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Blood was dripping down my arm rather steadily. The blood didn’t show on the black carpeting. A good color if you planned to bleed much in a room.

Yasmeen was helping Marguerite to her feet. The woman had recovered very quickly. Why? Because she was a human servant, of course. Sure.

Yasmeen walked towards the bed, towards me. Her lovely face had thinned until the bones showed through. Her eyes were bright, almost feverish. “Fresh blood, and I haven’t fed tonight.”

“Control yourself, Yasmeen.”

“You have not taught your servant good manners, Jean-Claude,” Yasmeen said. She was looking very unkindly at me.

“Leave her alone, Yasmeen.” Jean-Claude was standing now.

“Every servant must be tamed, Jean-Claude. You have let it go far too long.”

I looked over Yasmeen’s shoulder at him. “Tamed?”

“It is an unfortunate stage in the process,” he said. His voice was neutral, as if he were talking about taming a horse.

“Damn you.” I pulled my gun. I held it two-handed in a teacup grip. Nobody was taming me tonight.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone stand up on the other side of the bed. The man was still under the covers. It was a slender woman, her skin the color of coffee with cream. Her black hair was cut very close to her head. She was naked. Where the hell had she come from?

Yasmeen was about a yard from me, tongue playing over her lips, fangs glistening in the overhead light.

“I’ll kill you, do you understand that, I’ll kill you,” I said.

“You’ll try.”

“Fun and games aren’t worth dying for,” I said.

“After a few hundred years, that’s all that is worth dying for.”

“Jean-Claude, unless you want to lose her, call her off!” My voice was higher than I wanted it to be, afraid.

At this range the bullet should take out her entire chest. If it worked, there would be no resurrecting her as the undead; her heart would be gone. Of course, she was over five hundred years old. One shot might not do it. Lucky I had more than one bullet.

I caught movement from the corner of my eye. I was half-turned towards it when something flattened me to the ground. The black woman was on top of me. I brought the gun around to fire, not giving a damn if she was human or not. But her hand grabbed my wrists, squeezing. She was going to crush my wrists.

She snarled in my face, all teeth and a low growl. The sound should have had fur around it and pointy teeth. Human faces weren’t supposed to look that way.

The woman jerked the Browning out of my hands like taking candy from a baby. She held it wrong, like she didn’t know which end of the gun went where.

An arm came around her waist and pulled her backwards off me. It was the man on the bed. The woman turned on him, snarling.

Yasmeen leapt for me. I scooted backwards, putting the wall at my back. She smiled. “Not so tough without your weapon, are you?”

She was suddenly kneeling in front of me. I hadn’t seen her come, not even a blur of motion. She appeared beside me like magic.

She had her body up against my knees, pinning me to the wall. Yasmeen dug her fingers into my upper arms and jerked me towards her. Her strength was incredible. She made the black shapeshifter seem fragile.

“Yasmeen, no!” It was Jean-Claude coming to my aid at last. But he was going to be too late. Yasmeen bared her teeth, raised her neck back for the strike, and I couldn’t do a damn thing.

She pulled me in tight against her, arms locked behind my back. If I’d been pressed any tighter I’d have come out on the other side.

I screamed, “Jean-Claude!”

Heat; something was burning inside my sweater, over my heart. Yasmeen hesitated. I felt her whole body shudder. What the hell was happening?

A tongue of blue-white flame curled up between us. I screamed and Yasmeen echoed it. We screamed together as we burned.

She fell away from me. Blue-white flame crawled over her shirt. Flames licked around a hole in my sweater. I shrugged out of the shoulder holster and pulled the burning sweater off.

My cross still burned with