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“Okay,” I say. “Which one of you is it?”

Nobody answers right away.

Then Lenart says, quietly, “All of us.”

Merek doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me from the stove, steady, with the lines on his forearms glowing. Tav nods once, slowly, so his horns dip. William, by the door, says, “Yes.”

I look from one to the next. A vampire. A demon. A minotaur. A gargoyle. The four most beautiful men I’ve ever seen, in one kitchen, and every one of them is waiting to hear what I’m going to say.

“Holy shit,” I say.

“That’s fair,” Merek says.

“No, I mean it. Holy shit.” I push my hair off my face. “That’s why. That’s why I’ve been like this. I thought I was losing my mind. I’ve been walking around for two days wanting to climb all of you, and I thought it was the stress.”

Tav’s ears go straight up.

Merek laughs, low, and doesn’t hide it. William looks at the floor. Lenart goes very still.

I hear what I just said, and I don’t take it back.

“So the bond is doing that,” I say. “Making me want you.”

“I don’t know,” Lenart says. “I don’t know how it makes you feel or if it makes you feel anything at all.”

That’s honest, and I don’t love it.

I sit back. Fate, apparently, has handed me four monsters and a membership card. My whole life, people have been handing me things and expecting me to be grateful. A bad shift. A worse manager. A bill.

“Fine,” I say. “Fate thinks you’re all mine. That doesn’t mean I know a damn thing about any of you.” I look around the table, at each of them. “You want me? Show me.”

The kitchen goes quiet. The bacon grease pops once in the pan. Merek reaches over and turns off the burner without looking at it.

Lenart pushes back his chair and stands.

He doesn’t say anything. He comes around the end of the table until he’s standing in front of my chair. Then he holds out his hand.

I put mine in it and let him draw me up.

His hand is cool. The same cool I felt on my arm on the Solstice, and the same heat answers it, all the way through me. I’m standing close enough to him now that I have to tip my head back. I know his face by now. The cheekbones, the hard jaw, and the full lower lip. The mouth I watched across a nightclub before I knew what he was.

I know what’s behind it, too. I’ve seen the fangs slide down.

I didn’t believe in vampires until yesterday morning. Now I’m standing in a demon’s kitchen in a borrowed shirt, wanting one to put his hands on me so badly that my skin aches.

He doesn’t move. He’s close enough that I can feel the cool coming off him, and he isn’t breathing. I watch his chest, and it’s perfectly still.

“Tara,” he says. Not Ms. Iverson. “May I?”

I take a fistful of his shirt and pull.

He comes down to me, and his mouth is on mine.

He starts out careful. One hand goes to my jaw, cool fingers along the side of my face, his thumb under my chin to tip it up. The other settles at my waist, over the knot in Merek’s shirt. He kisses me slowly, as if he has all the time in the world, and he does.

Then I kiss him back.

I open my mouth under his, and I feel the exact moment his control goes. His hand slides off my jaw and into my hair, into the loose end of my braid, and closes. The hand at my waist drags me in until I’m flat against him. He’s hard everywhere under the suit, much harder than he looks, and cool, like stepping into a lake in August, and every place we touch I’m burning anyway.