“It’s for Vicki!”

“Vicki?” Henry turned, frowning slightly, to see Tony staring at him with an expression of horrified disbelief.

“You didn’t forget. Don’t tell me you forgot. You must have gotten Celluci’s e-mail.”

“E-mails.” Over the last few weeks there had been a series of messages from Detective Sergeant Michael Celluci. Each of them had been as direct and to the point as the detective himself tended to be, falling somewhere between terse and rude, and each of them had been read and promptly deleted. “About Vicki’s birthday.”

“Right. So”—looking relieved, Tony nodded toward the shawl—“what do you think?”

“I think you’re unnecessarily concerned,” Henry told him. “It’s just a birthday.”

Tony stepped out into the middle of the sidewalk and stared at the bastard son of Henry VIII, once Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Marshal of the North, now vampire and romance writer, like he’d just grown another head. “Are you insane?”

Tony took a long drink of his latte, set the mug carefully back on the artfully distressed surface of the coffee shop’s round wooden table, leaned forward, and looked Henry right in the eye. It was something not many people could or would do and not something he dared on a regular basis, but he needed to make sure Henry understood the seriousness of the situation. “She’s turning forty.”

“She’s essentially immortal,” Henry pointed out, keeping the Hunter carefully masked despite the other man’s provocation.

“What difference does that make?”

He spread his hands. “An infinite number of birthdays.”

“So?” Taking the opportunity to look away without backing down, Tony rolled his eyes. “She’s still only going to turn forty once.”

“And someday, God willing, she’ll turn a hundred and forty, two hundred and forty…”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

“Apparently not.” Taking a swallow from his bottle of water, a modern conceit he appreciated since it granted him an accepted public behavior—and there were many in Vancouver who drank neither caffeine nor alcohol—Henry studied Tony’s reaction and shook his head. “Apparently not,” he repeated. That Vicki Nelson, who had been the first child of his kind he’d created in almost four hundred and seventy years, would care about something so meaningless as a birthday was hard for him to believe. Granted, she’d been definitely human before the change: strong willed, opinionated, with a terrier-like determination…. No, not terrier. That implied something small and yappy and Vicki was neither. Pit bull then. Aggressive, yes, but more often badly handled and misunderstood. He grinned at the thought of anyone attempting to put a muzzle on Vicki Nelson.

“What? You’re wearing one of your I’m so clever smiles,” Tony told him as his thoughts returned to the coffee shop. “Have you thought of something to get her?”

Best not to mention the muzzle. Toronto, and Vicki, were three thousand odd miles away but the idea of that getting back to her gave him chills the way nothing had in the last four centuries.

“I’ve know her for years and I’ve never given her a birthday present.”

“Forty, Henry.”

“And why is that so different from thirty-nine?”

Tony sighed. “You write bodice rippers, Henry. I can’t believe you know so little about women!”

“No woman in my books has ever approached forty.” Grocery bills might be negligible but he still had condo fees and car insurance to pay and middle-aged heroines didn’t sell books.

“Yeah, and your fans?”

From the mail he got, his fans were definitely closer to middle age. Given that they thought he was a thirty-five-year-old redhead named Elizabeth Fitzroy, he declined all invitations to romance conventions. “We don’t exactly converse, Tony.”

“Maybe you should. Look”—elbows planted on the table, he leaned forward—“forty is a big deal for women. It’s either the age where they have to stop pretending or have to start pretending a lot harder.”

“Pretending what?”

“Youth, Henry.”

“Vicki will be forever young.”

“No.” Tony shook his head. “You’ll be forever young; you were changed at seventeen. Vicki was thirty-four when you drew her over to the dark side—you know, dark? Literally.” As Henry frowned, Tony waved a hand at the coffee shop’s window and the night sky just barely visible behind the lights of Davies Street. “Never mind. The point is, she was human twice as long as you were. And she was in her thirties. And she’s a woman. Trust me, forty counts. And if you can’t trust me, trust Celluci; he’s living with her.”

Vampires did not share territory. By changing her, Henry had lost her to his mortal rival. And that sounded like a line from a bad romance. He rubbed his forehead and wondered what had happened to make his life so complicated. Stupid question. Vicki Nelson, ex–Wonder Woman of the Metropolitan Toronto Police, had happened. Vicki had seen past the masks and gotten him involved in life in a way he hadn’t been for hundreds of years. Vicki had pushed Tony into his life and had, with her change, been at least indirectly responsible for the two of them ending up in Vancouver. Forty years to such a woman should mean nothing.

“Look at it this way, Henry.” Tony’s voice interrupted his musing. “Vicki’s essentially immortal; that’s a long time for her to be pissed at you.”

On the other hand, who was he to say what forty years should mean to such a woman? He moved his water bottle, creating concentric rings with the condensation. “What are you getting her?”

Tony, ex–street hustler, ex–police informant, third assistant director on the most popular vampire detective series on syndicated television and the only practicing wizard in the lower mainland, sagged against the wrought iron back of his chair. “I have no fucking idea.”

There were two messages in Henry’s voice mail when he woke the next evening. Both were from Tony. The first was, predictably, about Vicki’s birthday. According to the script supervisor working on Darkest Night, women of her age appreciated gifts that made them feel young without reminding them of their advancing years. Given that Vicki’s years weren’t exactly advancing, Henry had no idea of what that meant.

Assuming it contained more of the same, Henry intended to delete the second message without listening to it but he hesitated a moment too long.

“Henry, there’s a little girl missing from up by Lytton and someone called Kevin Groves about her.”

Kevin Groves, who worked as a reporter for the Western Star, one of the local tabloids, had the uncomfortable ability of recognizing the truth. Given that his byline had once run under the headline OLYMPIC ORGANIZERS RELOCATE FAMILY OF SASQUATCH, this was occasionally more uncomfortable for those who knew about his skill than it was for him. Over the last year he’d become an indispensable way of keeping tabs on the growing metaphysical activity in Vancouver and the lower mainland.

Like attracted like. Henry had experienced this phenomenon over his long life, and as Tony gained more control over his considerable power, he was discovering it in spades. The difference was that while Henry would move heaven and earth for those he claimed as his own, he was generally willing to let the rest of humanity go its own way. But Tony had bought into the belief that with great power came great responsibility and become something of a local guardian for the entire lower mainland. A policeman, as it were, for the metaphysical.

Henry, because he considered Tony his, very often found himself acting as the young wizard’s muscle. Vicki referred to them alternately as Batman and Robin or the new Jedi Knights, and for that alone deserved to have her birthday forgotten.

Occasionally, Henry wondered if he wasn’t using Tony as an excuse to become involved. Celluci had called him a vampire vigilante once. He’d meant it as an insult, but when Henry thought of little girls gone missing, he also thought that the detective had been more perceptive than he’d been given credit for.