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Jean-Claude handed me another slightly smaller towel. I took it, and watched as he began to wrap an identical towel around his wet hair. He was right; if I didn’t dry my hair well, it would be a mess tomorrow.

“How can the two of you do that?” he asked.

I looked at him from underneath the towel, while I wrapped it around my head. “What are we doing now?”

“Taking care of your hair like nothing’s wrong.”

I got the towel fixed in place and turned to meet Jean-Claude’s look. He took the hint. “If we let our hair dry badly, it will not change what has happened, Richard. The practicalities of life do not cease needing to be done just because other things are going wrong.”

Richard moved so he was sitting on the floor, rather than kneeling. He hugged his knees to him, and it was something that Nathaniel might have done, not my dominant Richard. Whatever he had experienced with us tonight, it had shaken him.

Jean-Claude came to sit beside me on the edge of the marble tub. He was careful not to touch me, only the faintest edge of our hips touching through the towels. I wanted him to wrap his arms around me, but he was probably right. Richard didn’t always like to see us cuddle.

“You wanted privacy for this talk, so talk,” he said. One of the side effects of the vampire marks was that we seemed to be sharing bits of our personalities. He seemed to have inherited some of my impatience and lack of anger management. A bad combination for a werewolf. But we didn’t get to pick and choose what we got.

“Ma petite, if you will tell him, and me, what happened before I arrived.” I told the shortest complete version I could of all that had happened before Jean-Claude showed up. Somewhere during the talk, I leaned in against Jean-Claude’s body. It just seemed wrong to be this close and not touch. He put his arm along my shoulder.

Richard didn’t seem to notice. “I thought this Samuel and Augustine were your friends?” he said.

“They are.”

Then Richard said what I’d thought earlier. “If these are your friends, Jean-Claude, what are the other masters going to be like?”

“I’d thought of that, too,” I said. “I mean, if these are your friends, your enemies are going to kill us.”

“One of the reasons for tonight’s little meeting was to see how ma petite reacted to other Masters of the City.”

“Badly,” Richard said.

“Not necessarily,” Jean-Claude said. He leaned forward, curving me more into his arm to keep from knocking me off the edge. Jean-Claude started to tell his part in tonight’s little drama, but Richard stopped him.

“I felt most of what happened after you touched Anita. I don’t need a reminder.”

“As you like,” Jean-Claude said, “but the point is we may have rolled Augustine as thoroughly as Belle Morte could have done.”

“I wouldn’t brag about that,” Richard said. He’d moved to lean his shoulder against the marble around the tub, so that he was close enough to have reached out and touched us, but he didn’t try to close the distance. And because he didn’t, we didn’t.

“If Augustine is truly ours in the way that Belle made allies, than none of the other masters will try us. They will fear us, Richard. Fear even the touch of our hands.”

Richard frowned at us. I wanted to touch the thick waves of his hair, but kept my hand around Jean-Claude’s waist, and the other hand in my lap. “But you told us, before we agreed to this gathering of masters, that everyone would behave. Especially if they thought one of their people would be Anita’s new pomme de sang. Now, the first two masters who touch her are breaking all the rules.”

“I believe there is a reason for that.”

He gave us a skeptical look that was like a mirror of my own. “What reason?”

Jean-Claude told him about his theory that the ardeur was hunting powerful prey.

“But that means that any Master of the City who comes into contact with her will be, what, compelled to try to mind-roll her?”

“Not just Masters of the City,” he said, and he told about Meng Die and Requiem.