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“She was mostly joking.”

“Mostly’s not never.”

He gave me a look that in anyone else I’d have called fond. He was wearing his black coat and a scarf I’d never seen, dark gray, and he hadn’t slept, of course. Neither had I. We’d spent what was left of the night side by side in Room 101 with the lights off and the curtain a hand’s width open, watching the roof across the street. Nothing moved on it. By dawn, the snow had filled in every footprint.

“Ready?” he said.

“No.”

“Nor am I.”

He knocked.

The door was opened by a man the size of a refrigerator, with a small cat tattooed on his neck. He looked at Maksim, then at me, then at the fruit.

“Boss,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s the boy.”

“ The boy?” I said.

“He’s been in here for days,” said Marcus, gravely, stepping aside. “Talking.”

I gave Maksim an outraged look. He studied the ceiling.

I’d expected, I don’t know, coffins and bat-wing curtains and a tragic pianist. What I got was a warm, dim, shabby-elegant bar with a brass rail and red lamps and a gray cat asleep on the piano, and behind the counter, drying a glass, a blonde woman in a gray sweater with a laugh like a drawer of cutlery.

She looked up and saw me, and then she saw the basket.

She put down the glass.

“Oh my God, “ said Tamsin, and came around the bar at a run. “You brought me a pineapple.”

“It’s for the neck,” I said. “You know. Thing.”

“He brought me a pineapple. “ She hugged me. She smelled of vanilla and cold air, and she was about my height, and she squeezed hard enough to crack a rib. “I’m in love. Maks, I’m so sorry, I’m keeping him.”

“You may not.”

“I’m keeping him.”

“He is spoken for.”

“Then I’ll adopt him. Sit, sit, sit. Do you eat breakfast? Everyone eats breakfast. I made eggs.”

She put me in a booth. She put an enormous plate of scrambled eggs in front of me, and toast, and coffee, and then sat down across from me with her chin on her hand and a look on her face like a woman watching her favorite show.

“You’re the one who told him to come to me,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been wanting to shake your hand for a week.” She held it out. I shook. “That was the kindest, dumbest, most dangerous thing I’ve ever heard. You told a starving vampire to go feed on his ex.”

“You’re not his ex.”

“I’m his very platonic ex.” She grinned. “Nine years. Not once. Isn’t that funny? You’d think, after that long, something would’ve happened, and I said as much to him a while ago and he looked so horrified I thought he’d throw himself out the window.”

“I was not horrified,” said Maksim, from the other end of the booth. “I was courteous.”

“You were a gargoyle. “