"Oh, Margrit, you hurt me. Can't an old friend call up to say hello after a few weeks' absence?"

"Old friend?" Margrit kept her voice down with effort. "Pit vipers would be safer friends than you, and old friends don't call at six in the morning unless they're in real trouble. You can't be in any trouble I could possibly help you with. The world's not that capricious." The accusation left aside the middling detail that Margrit, despite her better judgment, rather liked the fiery-haired dragon. "What do you want?"

"Capricious," Janx said with admiration. "Well done, for someone who protests she's just been wakened."

"I'm a lawyer. I'm supposed to be capable of conversing with an augmented vocabulary in order to obfuscate an argument without exerting myself. Besides, I was already awake. What do you want?"

"Better than a circus act," Janx said happily. Then his bantering faded, a note of tension replacing it. "I require your services, Margrit. A balance has changed."

Margrit coughed in disbelief. "You called me up at six-thirty in the morning to give me cryptic messages? 'A balance has changed'? What the hell does that mean? A balance changed in January when you had Vanessa Gray killed, Janx. Alban told me that you'd breached protocol by doing that. You're not supposed to go around murdering people's assistants, especially when they've been assisting for over a century. It's not playing fair, or something."

"Margrit, my dear, I would never murder Eliseo Daisani's assistant. That would be an inexcusable act of warfare." Teasing lightened Janx's voice again. Margrit groaned aloud and shook her head against the door.

"Right. You don't kill anybody yourself, right? You just hire people to do it." Janx had all but confessed to arranging Vanessa Gray's assassination, and it had been through his cell phone records that Margrit had helped the police track down the hired killer.