Kisten moved the gearshift out and back into first. “You didn’t pass out. You fell asleep.” The light changed and he inched up on the car in front of us to bully it into moving. “Passing out implies a lack of restraint. Falling asleep is what you do when you’re tired.” He glanced at me as we went through the intersection. “Everyone gets tired.”

“No one falls asleep in a dance club,” I said. “I passed out.” My mind sifted through the memories, clear as holy water instead of mercifully blurred, and my face flamed. Sugared, he had called it. I had been blood-sugared. I wanted to go home. I wanted to go home, crawl into the priest hole the pixies had found in the belfry stairway, and just die.

Kisten was silent, the tensing of his body while he drove telling me he was going to say something as soon as he double-checked it against his patronizing meter. “I’m sorry,” he said, surprising me, but the admission of guilt fed my anger instead of pacifying it. “I was an ass for taking you into Piscary’s before finding out if witches could get blood-sugared. It never occurred to me.” His jaw clenched. “And it’s not as bad as you think.”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered, hand searching under the seat until I found my clasp purse. “I bet it’s halfway across the city by now. ‘Hey, anybody want to go over to Morgan’s tonight and watch her get sugared? All it takes is enough of us having fun and down she goes! Whoo hoo!’”

Kisten’s attention was riveted on the road. “It wasn’t like that. And there were over two hundred vamps in there, a good portion undead.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

Motions stiff, he pulled his phone from a pocket, punched a button, and handed it to me.

“Yeah?” I questioned into the phone, almost snarling. “Who is this?”

“Rachel? God, are you okay? I swear I’ll kill him for taking you into Piscary’s. He said you got sugared. Did he bite you?”

“Ivy!” I stammered, then glared at Kisten. “You told Ivy? Thanks a hell of a lot. Want to call my mom next?”

“Like Ivy wouldn’t find out?” he said. “I wanted her to hear it from me. And I was worried about you,” he added, stopping my next outburst.

“Did he bite you!” Ivy said, jerking my attention from his last words. “Did he?”

I turned back to the phone. “No,” I said, feeling my neck. Though I don’t know why. I was such an idiot.

“Come home,” she said, and my anger shifted to rebellion. “If someone bit you, I could tell. Come home so I can smell you.”

A sound of disgust came from me. “I’m not coming home so you can smell me! Everyone there was really nice about it. And it felt good to let go for five stinking minutes.” I scowled at Kisten, seeing why he had given me Ivy to talk to. The manipulative bastard smiled. How could I stay angry with him when I was defending him?