LITMIR.BIZ

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and infiltrate Lady Jasmine’s inner circle to find out where her daytime lair is, we would, but we can’t ask Tash to. We’ll just have to keep hoping we run across a vamp informant who can tell us what we need to know.”

      Kat nodded. “Meanwhile, I think I should attempt a Heal on her. We all agree this situation’s gone far enough, no?” Her gaze swept my apartment, taking in the haphazard clutter of shoes, the cream Chanel jacket festooned with dust bunnies that Megan had slung over the back of a chair, the half-devoured box of Mallomars on my kitchenette counter.

      “Heal will not work,” declared Darkheart decisively. “Is only possible if Natashya has completely turned into vampyr, and that is not yet case. Da, Granddaughter?” he asked, his salt-and-pepper brows drawing together as he turned his eagle gaze on me. “Liz says she saw you yesterday at mall. You still have no trouble with daylight?”

      “None at all,” I said swiftly, if not entirely truth-fully, sending a silent vote of thanks to Liz Dixon, a fifty-something local art gallery owner who’d become my grandfather’s girlfriend when she’d aided us in the fight against Zena (note to self: must try to see Darkheart having a girlfriend as healthy and positive instead of ooky). Liz had obviously neglected to tell him that when she’d seen me I’d been wearing enormous D&G sunglasses that covered half my face, a flowing silk scarf tied Jackie Kennedy-style around my head and neck and a long-sleeved Prada blouse with linen slacks. Not exactly bundled up in multiple layers like the derelict Brooklyn had called Crazy Joe, but I’d certainly made sure that no part of my skin was exposed to the light. Merely as a precaution, of course, and the slight tingle I’d felt as I’d hurried from my car’s window-tinted interior to the mall’s entrance doors had probably been my imagination.

      “You’d tell us if the situation started to change, wouldn’t you, brat?” Megan asked, giving me a hard stare. “You haven’t always been all that forth-coming in the past, but this isn’t like the time you were seeing that hot guy with the Harley and hiding it from Kat and me, or when you tried to change your biology grade on your report card. We need to know how far along Vamp Avenue you’ve come, because at some point Kat is going to have to attempt a Heal on you.” She’d switched from her Daughter tone of voice to her big sister one. In the mood I was in, they were both equally irritating.

      “I get it, all right?” I said waspishly. “Gawd, Meg, give it a rest. I know I should have told you I was starting to have cravings and I’m sorry you had to find out the way you did, but it’s not like you caught me with my fangs sunk into someone’s neck. I was buying from a legitimate butcher, for heaven’s sake. In some parts of the world they eat blood sausage on a regular basis, so I don’t see that my little snack tonight was such a big deal.”

      “Is true. In Russia is called krvavica and many people like taste. My mother used to make often for breakfast.” Dmitri had been silent for so long I’d almost forgotten him. I gave him a surprised glance, although I wasn’t totally sure whether my surprise was over the fact that he was defending me or because I couldn’t imagine him as a little boy with a mother. His blue gaze darkened. “Still, was blood,” he said, his chiseled-from-permafrost features tightening in distaste. “To me was disgusting.”

      “Really? Mikhail loves krvavica,” Megan said thinly.

      “Is because he is oboroten,” Dmitri replied with a shrug of his linebacker shoulders that briefly stretched his black T-shirt over the tectonic plates of muscle that made up his torso. “As you say in America, a manimal, da?”

      This time my glance locked with Kat’s, and I saw she was stifling the same unworthy impulse to laugh as I was. Dmitri couldn’t know it, but as far as Megan was concerned he’d just used the single worst term he could have chosen to describe her occasionally fur-bearing boyfriend.

      “As we say in America, a shapeshifter,” she corrected coldly. “And speaking of Mikhail, if we’re finished here I think we should rejoin him and Jack on patrol. Kat, you coming?”

      “Yes, but some nights I don’t know why I bother,” Kat drawled. “When I was a ballbreaking bitch, men were falling over themselves to take me up on my offers, but now I’ve gone all altruistic Healer-chick and just want to save them from an eternity in hell, most of the time they’d rather take their chances with your stake. Still, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, no?” She began strolling to the door, but then turned back to me. “Sweetie,” she said firmly. “The shoes. Get them out of the garbage bag, okay?”

      “And if my Dolce sweater that you didn’t borrow is somewhere here underneath all this mess, have it dry-cleaned and give it back to me,” Megan added. “Grandfather, do you want to accompany us on patrol for a few more hours?”

      “Nyet, is late for old man like me. Also, Liz asked me to drop by her apartment tonight for glass of wine. I may stay over, so do not worry if I am not home tomorrow morning,” Darkheart said complacently while I tried to forget the Bed, Bath & Beyond shopping bag overflowing with black satin sheets I’d seen Liz carrying when we’d run into each other at the mall. “I will collect garlic wreaths first and then leave.”

      “You go, tovaritch. I will collect wreaths,” Dmitri offered, which I suppose was nice of him but not what I wanted to hear. Unfortunately for me, however, Darkheart accepted with alacrity and within minutes I was alone with Russia’s answer to Paul Bunyan, watching him de-festoon my apartment of wild garlic while I tried not to breathe in the, to me, nauseating scent of the small white flowers.

      “You lie to sisters and grandfather,” Dmitri said without preamble as he deftly wound Darkheart’s garland lasso around one pumped forearm. His Siberian-blue gaze flicked to me before he turned his attention back to his task. “You have met Jasmine’s lieutenant, da?”

      Now, along with the speaking-before-I-think thing I’ve developed growing up with Megan and Kat, I also credit them for my ability to lie at the drop of a hat. It’s a necessary talent, believe me, when you’re saddled with a sister who feels it’s her moral duty to force you to confess when you’ve had some unfortunate accident like breaking Grammie’s favorite Lladro figurine, and another sister who doesn’t see why she should take the heat for said Lladro breakage when she didn’t do it. So if Dmitri had thought he could startle me into the truth with his unexpected accusation, he was sadly mistaken.

      “Of course I haven’t met him!” I said, putting a hefty amount of outraged virtue into my tone. “I don’t believe your nerve! What gives you the right to accuse me of lying to my family?”

      “This is America, nyet? I have right to say truth when is in front of my eyes,” Dmitri replied, seemingly unperturbed by my impressive outburst. He finished winding up the garland and set it on the back of the sofa. “Besides,” he added calmly, “I cannot stand by and see future Gospozha Malkovich take dangerous risks.”

      It took a moment for his words to sink in and when they did I thought I must have misheard him. “Gospozha? Isn’t that Russian for the missus?” I said dubiously.

      His back toward me, he nodded as he untacked the last wreath from the window frame. “Da, is correct. From first time I saw you I had strong feeling inside me that you would lead me to my sud’ba, so must be that you and I will be couple one day. These strong feelings that come to me are never wrong,” he said, turning from the window and laying the wreath beside the garland. “My babushka was cygan and from her I inherit gift of knowing future.”

      I held up a hand. “Whoa, nellieski,” I said firmly. “We’ve got a lost-in-translation situation happening here. I still think I must be wrong on the gospozha part, but forget that for a minute. What’s a sud’ba, who’s a cygan, and isn’t a babushka some kind of shawl for old ladies to wrap around their heads?”

      “Sud’ba is fate. Cygan means in America gypsy, and babushka is grandmother. You are not wrong on gospozha.” His garlic-gathering completed, Dmitri stood facing me, his jeans-clad legs planted slightly apart on the

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