“I like her,” Dorian said, with a faint precise accent that might have been English.

Pouting, I sat back. Well. So much for that little speech. “Dang. Steal my thunder, why don’t you.”

His smile was wry, and his eyes gleamed. Damn, he was hot. I said, “So now that you’re talking can I ask you a question, Dorian? You have a portrait in the attic or what?”

Dorian groaned and shook his head. Anastasia actually threw the pillow from her sofa at me. Throw pillow. Ha.

Gemma stared blankly. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I forget how young you are,” Anastasia said to her. “Never mind, I’ll have a book for you to read later.”

I took note of that bit of information.

We talked for a while longer, mostly Anastasia asking questions about my show and how I’d gotten my start. She didn’t dig too deeply—I didn’t tell her anything I hadn’t mentioned on the air at one point or another. I expected her to ask how I’d become a werewolf—a traumatic episode on several fronts that I didn’t like talking about. But she didn’t. Almost like she knew, or suspected that I didn’t want to talk about it.

Then I really was too tired to keep my eyes open much longer. As a kid I’d been to sleepovers where if you were the first one to fall asleep you’d wake up with stuff written on your face in lipstick. I didn’t want to know what happened when you fell asleep in front of a couple of vampires. So I said good night and trundled upstairs to my room.

My room was on the second floor, in a corner, with a lovely view. I was looking forward to shutting the door and getting to sleep. Not looking forward to being in bed alone.

Odysseus Grant didn’t startle me and make me jump the way he might have. I smelled him first: the clean and quiet smell of a man who didn’t like to leave a trace. He stood at the end of the hallway, by the door to my room. “Kitty. Could I speak to you a moment?”

“What is it?”

“I only wanted to ask you to keep your eyes open. Have you heard of something vampires call the Long Game?”

My heart did a double-beat. My smile fell as my whole face went slack.

“Then you have heard of it,” Grant said, a wry curl to his lips.

I shook my bemusement away. Tried to clear my head. “Why are you asking? Cleaned up all of Vegas’s supernatural problems and need a new challenge?”

“What do you know about it?” he said.

“It’s a political thing, I think. It’s hard getting a straight answer out of them, but from what I gather there are some vampires trying to consolidate power. Trying to form some kind of monolithic vampire organization. Now, I’m not sure if this means they’re trying to take over the world—or if this is just something they play around with because after two thousand years of hanging out a guy gets bored. To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure I want to know. I just want to stay out of it.”

He raised a brow. I recognized the expression: wry disbelief. When was I ever able to stay out of anything?

“Will that be possible?” he asked.

“Not if I keep sticking my nose in it. So… you’re here because you think this has something to do with the Long Game? You think Anastasia—”

He put a finger over his lips, then said, “Just keep your eyes and ears open for me.”

“What have you heard?” I said. But he’d already walked to the other end of the hall and disappeared into his own room.

I looked around for the hidden cameras. Because damned if this wouldn’t play well on reality TV.

I was right about the meadow being perfect for elk. The next morning, a herd of them were grazing there. The sun was behind the lodge, behind the hills to the east, but had risen high enough to wash the valley in golden light, which brought out all the colors of the mountains, the grass, and the forest and sparkled off the lake. The elk, about five of them, were perfectly peaceful, moving step by step, noses buried in grass. I sat at the picture window in the living room and watched, breathing in the rich fumes of a cup of gourmet coffee graciously provided by SuperByte Entertainment and Skip the PA. The house was quiet; I could hear birds chirping outside. If I went out on the porch, I’d bet I could smell the beautiful, clean mountain air, the dew on the grass, and even the elk in the meadow. But I didn’t want to move and disturb anything. I might even have been relaxed. I was almost startled by the feeling.

It couldn’t last. If I’d been here all by myself, settling in for a real vacation, the relaxation might have seeped into my bones. But I was sharing the place with a dozen other people and the production staff. Inevitably, I heard footsteps on the hardwood floor, entering the living room. I took a breath through my nose and sighed at the information.

Jerome Macy wasn’t the person I most wanted to see. Like their animal counterparts, werewolves are territorial. Competitive. They have pack structures and hierarchies. I wasn’t sure how any of that was going to play out with Jerome and me. We hadn’t had a chance to talk about it. I hoped we would talk about it instead of deciding we had to duke it out, however cinematic that would be. However much Provost was hoping we’d duke it out. I was just waiting for the request to shape-shift on camera. I might have made a show of teasing Conrad with the possibility, but I wasn’t really planning on doing it.

Macy moved up beside me and looked out the window to the meadow and elk. My back muscles stiffened, but I tried not to show it. Tried to keep my shoulders from bunching up, like hackles rising. We were all friends here, right?

“Makes me want to go hunting,” Macy said, flexing his hands like he was stretching his claws.

So much for the peaceful morning.

“They’re all healthy adults,” I said. “Too much work.”

“Not if we hunted together.” He glanced at me.

Now, that—turning wolf and going on a hunt with a guy I barely knew—was a bad idea. Even if it would give Provost some great footage.

I smiled wryly. “Why would I want to go through all that trouble when there’s a lovely staff here that wants nothing more than to feed me, and I don’t have to lift a finger?”

His lips curled. “It’s not the same.”

No, it wasn’t. Wolf was salivating at the thought, but I didn’t have to tell Macy that. “Sorry. It’s just that things around here are going to get weird enough without encouraging that side of it. I like to keep Wolf under wraps when I can.”

Being a werewolf isn’t an either-or thing. It’s not the Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy. It’s more like a scale, with wolf at one end and human on the other. Some days were a little more wolf than others. Some people were a little more wolf than others. The couple of times I’d met him, I’d had trouble deciding where Macy fell on that line. Did he look kind of burly and mean because he was a boxer turned pro wrestler, or because he was a werewolf who lived right on the edge, who always had a little of his wolf side seeping to the surface? He’d once been the heavyweight world champion. He was huge, solid, like a tree. He’d retain all that mass when he shifted—as a wolf, he’d be monstrous. How much of his fighting instinct came from his wolf side?

After a moment he said, “I know all about keeping it under wraps. Being able to go into a ring and fight it out with somebody without losing my temper, without losing myself? Yeah. But I don’t always get to see a stretch of open land like that. Before I leave, I’m going to shift and run out there. I don’t always get to have company when I run, either. Thought it’d be nice for a change.” His smile turned thoughtful. I considered that maybe there was a real guy hiding in there and not just a thug.

“You don’t have a pack at home?”

“Don’t need one. You?”

“Yes. A pack, a mate, the works. It’s kind of nice having people to watch my back.”