“You’re Tamwood,” Glenn said, his bravado clearly scraped from a misplaced feeling of security. “Captain Edden gave you three hundred hours of community service for taking out everyone on his floor, didn’t he? What was it he made you do? A candy striper, right?”

Ivy stiffened, and my mouth dropped open. He was that stupid.

“It was worth it,” Ivy said softly. Her fingers were shaking as she set the bag of marshmallows gently on the counter.

My breath caught. Shit. Ivy’s brown eyes had gone black as her pupils dilated. I stood, shocked at how quickly it had happened. It had been weeks since she vamped out on me, and never without warning. The angry shock of finding someone in an FIB uniform in her kitchen might have accounted for some of it, but in hindsight I had a sick feeling that letting her walk in on Glenn hadn’t been the best thing. His fear had hit her hard and fast, giving her no time to prepare herself against temptation.

His sudden fright had filled the air with pheromones. They acted as a potent aphrodisiac only she could taste, jerking into play thousand-year-old instincts fixed deep in her virus-changed DNA. In a breath, they had turned her from my slightly disturbing roommate to a predator that could kill both of us in three seconds flat if the desire to sate her long-suppressed hunger outweighed the consequences of draining an FIB detective. It was that balance that frightened me. I knew where I was on her personal scale of hunger and reason. Where Glenn stood, I hadn’t a clue.

Like flowing dust, her posture melted and she leaned back against the counter on one bent elbow, hip cocked. Deathly still, she ran her gaze up Glenn until it locked upon his eyes. Her head tilted with a sultry slowness until she was eyeing him from under her straight bangs. Only now did she take a slow, deliberate breath. Her long pale fingers flicked about the deep V-neck of her spandex shirt tucked into her leather pants.

“You’re tall,” she said, her gray voice pulling remembered fear from me. “I like that.” It wasn’t sex she was after, it was dominance. She would have bespelled him if she could have, but she’d have to wait until she was dead before she had power over the unwilling.

Swell, I thought as she pushed herself from the counter and headed for him. She’d lost it. It was worse than the time she found Nick and I snuggled up together on her couch not watching pro wrestling. I still didn’t know what had set her off then—she and I had a concrete understanding that I wasn’t her girlfriend, plaything, lover, shadow, or whatever the newest term for vampire flunky was these days.