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get hurt.”
    Jackson, still grinning, gave me a short bow. “Then I believe I’ll leave you two ladies to sort things out.”
    *   *   *
    I watched him head out the door—and realized what the bell I’d seen earlier was for. Daytimers might not be allowed to lock their doors, but they could make sure guests wouldn’t arrived unannounced. Celine had come in last, and she hadn’t set the bell. She’d known Lars would come for me tonight.
    Which meant she was conniving, or she didn’t like to dirty her own hands—or she knew she was too weak to fight me herself. I turned toward her, where she sat on her black bed in her black slip—given the whiteness of her limbs, she looked like a porcelain doll—and I kept my eyes on her as I stalked across the floor and set the bell’s hinge out, so we wouldn’t get any other unannounced company. Her lips tightened at this. She knew she’d been caught. Then I walked over to the destroyed cot.
    The frame was bowlegged from the violence of Lars’s blow. And the stone that’d weathered the hammer’s first hit was chipped. Exactly where my brainpan would have been if I’d still been lying down at the time. No wonder everything in here was black—it made it easier to hide the blood.
    I swept my sheets up and turned back toward her, staring her down while wearing my ridiculous clothing, my spandex skirt only fractionally below my crotch, with the hammer handle in one hand like a knife, and my fist still around the hammerhead brass knuckles I’d made at my side.
    I’d won. I could ask for the bed now, and get it. I could make her sleep not on a cot, but on the floor, in the hall. Or in her bed with me, doing whatever I liked.
    Or I could be kind to her and manage to live with myself for another day.
    The thing was, if I did that, she’d think I was weak. She’d tried to have me killed—and showing her mercy would earn myself nothing in return. I’d had too many sociopaths before as patients at work; I knew how they worked. No matter how kind you were to them, some dogs would always bite.
    But I didn’t want to be one of them . Yet.
    “Give me all your pillows except one.”
    She threw them at me like an insolent preteen, and I kicked them over to the zebra rug. Between it, the pillows, and the sheets, I could make a tolerable bed. I did so, and then sat down in it, like a bird in a strange black nest. I set the hammer handle down and said, “And throw me the remote for the lights.” That she threw more carefully. I caught it, and she angrily drew her curtains closed.
    I thought I’d probably weathered all the attacks on my life there would be tonight. I decided to dare kicking off my shoes, but set them carefully beside me so that I could easily find them again—and in doing so saw a splash of black roll like mercury inside the right one, to stay hidden. I frowned instantly—I had a sinking feeling I knew precisely what that was, although I couldn’t investigate with Celine in the room. The last conversation I’d had with the Shadows had been on the life raft before coming here. I didn’t know why I’d assumed they’d have left me alone, but it’d been foolish of me.
    Were they responsible for my dream of Asher? It didn’t seem like them to taunt by proxy when I would be so much more depressed knowing they were here themselves. Hopefully I’d get the chance to ask them tomorrow.
    “Can you turn the light off?” Celine asked petulantly from behind her curtains, having decided I was unlikely to wreak revenge.
    “Don’t get out of your bed without telling me,” I warned, and then with a sigh that I hoped that the Shadows could hear, I clicked off the light and lay down in the dark.

CHAPTER FIVE
    We don’t have eight months anymore, baby.
    Lars’s attack had broken whatever illusions I had about biding my time here safely. I’d been lucky, that was all. If Raven couldn’t give me any more blood without turning me, then my powers, limited as they