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“Not yet.”
“Then why am I in bed?”
He sighed and pulled me to a sitting position, putting the mug firmly in my hands. “A healer is coming and he wants you to stay awake until he arrives, all right?”
I drank some too-hot coffee and scowled at him, annoyed although I couldn’t remember why. The light from the lounge was leaking in, highlighting his spiky blond hair. I decided that must be it.
“You really hate my hair, don’t you?” he asked, a smile flickering over his lips so fast I might have imagined it.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I reached out to touch it, and was surprised as always to find it mostly soft. Just a little stiff in places from whatever product he used on it. It felt weird, imagining Pritkin having anything in his hair but sweat. But he must have; nobody’s did that all on its own.
“It’s like . . . angry hair,” I said, trying to pat it down and failing miserably.
He caught my wrist. “Most people would say that suits me.”
“I’m not most people.”
“I know.”
I went back to watching the fridge. I could see the door over Pritkin’s shoulder, and it wasn’t closed after all. It was very slightly open, like a panting mouth. And some kind of multicolored mucus was dripping out the bottom.
Condiments, I told myself firmly.
Or so it wanted me to think.
“Dryden’s finished hugging the toilet,” one of the vamps said, walking into the kitchen. “Do we need to dose her, too?”
“She took care of that herself,” Marco said, joining the party. He’d pulled off the barfed-on shirt but hadn’t yet bothered to go to his room for another one. That left him in dark gray slacks, a pair of Ferragamo loafers and a lot of hair.
A lot of hair. It was even on his shoulders. It was like a pelt.
He crouched down on the other side of me. “You’re really hairy,” I told him, impressed.
“And you’re really stoned.”
I thought about that for a moment. It seemed like an outside possibility. “Why am I stoned?”
“It was the goddamned chocolates. I always taste everything before you eat it, yet I sat right there and watched you scarf half the damn—”
“You couldn’t know.”
“It’s my goddamned job to know!”
I sighed and pulled his curly head to me. He was warm and fuzzy, like a big teddy bear. A big teddy bear with fangs.
I patted him softly.
“Why didn’t the wards detect that shit?” one of the other guards demanded angrily. He was a redhead, his fiery hair worn in a slick style that went with his natty blue-plaid suit. He was one of the ones who had made fun of the mage when he first arrived, but who’d let him follow us in. I wondered if he’d caught flak for that.
Probably.
“They detect poison,” Pritkin told him. “This was a narcotic.”
“What the hell was the point in that?”
