about my name before.

“I think,” Mary told me, “that you should not anticipate escaping from here. We have kept your greater cousins here for months at a time, and none have escaped us that we have not let go. We will keep you alive, because that is what he wants. You should remember that—that you owe him your life.”

Him who? Bonarata? Oddly, I thought not. The other Master Vampire, Kocourek, had Bonarata’s support. Bonarata, evil and rotten to the core though he might be, had a code of honor he followed. I knew the stories—and some of them were gruesome. It was the belief that Bonarata would keep his word that had allowed him to amass power for as long as he had. If he supported one seethe, he would not undermine that with another in the same hunting ground.

So whom did she mean?

I cocked an ear at her. And she got it.

Her eyes half-lidded, and she smiled secretly. “Guccio,” she said.

It took me a moment to process his name. Pretty Vampire. Hadn’t his name been Guccio? I’d been meeting a lot of people in the past day or two. But I was pretty sure that Pretty Vampire had been Guccio.

“I see you know of whom I speak. Though you met him only briefly, he leaves an impression most rare.” She took a step forward and dropped to her heels, so her face and mine were even. “He said you were ugly and fat. He said he prefers me.”

Yippee. She was welcome to him. Even if I wasn’t married, I don’t date the dead.

Mary’s mouth was pursed unhappily as she examined me. “You do not look as though you are fat. You look puny and stupid, but not fat. I think he lied to me. And why would he lie unless he wanted you and he didn’t want me to know it? Are you ugly?”

Heaven save me from jealous vampires. I’d always thought that vampires were cold-blooded, and, if they thought about another creature at all, it came with thoughts of food.

I didn’t make the mistake of trying to answer her question. There was no right answer to a question like that. In my coyote shape, I had the perfect excuse to maintain my silence.

“You brought another witch with you,” she said after a moment.

I had no idea what she was talking about. Had Bonarata had a witch travel with me from the US?

“He said”—she frowned unhappily—“he said he wasn’t looking for another witch because he had me.” Shrewd eyes examined me. “But I’m not stupid—I’m not as stupid as he thinks I am, anyway. He lied about you. If he weren’t interested in the witch, he wouldn’t have brought her up.”