He exhaled. “Be careful, then. Can you at least do that?”

I was saved from answering by the car crash from the living room. For a second I forgot we were several stories up. The sound was exactly the same. A waterfall smash of shattering glass and the scream of twisted metal. Niko lunged into motion and I was on his heels.

In the living room, Promise’s largest window was gone. With curtains billowing, the cold air whipped through to carry with it tiny pieces of glass—a razor-edged wind. On the floor was a thick carpet of the shining stuff. Misshapen pieces of the metal framework were embedded in two walls, the ceiling, and glittered in the light as much as the glass did. Diamonds and silver.

In the middle of it all, she stood.

Not Auphe. I eased my finger fractionally off the trigger of my Glock. Not Auphe. Don’t pull the trigger. Not Auphe.

Straight black hair whipped around her shoulders, blood covered her hands and sword, and her eyes . . . I saw those eyes almost every day. Wildflowers in spring.

“They’re right behind me.”

Although Niko and I had moved into the room, it wasn’t said to us. Violet eyes found violet eyes as Promise appeared in the hall. She had a crossbow in her hand and an expression of wary affection and resignation on her face.

“Cherish, what trouble have you brought now?”

A dimple flashed by a very familiar mouth. “It’s only a little trouble, Madre.”

Robin had been the one to pull the first watch and was in the living room when the window had exploded. He now stood, back pressed to the wall, next to the absent window, with his own sword high. He took off the head of Cherish’s trouble as it flowed over the bottom edge of the window. The first of her troubles, rather. They weren’t as little as she claimed. More and more came, pouring into the apartment in an undulating wave.

That’s when the big picture hit me, jerked from Auphe dread to an almost equally crappy reality. She had crawled . . . no. With that much force, she must have raced up the side of the building to throw herself through Promise’s window. And the trouble she was talking about had come right behind her.

“Black cadejos,” Robin said as he took another head. “Whatever they bite will rot off in a matter of days. Nothing can heal it.” He swung his sword again. “And, worse yet, they smell like dog piss.”

“Don’t feel bad,” I murmured to Niko, the icy clamp at the base of my spine easing. Cadejos. Big, ugly, and flesh rotting, but not Auphe. “I’m sure you knew that.”

He growled and stepped into the fray, beheading two cadejos with one blow. Several across the room had leapt up to the wall and were running along it. I nailed them in their low-slung foreheads. They did smell like dog piss. Not surprising—they looked like dogs as well . . . if you crossed one with a weasel. Black skin, sleek black hair, short legs, long length, and a whiplike tail. They were like a living puddle of oil, but with baleful yellow eyes and a mouthful of teeth that could’ve come from the dinosaur that made that oil.

I fired again at one that vaulted toward me. The silencer chuffed as I hit it midchest. I ducked as it tumbled over my head. Another one, the size of a German shepherd, was hurtling toward me. I jerked my gun over, but before I had the shot lined up the thing was down, chopped into three separate pieces. Niko stood on one side of the body and Cherish stood on the other, both with bloody blades buried in the cadejo’s flesh. “Little boys,” she smiled at him, her dimple appearing again. A vampire with a dimple . . . what the hell was up with that? “They need protecting.”

Crossbow bolts went through the eyes of three cadejos sweeping up behind Cherish. As she looked over her shoulder, eyes widening slightly, I drawled, “When your mommy’s done watching your ass, we’ll let the adults set up a playdate for us.”

She wasn’t offended. Instead she laughed. If you didn’t know she was a vampire, you would’ve guessed her to be only ten years younger than her mother—she looked about nineteen or twenty. And her mouth and eyes were the same as Promise’s. Her chin, though, was more pointed, her face a little wider at the cheekbones, her nose thinner. But it was the perfectly black, perfectly straight hair parted precisely in the middle to fall just past her shoulders that was the first definitive sign. The light brown skin was the second: Cherish’s father had left his biological stamp on his daughter too. The third, and obvious even to me, was the madre. Spanish for “mother.” Cherish’s father was either a Spanish or Latin American vampire.

Still laughing, she whirled and took out another cadejo. Robin handled the last two that eeled through the window. That left five. Niko took two, Promise and Cherish one each, and I shot the last in the head. And then I aimed at what had wriggled in behind the couch. It wasn’t a cadejo. It was wearing clothes. I could see a slice of jeans and a bit of red sweatshirt.

“No.” Cherish stepped between us. “He is with me.” She turned. “Come out, Xolo. Come out, perrito.”

Pale fingers edged around the couch and perrito slowly edged into view. My Spanish was pretty rusty, despite Niko’s best educational efforts, but that I recognized. Puppy. And I could see why she called him that. It was a chupacabra, like the one from the bar. Puppy was a good name for something that looked like a cross between a bald dog and a lizard. It was the size of a small human—about five-three; no hair; round, mellow brown eyes; and with a bony spinal ridge that started midskull. As it moved out into the open, it pulled the hood of the sweatshirt up to cover the ridge and ducked its head shyly. I didn’t know much about chupas aside from what I’d seen in the bar. They didn’t talk as far as I could tell, they drank tequila, kept to themselves, and they didn’t tip.

“Oh, hey, another big spender. So glad I could save your life at no charge,” I snorted and let the muzzle of the gun fall toward the floor.

Cherish let her arm drape around the goat sucker’s red-clad shoulders. “Xolo. Xolo. He is a good perrito. Safe and good. I promise.”

He leaned into her side like a child and watched us with those unblinking soft brown eyes. He was a pet, not that bright, or was one introverted son of a bitch. She patted him on the shoulder and pointed to the couch. “Rest. Nap. There will be food soon.”

Unless Promise kept a goat in her freezer, “soon” seemed a little optimistic, but Xolo took her at her word. He went to the couch, like a good perrito, curled up, and was out like a light. With a bifurcated upper lip, eyes closed, and sneakers that could’ve been mine, he wasn’t much to look at. There were bloodsuckers and then there were bloodsuckers, and a goat sucker didn’t stand up too high next to the vampires, trolls, bodachs, wolves . . . the usual. Unless you were a goat, they weren’t much to worry about—as far as I knew. Trouble was, that wasn’t very far.

“Nik?”

He moved next to me, the blood staining his boots with each step. Promise’s beautiful rug was ruined, a sopping mess of cadejo blood. The entire room was a battlefield of the fallen, and the dog piss smell was not improving matters. “Chupacabras suck blood from animals. They have a mild telepathic ability said to be used to freeze their prey. Most references say they are harmless to humans.”

“Just lousy tippers.” I looked over to the piano where Promise had several photographs in polished silver frames. One I’d noticed before. It was old, a black image on tarnished metal. Promise and a little girl, dressed in clothes I’d only seen in movies. Promise sat in a chair, the little girl at her feet. The pose was stiff, but the small hand held in the larger one . . . that was warm. I’d wondered about that photo before. Vampirism isn’t a contagious disease. You’re born a vampire. Vampires have children, and I guessed now that that little dark-haired girl was Promise’s daughter.