He was so lovely. And he was at peace, the way I knew he should be.

I kissed him lightly. I didn't have any potion, and I put no spell behind it; it was just a kiss, just the brush of lips.

But the emotion behind it—darkness and passion and need, so much need, it seemed to bleed silver from my pores.

Magic.

I felt him reaching for me, in the dark, and I couldn't help but respond. It wasn't my own doing. I wasn't this strong.

I felt the connection snap clean between us, silver and hot, vibrating like a plucked string.

His eyes opened, and he smiled.

"You came back," I murmured.

" 'Course I did, Holly," he said. "I'll always come for you."

"I didn't—there's no potion—"

"Don't need it," Andy said. He stirred, and the sheet across his bare chest slipped down, revealing raw bullet holes that were, before my eyes, sealing themselves closed. "Got myself some skills, you know. More than most."

I kissed him again, tasting potions and poisons and my own tears. "How long can you stay?" I asked.

He smiled. "Long as you want me."

Forever.

The pounding began at 2:11 a.m. and continued until I hauled my weary ass out of bed. My hand fumbled awkwardly around the nightstand until it finally closed over my gun. I was fuzzy from lack of sleep, but I never left my weapon behind these days. Besides, I was going to need it to shoot whoever was banging on the damn door.

I threw on a robe and stomped downstairs, only to be almost smothered by the huge bouquet of hothouse extravagance that was waiting on the front stoop. "D-delivery?" someone said, about the time I realized that the forest of roses had legs.

"Do you know what time it is?!"

"Uh, a little after nine?" a man's voice said. I belatedly noticed the sunlight cascading over my nonwelcome mat. It was a gift from a sarcastic werewolf and read, MY bite actually IS worse than my bark. I'd never been sure if he meant his or mine.

Dammit; my clock must have stopped. And with my schedule these days, my body was so confused that it hadn't woken me up, either. "Hey," I croaked, like I wasn't still holding a gun on him.

I quickly lowered it, trying to remember how to smile. It didn't seem to help. The overabundant foliage was shaking enough to send a cascade of petals over my doorstep, and a glimpse in the hall boy mirror explained why. My long brown hair was a tangled mess, my eyes were so bloodshot that it was impossible to tell they were gray, and weeks of almost no sleep and constant menace had reduced my smile to something closer to a snarl.

But the delivery guy refused to be deterred by irate, possibly crazed homeowners. "Ms. Accalia de Croissets?" Surprisingly, he didn't mangle the pronunciation of my name.

"Lia," I corrected automatically, reaching to the hall boy for my purse and a tip. I wondered what the right percentage was after pulling a gun on someone. My purse slipped out of my sleep-clumsy grasp and I bent to pick it up—and thereby dodged the spell that tore through my foyer and into my living room.

I had a glimpse of drywall bits cascading over the carpet as the partition between rooms was obliterated; then my gun was up and I was firing. It shredded roses but did nothing to the mage posing as a delivery guy. He had shields, a fact I realized about the time one of my own bullets hit them and ricocheted off, grazing my cheek. So I turned the hall boy over on top of him and ran, cursing my stupidity.

My new job was training recruits to the War Mage Corps, the magical equivalent of the police. Most of my students started out painfully naive, yet even they wouldn't have answered the door woozy and only half-armed. I'll probably end up an axiom, I thought. "Give a demon an edge, and he'll slit your throat with it."

"It's amazing how many things a stake through the heart can kill." And "Don't do a Lia; keep your damn weapons with you!" Only mine were on the floor of my bathroom, where I'd dropped them last night before taking a shower.

I could hear the mage thrashing through the mess behind me as I hurled myself at the stairs. I was halfway up when a burst of energy crackled overhead, electrifying my body and making my hair stand on end. The steps in front of me disappeared in a roar of heat and noise.

A splinter the size of a knife stabbed me in the calf as I fell, one leg in the smoking hole, one slipping to the side to wedge itself between banisters. I didn't try to pull free—there wasn't time—just muttered a spell that sent the contents of a bookcase flying down at the mage. Pages fluttered like bird's wings as they soared past my head and slammed into my attacker. They didn't get through his shields, but a few of the larger ones staggered him, and the wildly flapping pages made it impossible for him to see. It bought me a few seconds to rip my bleeding leg free of the hole and hobble the rest of the way up.

The damn splinter had done something nasty to my knee, which was screaming in protest and gave out entirely by the time my foot touched the top step. I dropped to the floor and a spell shimmered and blurred the air overhead. It passed close enough to ruffle my hair on its way to destroy the now-empty bookcase.

Tiny splinters peppered my legs through the thin cotton of my pj's as I threw an impediment spell behind me and started fast-crawling down the corridor. I'd made it a couple of yards before I realized there were no sounds of pursuit. I glanced over my shoulder—because no way had a small diversion like that stopped a war mage—and therefore failed to see the floor in front of me vanish.

The deafening sound of the explosion whipped my head around in time for me to shrink back from the bullets spraying upward through the hole. They ricocheted everywhere in the small space, but I managed to raise my shields before any of them connected. I'd hoped to put that off a little—shields eat power like candy, and my reserves were already low. But my weapons wouldn't do me any good if I didn't live long enough to reach them.

My ears were ringing as I started edging around the gap, trying to balance on the two feet of burnt carpet that remained, when another spell took out even that. The blast was a direct hit, and despite my shields, it was like a punch to the face—stunning, dizzying, knocking my head backwards. I fell a story to land hard on my dining room table, along with a ton of plaster, a couple of ceiling joists and my brand-new chandelier.

The impact knocked the air out of me, which is the only reason I didn't scream. My knee had caught the edge of the table, and of course, it was that knee on that leg and oh my God. Something in the joint thwanged before the pain hit me broadside and the world went weirdly bright for a second.

My slide off the table was more of a fall, my injured leg softening under me. I tried to put some steel into it, to straighten up and find my balance, but the best I could do was a drunken stagger as the room spun around me. I teetered, turned shakily, and barely recoiled in time to avoid the folding door from the hall. It came spinning past my head to crash against the far wall in an explosion of slats.

Imminent death is an excellent cure for dizziness. I threw myself at the kitchen door, planning to make for the back steps and a judicious retreat. But I collided with a fireball spell instead. It bounced off my shields and burst against the kitchen table, flooding the air with the acrid smell of not-found-in-nature materials on fire.

I belatedly realized there was a second assassin in the laundry room. And yet another figure was silhouetted against the frosted glass of the back door, working to get past the wards. So I had at least three dark mages after me, and I still didn't have any weapons.