“Yogurt isn’t tartar sauce, Nik,” he sniped, but there was a smile behind it.

“You thought it was.” And our neighbor at the time, ninety with ten cats, had given me free containers of it if I dragged her garbage can to the curb for her. Her granddaughter bought the yogurt for her, and the old woman hated it with a passion. It might be my health-conscious nutrition had begun with a mother who rarely bought groceries and a cranky cat lady who’d survived nearly a century of dipping everything in lard and didn’t see a reason to change her ways.

“I was dipping fish sticks in goddamn cherry yogurt.” He started back up the stairs. “I should so kick your ass.”

“You should,” I agreed amiably, as he moved fingers under his sleeve to bead number two and repeated his mantra silently.

“You tell anyone about it and I’ll kill you.” Bead number three. “Dead.”

“And you’d have every right,” I said as mildly as before, and far more self-satisfied than could be good for my karma.

“Damn straight I would.” Bead number four. Calm and controlled, he was working his way there. Slowly, perhaps, months away—a long, long path, but he would get there. If he continued to work at it. And if I had to throw him to the floor and sit on him every hour on the hour to accomplish that, so be it.

But there is only so much meditation can do. What we found upstairs was enough to destroy an entire five hours of meditation, much less five minutes’ worth.

I opened the door to see Cherish and Robin sitting at a table with cards in hand. The former had a pile of clothes at her feet, and the latter was nude except for one sock. Unfortunately, that sock wasn’t in a place that would’ve provided the rest of us with any comfort. I said a mantra of my own. It didn’t help. There was only one answer to this. I started walking. Fast.

Goodfellow had once told us he had invented the game of poker. I doubted that was true, but I didn’t doubt he excelled at it. The only excuse for his catastrophic loss, catastrophic from my point of view at least, was the desire to show off his puckly attributes to Cherish. As Cal had once told me after accidentally interrupting one of Robin’s more dissolute fests, there was a good deal to show off.

Green eyes turned brightly sly at the sight of us. “Niko.” He knocked on the chair to his left. “We have room for one more.”

“I think you already have three at the table,” I said. And if I walked even faster, I wasn’t the slightest bit ashamed. I, usually the hunter, in Robin’s case knew very well what it was like to be prey. And as prey, you do what you have to to survive.

Run like the wind.

Cal was somewhat less restrained in his comments than I had been. “Jesus Christ, I cleaned my guns at that table last night, you perv. Where the hell am I supposed to clean them now?”

“Perhaps the same place you got laid today?” Robin said smoothly.

“How’d you know that?” Cal demanded.

“It’s a sixth sense,” came the complacent answer.

“Being a nosy, sex-sniffing bastard is a sixth sense? Since when?”

By that time, I was in the bedroom and with relief closed the door behind me. Promise looked over from where she was firing her crossbow at a large painting on the wall. It was an especially fine rendition of Pan of the Green Wood. He was playing his pipes for a virginal maiden clad in a sheer Greek stola. Every bolt was buried in two areas: the curly head and those puckly attributes I’d seen in passing.

“Did you know art galleries will deliver within an hour if you pay them enough,” she informed me as she turned back and casually fired another bolt into Goodfellow’s pride and joy.

“I think Cherish can hold her own with Robin,” I said.

“I know she can. That does not mean I want the sight inflicted on me,” she replied with exasperated annoyance. It was also said with a maternal protection I didn’t think she knew was present. With one last shot, she pierced the chest where the heart would be before tossing the crossbow onto the bed. The room was painted a deep chocolate brown, the same color as the wide streaks in the pale blond hair that was twisted into an intricate braid. She wore different clothes than she had yesterday. The painting wasn’t the only thing she’d had delivered. “I had clothes sent from my apartment, including what you have there,” she offered as she noticed my gaze. “I thought Cal could borrow some of yours. Robin, of course, had all new delivered. Not many, though,” she said. “I expected the entire upper loft to be devoted to them.”

“To be fair, no one can go in his apartment now,” I reminded. “His cat might very well kill them and use the body as a plaything.” And that he’d only had a few clothes was a bad sign that Robin had had all the togetherness he could tolerate.

“Yes, his pet. How very unlike Robin to take on something that requires attention—attention that I’m sure he thinks would be better spent on him.”

Pucks weren’t well liked by other supernatural creatures. Their trickster personalities—in other words, the lying and stealing—didn’t make them very popular. Pucks also tended not to associate with other pucks—ever—which was understandable. All those massive egos gathered together, each vying to be the center of attention—as Cal had said, “All those drama kings in one place . . . no way that would be a pretty picture.”

“He gets lonely.” More precisely, he anticipated being lonely. Despite having us now, not to mention the continuous faceless stream of sexual partners, one day Cal and I would be gone. When you live thousands of years, it’s the price you pay for befriending humans. A mummy cat would be around much longer. Although there was Cal’s Auphe blood. It was possible he could live longer than your average human. Could, but wouldn’t.

I’d been the only constant for his entire life. I’d been the one who raised him. I’d been the one to help him back to sanity after he’d escaped the Auphe following two unimaginably horrific years as their prisoner. He was rational now, but even so, he lived his life balanced on the thinnest of tightropes. I’d seen the suicide run he’d once made to save me. I wouldn’t be around to see the one he’d make to join me, but I knew it would come. I also knew that as much as I tried I couldn’t change that.

“True, Robin and I don’t always see eye to eye, but when the time comes I’ll do what I can.” She laid her hand on my cheek. “I hope he can do the same for me if . . .”

I knew what she left unspoken. If we made it past this. If we were still together. If I could forgive her.

Now I knew there was nothing to forgive. I tilted my head down and kissed her. A warmth of lips, a fleeting touch of silken tongue, and a taste so familiar it seemed I’d known it all my life. “I was a bastard,”

I said quietly, taking her hand and intertwining fingers with hers. “I expected perfection when I’m far from it myself. I’m sorry for that. We all have secrets. Or will.”

An emotion flickered behind twilight eyes. Regret. Her hand tightened on mine. “Now I know how it feels to be on the receiving end. It’s not a pleasant sensation. I’m sorry for that, no matter what my reason.”

I nodded and said quietly, “Cal.” Now worry joined the regret in her eyes. “You have to know and you have to remember, if there had been no Cal, there would be no me. I don’t know who or what I would’ve been, but it wouldn’t be the person I am now. I do know this though: It wouldn’t be a change for the better.”

“Niko . . .”

I didn’t let her finish. “Just remember.”

Her eyes cleared. “I will. I promise.”

Time would tell.

The bedspread on Seamus’s bed was brown and gold. The sheets were ivory, the same as Promise’s skin. The light brown of my skin was a stark contrast to hers, yet it fit. Just as we fit—as we always fit. The touch of my hands on her breasts, stomach, hips; the feel of her beneath me, wrapped around me . . . how could that not always be?