Riding a bike was always a thrill, but as a rodent, it was a scentual rush. Eyes squinting and my whiskers bent back by the wind, I rode home in style. I didn’t care that Ivy was getting odd looks and people kept blowing their horns at us. I was sure I was going to have a brain orgasm from the overload of input. I almost regretted it when Ivy had turned onto our street.

Now, with a finger, I pushed the last bit of cheese onto the spoon, ignoring Jenks’s pig noises from the ladle hanging over the center island. I hadn’t stopped eating since losing my fur, but as I’d had only carrots for the last three and a half days, I was entitled to a little binge.

Setting the empty container aside on the dirty plate before me, I wondered if it hurt more or less to transform if you were a human. From the muffled, masculine groan of pain that had emanated from the bathroom before the shower started, I’d say it hurt just about the same.

Though I had scrubbed myself twice, I thought I still smelled mink under my perfume. My torn ear throbbed, my neck had red-rimmed punctures where Baron had bitten me, and my left leg was bruised from falling into the exercise wheel. But it was good to be a person again. I glanced at Ivy doing the dishes, wondering if I should have taped up my ear.

I still hadn’t brought Ivy and Jenks entirely up to speed on my last few days, telling them only about my captivity, not what I had learned during it. Ivy had said nothing, but I knew she was dying to tell me I had been an idiot for not having a backup plan for escape.

She reached for the tap, turning it off after she rinsed the last glass. Setting it to drain, she turned and dried her hands on the dish towel. Seeing a tall, thin, leather-clad vamp doing dishes was almost worth the price of admission to my crazy life. “Okay, let me get this straight,” she said as she leaned against the counter. “Trent caught you red-handed, and instead of turning you in, he put you in the city’s rat fights to try and break you so you’d agree to work for him?”

“Yup.” I stretched to reach the bag of frosted cookies next to Ivy’s computer.

“Figures.” She pushed herself into motion to get my empty plate. Washing it, she set it next to the glasses to drip. Apart from my dishes, there had been no plates, silverware, or bowls. Just twenty or so glasses, all with a drop of orange juice in the bottom.

“Next time you go up against someone like Trent, can we at least have a plan for when you get caught?” she asked, her back to me and her shoulders tense.

Annoyance pulled my head up from my bag of cookies. I took a breath to tell her she could take her plans and use them for toilet paper, then hesitated. Her shoulders were as tight as her stance was rigid. I remembered how worried Jenks said she was, and what she had said about how me flying off the handle jerked her instincts into play. Slowly my breath slipped out. “Sure,” I said hesitantly. “We can have a fail-safe plan for when I screw up, as long as we have one for you, too.”