The key word was "casual." Robin wasn't quick to share the things that truly touched him. I thought in the beginning that it was because nothing did touch him. When Niko and I had first met him, I didn't think there could be a creature more superficial, shallow, or self-absorbed. I'd been wrong.

The puck had the depth of a long-abandoned well, and if those depths were desolate and murky, that was the result of outliving everyone you cared for. Robin was a human-lover, not a nice turn of phrase among monsters. So not only was he despised for a puck's natural trickery and thieving ways; he was scorned as well for the company he kept. His human companions would die, and the nonhuman would have little to do with him. Robin boasted of his vast circle of acquaintances—how many he knew—but knowing and being accepted are far different things.

I didn't know when Robin gave up on humans, when letting them go … when watching them die got to be too much, but I suspected it was around the time of that painting. It had been created in Pompeii days before he lost his chosen family, and now that hunk of ancient wall hung on a modern-day one—a constant reminder.

Why he'd made an effort to connect with Niko and me, I'd not yet figured out. Why he picked that moment to break a solitary pattern of almost two thousand years was still a mystery. I wasn't sure I could've been brave enough to take that chance. Hell, I knew I wouldn't have been.

I was brave enough, though, to knock at the door where George said he would be, but only just barely. I couldn't begin to guess what might be behind the door, but if I saw one donkey, I was gone. Robin could face certain death on his own. Two girls, naked except for their body art, opened the door, human female, and from the twining of arms and pressing of flesh, they were very close. I swallowed thickly and took a closer look. I mean, Jesus, who wouldn't?

One was painted in blues and greens with waves and leaping fish. The other was all over raging flames with the yellow scales of phoenixes shining through the red fire. As art went, it was pretty cool. As for the nudity, that was damn cool too.

"Is … ah … Robin here?" I asked, forgetting his name for a second as my brain decided to send my blood south for the winter.

The red girl looked blank and the blue one wrapped her arms around the other's scarlet neck and her legs around a waist painted with the eternal fire lizard. Her lips were busy sucking lightly at an earlobe and nipping the soft skin behind. It was distracting. I did need to find Robin, but how often did you get a show like this and not have to pay a big-ass cable bill for it?

"Boom chika bow wow."

Robin slid up, patterned head to toe in green leaves. He was a forest and in the forest were eyes—the cagey, wise ones of foxes peering through the foliage. "Someone has you down pat," I snorted. "Who's running around here painted like a henhouse?"

"They're resting." He grinned shamelessly. "They're very, very tired." The grin widened. "But you, on the other hand, are wide-awake. Care to help yourself?" He waved an arm toward the inside of the apartment. There were thirty people at least, all brightly colored and most of them horizontal.

"Are they all human?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Then no." I took his arm and pulled him into the hall. "I need to talk to you. There's trouble."

"Isn't there always? It's exhausting. Perhaps I should dress first?" he suggested dryly. "I'm perfectly comfortable as Zeus made me, but not everyone is as amenable."

With the two naked girls holding my attention, I hadn't even realized Goodfellow was wearing the same party attire as everyone else…absolutely nothing. "Crap," I groaned, blinked, then looked away hurriedly. "Goddamn, Goodfellow. You have a permit for that?" Talk about your weapons of mass destruction. Jesus.

"Now you know precisely why I'm so smug," he said with mock hauteur. "Give me ten minutes." He disappeared back into the interior of the apartment. I waited in the hall, a lack of faith in my own willpower keeping me there—not to mention a healthy dose of survival instinct. It wasn't only lamias that could drain a man unto death. The girls still framed in the door looked entirely capable of doing the same. Not necessarily a bad way to go, though.

"All right, kid, I'm cleaner than a nun's pair of Sunday panties. What trouble are you speaking of?" Robin, dressed with damp hair, had stepped back into the hall to close the door behind him. The red and blue girls were still intermingled close enough to be only seconds away from making purple, and I craned my head to catch one last glimpse as the metal swung to block them from sight.

"Ishiah." I straightened and said seriously, "He said someone is targeting you. He doesn't know who or why, but the word is out."

"The sirrush," he announced after a short stretch of silence as we walked.

"Yeah." The building had the typical flavor of artist tenants…old, decrepit, and smelling of pot. There was one lonely light overhead and it flickered uncertainly. "So who's after you? Who'd want to kill you?" I waited a beat and added, "Besides me, I mean."

"You must be joking," he said incredulously. "I couldn't begin to guess. Ex-lovers, ex-business partners, ex-marks…there isn't a PDA in the world big enough to compile that list."

The light gave up the ghost entirely as we reached the stairwell. There was still illumination from the street coming through a distant, dirt-filmed window, but it was gray and wispy—a ghost among us. It reminded me. "It can't be Abbagor. He's dead." Abbagor had been one of Robin's acquaintance/informants. A troll the size of a Lincoln, he'd lived and died under the Brooklyn Bridge. And Niko and I had nearly died with him. He'd been one malevolent, flat-out evil son of a bitch and every time I passed the bridge I flipped it off in his memory.

"Even if he were alive, it wouldn't have been him. Abby did his own dirty work. He enjoyed it far too much to farm it out." He started down the stairs.

"The Auphe." I hadn't wanted to say it, because I didn't want it to be true, but burying your head in the sand was only going to leave your ass up and chewed the hell off.

"No," Robin denied. "They're not above subcontracting, but they would be more subtle than a sirrush. Auphe are insidious, cunning, all the things a poor, simple sirrush is not." He sighed as he moved downward. "Thinking about my own horrific end, what a way to ruin a good orgy."

"Sorry about that." I followed him. His hands were empty, but mine were not…one of them at least. I held the Glock against my denim-covered outer thigh. "I assumed you'd want to know you've been marked for death. I don't know what I was thinking."

"When it comes to murder and assassination, it is the thought that counts. I appreciate the effort." The words were sober, the expression anything but…until he moved on. "It's hardly the first time. Or the hundredth for that matter," he said absently as he looked back at me. "You're well? Before she left, Delilah said you were recovered. Do you have full strength in your arm?"

"Normally I'd flex, but after what I saw upstairs, I'm keeping the sexiness to a minimum." The stairs were concrete and slick from years and years of pounding feet. "And, yeah, I'm fine."

"Good—that's good, because your chest looked…" He grimaced. "Never mind." Hitting the landing, he paused to say slyly, "I think she was attracted to you, our wolf girl. The situation was too dire for the customary ass-sniffing and leg-humping that is so prized on the wolf social scene, but there was definitely a look in her eye."

"Do you want more than one person trying to kill you?" I drawled. "I don't really have the time, but the inclination is no problem whatsoever."

He didn't have time to take me up on the offer. Someone…something else spoke in his place.