“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? WHY WOULD AN Atrika go after you like that?”

“Oh, goodie, I get to be special again. First I’m special to the head warlock and now a demon wants to cuddle with me in the middle of the night.” Sarafina dabbed a Q-tip covered in disinfectant over a nasty scratch on Theo’s face. He winced and she blew across it. Poor big baby. “This guy, Bai, asked for me by name.”

Theo had come back to the Coven about an hour after she’d hightailed it there and sent some witches to aid him. She’d come into the dark, quiet Coven screaming for help, since she hadn’t known where to find anyone of importance. Thomas, Jack, and Claire had helped Theo drive the demon off.

Grosset was uninjured. It seemed he’d hit the mattress of her bed, not the wall. Now he was fed, watered, petted, and amply cuddled and curled up on Theo’s couch, fast asleep.

Theo rubbed his chin. “I guess this means what we’d suspected is true. Somehow the Duskoff have found a way to ally with the Atrika. I’d bet anything that demon was running an errand for Stefan.”

“Uh, from what I read in Micah’s book, an Atrika wouldn’t be anyone’s errand boy.”

“Something is drawing them together. The law of averages is against both the Duskoff and the Atrika taking a special interest in you at the same time.”

“I really wish I were less interesting.”

He glanced at the clock. “It’s only a couple hours until morning. The rest of the Coven might be able to make sense out of some of this.”

“Have I said thank you yet?”

“You looked like you were doing a pretty good job before I got there.”

She snorted. “That was a lucky shot.”

“Took guts.”

Lifting a shoulder, she said, “He made me mad.”

“Remind me never to do that.”

She held a bottle of disinfectant in one hand and a bag of cotton balls in the other. She glanced pointedly at his ripped and bloody shirt. “Take it off.”

He gazed past her while he pulled the garment over his head and tossed it on the coffee table, looking far away in Musing Land. Suddenly, Sarafina was all there, though, momentarily struck dumb by the confusing, alluring, beautiful expanse of his body.

The first thing she noticed were the tattoos. They covered his arms, shoulders, chest, and back in swirling and swooping black tribal designs. Underneath those, or meshing with them, really, were scars—thin, white, raised ridges of flesh. Perhaps once they’d been wounds made with a knife? Maybe even a whip. The scars dovetailed with the tattoos, flirted and danced with them. The effect was clearly deliberate and oddly beautiful.