My apprentice had Jack Karma’s Bowie knife out, the silver loaded along the blade’s flat running with blue light. He held the knife up, a tiny bar between him and the slender shape of the hellbreed, who was leaning forward, weight on his toes. Highly polished wingtips placed just so on the hardwood floor, his expensively cut platinum hair ruffled on a breeze that came from nowhere, Perry smiled a shark’s smile. His chin jerked to the side and he almost moved before I was on him.

The shock grated through me, my aura fluorescing into the visible. Hard little sparks of blue crackled off sea-urchin spikes, an exorcist’s aura hard and disciplined—and reacting to the soup of baneful intent in the air.

Gilberto let out a harsh yell, his voice breaking. Perry didn’t speak, but that could have been because I had him on the floor, arm twisted up so far behind his back that whatever he had serving him for bones crackled, the gun pressed to the back of his shiny blond head. One of my boots was on his other wrist, flexing down until something else made a creaking, almost-snapping sound.

He gave a token heave or two and went still, the scar turning to soft velvet fire, sliding up my arm.

I would have preferred pain. Either way, the gun didn’t waver. All of a sudden I understood why Mikhail had almost drawn on him the first time he’d shown up at the bar, sniffing around me. A million years ago, back when I was the apprentice and Mikhail was the hunter.

The longer I live, the more things just seem to repeat themselves.

Perry chuckled. “Kisssssss.” Subvocal rumbling slid under the surface of the word, trailing away on a long hiss like a freight train’s brakes failing on a long sharp hill. “Darling. So rough.”