“Shut. Up.” My knee dug into his back. I made sure I was braced, watched him. “Gil?”

A long, tense-ticking two seconds. My apprentice gulped. “Si, señora?” No trace of sarcasm or machismo. That was either good… or very bad.

“Go out the front door. Saul’s in the car. You two are going to have some lunch. I’ll catch up with you.” A nice even tone, but I did not relax. Perry didn’t move, his body loose and unjointed against the floor. As if I was kneeling on a sack of loosely threaded bones in a bag of noisome fluid.

“Si, señora.” He got up, slowly, like an old man. The Bowie knife boiled with blue light, and my finger tensed on the trigger.

It was time to make it very clear to a certain hellbreed that my apprentice was off-fucking-limits. If you give ’breed an inch, they will take twenty miles. Your only hope is to make it clear the first time.

And God help me, I liked making things violently clear to this particular ’breed. “Let’s start at the beginning, Perry. You do not threaten my apprentice.”

He said nothing, just hissed. Which meant I wasn’t getting through.

So I pistol-whipped him twice, bouncing his head off the floor. He hissed again and surged up, I shoved him back down and snapped a glance at Gilberto, who was stumbling in slow motion, a sleepwalker in a nightmare. But he was heading the right way, toward the front door. Saul would take care of him.

“Sweet nothings.” The sibilants dragged out over the rumble of Helletöng. “Oh, my darling. I’ve missed you.”

I stuck with the safest response possible. “You do not threaten my apprentice.” And I was so close to blowing his head all over my living room floor. So, so close.

Not only because of the scar, rubbing against itself and moaning on my wrist. Not only because of Gilberto’s cheese-sick cheeks or the fact that Perry was here, inside the house I slept in.