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He motioned to Nathaniel. “This one plays games, and very well, I think.”

I nodded. “Nathaniel likes games better than I do, better than Micah does, but he doesn’t play them with us.”

Auggie gave me a look that seemed to imply I was being naïve. “Once a hustler, always a hustler, Anita.”

“Was that meant to be mean?” I asked.

“I thought you liked honesty,” he said.

“It was meant to be mean,” Micah said.

“I know whore when I see it, because I was one. So was Jean-Claude, and Asher, and Requiem, and London. Mustn’t leave out the ladies: Elinore, Cardinal, anyone who was ever Belle’s line was a whore. We’re created to be whores.”

“Nathaniel is not a whore,” I said, and reached for him. He pulled away from the touch, and gave me eyes full of loss. “I was.”

“You researched us, before you came here,” Micah said.

“You bet,” Auggie said.

I touched Nathaniel’s face, and tried to put into my eyes how much he meant to me. Whatever he saw in my face made him smile, a little. He pressed his hand over mine, pressing my hand against the curve of his jaw.

Micah stepped in front of us both. “You knew looking at me like that would be an insult. Nathaniel stepped up, took the attention, because it wouldn’t bother him. Something about him protecting me bothered you. Why?”

Jean-Claude raised his head, curled his legs over each other in a way that let you know just how flexible he was, but still managed to be “ladylike,” for lack of a better word. “I know why.”

I put one arm across Nathaniel’s back, and asked, “Why?”

Jean-Claude and Auggie exchanged a look. “If you think you can read me that well, go ahead,” Auggie said.

Jean-Claude gave a small nod, then looked at us. “Augustine prefers women to men, but one would have to be very, very heterosexual indeed to ignore the beauty of both of you. In his defense, you did fall into his lap. He behaved himself admirably. There are vampires among our own kiss who would not have shown his restraint. He offered such a small insult, and you took it as a large one. Anita and I are not falling over each other to profess our love for him, and that irks him. It puzzles him. Then you, who are animal, thus lesser in the eyes of most vampires, insult him, too. But I think it is more than that.” He looked at Auggie. “I think he watched Nathaniel use the only gift he had to protect Micah. Did it bring back old memories, Augustine? Bad memories?” He leaned in toward the other man.

Auggie stood up, abruptly, and wouldn’t look at him. “My memories are my own.” Then he realized what he’d said, and gave a bitter laugh. “For now, at least, until she dictates otherwise.” He wasn’t referring to me.

Jean-Claude lay back on the couch, spreading his hair over the arm of it, one arm carelessly above his head, the other across his stomach. One bare foot trailed over the carpet; the other was tucked up on the couch, his knee leaning against the back of the white couch. He looked fetching, and he knew it. But it was the way Auggie watched him that made the show. There was real anguish in his eyes. It hurt me to see his face like that.

“You give me another taste of heaven, and now I am in purgatory again. You, and she”—and he pointed at me—“can bring me into heaven at a whim, and cast me into hell if it is your will.” He closed his eyes, his face etched with pain. “I remembered you as gentler than this, Jean-Claude. I remembered you as my friend.”

“Friends do not use their powers against each other. You woke ma petite’s ardeur, deliberately. You meant to have her. The fact that we both had you was an accident of power. You remembered me gentler, and less powerful. You underestimated me, and you have mistaken ma petite.”

Auggie opened his eyes, and stared at the other vampire. “I don’t understand what you mean by that.”

“Ask our Nathaniel how he won her heart.”

“I see his body; I know how he won her heart.”

“You see nothing, know nothing,” Jean-Claude said. “Mon minet, tell him how you won her heart.”

“You call him ‘my pussycat’ and I’m wrong about him?” Auggie said.

Nathaniel leaned