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“Zee, maybe you should text Reynard and ask him to help?”

Zee’s face fell, as though I’d suggested he take Reynard out to dinner. “Text Vampire Daddy? What am I, his simp? Nah, dawg. I ain’t texting ’im.”

Zee and Reynard had a complicated relationship. I’d need to come at it from another angle. This was going to take a some of my sophisticated Zee wrangling. “You’re right, you probably don’t even have his number.”

“Excuse me? I have his number. He left it with me when he went to Vampire Mansion to negotiate your return, then lost a finger. I just don’t use it.”

“Okay,” I sighed, laying on the disappointed act. “It’s fine. I’ll ask Madame Matase to call him. She’s real busy, but this is important. It’s for Tom, after all.”

Zee glared through his pretty lashes. “Fuck. Fine. Wait.” He pulled his phone from his pocket. “There’s like . . . a one percent chance he’s blocked me.”

“He blocked you? Why?” Did I really want to know?

“Pfft, I dunno. It’s not like I’ve been spamming him vampire dick jokes or anything.” He opened his phone and scrolled through what I assumed to be past messages. “Ha, listen to this: What do you call a vampire with no dick?”

I cringed. Zee had been texting a one-thousand-year-old vampire baron, dick jokes? This was not going to end well.

He snickered. “Pointless.”

Oh dear. “Zee, that doesn’t make sense.”

“Meh, whatever. I switched out fangs for dick. Works every time.”

I’d had Victor’s fangs in me, and to be fair, the experience had felt a lot like getting some dick, so maybe Zee was more right then he knew. Zee seemed impressed with his joke, although I doubted Reynard had been. “Did he reply?”

“He said . . .” Zee cleared his throat in preparation for his Lord Reynard voice. “Stop messaging me, demon, or I will block this number.”

Well, that made his thoughts on the matter pretty clear. “Did you stop?”

“Fuck, no. What did the vampire say to the corpse?”

Oh my stars. “Maybe don’t text him? I’ll ask Madame⁠—”

“I vanna fuck your blood.”

Oh dear. “You sent that to Reynard?”

“Yup.”

“Did he reply?”

“Not yet.”

“Has he replied at all since you sent that?”

“Nope.”

“When did you send it?”

“Two days ago.” Zee stopped tapping out a message on his phone and looked up as a thought occurred to him. “He blocked me, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Ugh, he can—” Zee began tapping out a new message. “Suck a bag of dicks and die.” He stabbed a finger at the screen, and placed the phone, screen down on the bar.

“Did you just send that?”

“Maybe? Signal’s real bad here. It probably won’t work.”