I made a face. "Don't remind me."

He kissed me. "I am thankful for all your peculiarities." He said it with a fervor that made me smile, but a cold part of me wondered what Delk must think of all this cooing vampire affection. Not much, I imagined.

"I'll see the boy out," Tina offered. She'd come in, unnoticed as usual, and was standing by the back stairs. "The boy," heh. No more of "your friend" or "the young gentleman" or "Jon" or even "Mr. Delk." Nope, the gloves were off.

"No, you won't," I wheezed, because she looked positively drooley at the thought of getting Jon alone for a moment. "I'll see him out." I was pretty sure I could make the walk from here to the front door without falling down.

Pretty sure.

"Well,I'm not going to," Jessica said. "Marc, you help her." "I've got patients here."

At some point, Jon had climbed to his feet. The gun was still out, was swinging wildly as he tried to point at all of us at once. His other arm was bent at a nauseating angle; I wondered how he was able to get to his feet, never mind stand and keep the gun up. His face had gone the color of oatmeal. Sweat was standing out on his forehead in big drops. "Nobody sees me out! None of youfreaks come near me. I'll see myself out."

"Well, all right, don't make a big thing of it," I said crossly. "You know, I should be yelling at you for shooting me, but I'm going to let the whole thing go. Now we're even for everything, right?"

"Fuck you," he replied, sounding cool and tough, and we all pretended not to see the tears rimming his lower lashes. "You're only alive because I—because I didn't want you dead just yet."

"Whatever sustains your fragile young male ego. But I think you'd be better off coming back here with an improved attitude."

"You'll see me again," he promised. "With attitude and more." Then he let the gun sort of drift to his side—it was probably way too painful to put it, one-handed, back into a shoulder holster—and simply walked away. On his way through the foyer, he steadied himself once on the banister—and drew his hand away in disgust, shaking stale gum off his fingers.

"And you wanted to evict me," I gently chided Jessica.

Delk stumbled up against the giant front doors, wrestled with the nineteenth-century knob, swore at the latch, got the door open, swore some more at us… and was gone.

"He's got a lot of personal growth ahead of him," I observed. My chest felt a lot better; had the bullet gone through me? It must have. I hoped so; I didn't want Marc or anyone else digging around in there to find it again.

"The infant is lucky he chose to leave."

"We did some pretty shitty things to the infant, in case you forgot. Or don't you care about that?"

Sinclair was eyeing the ruins of my ripped shirt, the bloodstains. "No," he said flatly. "I don't care about that."