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"How considerate," I mumbled as I glared at him.

"I do try."

River moved half a step in front of me.

It was barely a movement, but Destin noticed.

The temperature in the hallway plunged as River placed himself between us, and for the first time since the vampire appeared, something interrupted that smooth, seductive attention.

Destin looked at Blackman with the focus of a hungry piranha.

And changed.

It wasn't dramatic. If I hadn't been watching him so closely, I might have missed it. The sensual amusement remained on his face, but the interest behind it sharpened into something altogether different.

Recognition.

His attention swept over River, and suddenly I had the uncomfortable sense that everything before this, the smile, the manners, even me, had merely been something to occupy his time while he waited for the person he had actually come to see.

"Ah," he murmured, and this time there was nothing seductive in his voice. "There you are."

River snarled at him, making me flinch back in surprise.

"I've been trying to work out what you were for six weeks." Destin's voice had lost its polish at the edges. "Every creature in my territory has felt something walking around out there that shouldn't exist and nobody could put a name to it. And here you are, standing in a hallway in Ohio City, playing bodyguard. How domestic of you."

"You need to leave." I recovered enough to realize the vampire needed to go, and that I had to get River out of here before one of them did something permanent.

"Miss Byrne, I have been unfailingly polite. I have stood on this porch for a while rather than cross a threshold I wasn't invited over. I'm not here to hurt you and I'd have trouble doing it anyway, given that you flattened twelve High Priests without meaning to." He tilted his head in a birdlike manner that raised every hair on my arms to attention. "I'm here because you are investigating inside my territory without permission, and because somebody has been running demons through the area for days. I want to know which of those two things is your fault."

"The demons have nothing to do with me."

"No," he agreed. "I didn't think they did. But you'll appreciate I had to look at you while you said it."

Behind me, in both hands, the tin box was getting warm.

"Somebody's controlling them," I said before I could think better of it.

"Somebody who knows how a great many things work, I presume." Destin put his hands in his coat pockets. "I have had an arrangement with the demons of this region for sixty-one years, Miss Byrne. It was a good arrangement. I kept them out of the human districts and they kept out of my nests and everybody made money. Days ago somebody started moving them through my territory in formation without so much as a letter, and I have spent every night since trying to find out who. I have got precisely nowhere, and I am not accustomed to that."

We stared at each other long enough that it was getting uncomfortable.

"Which brings me," he finally broke the stare-off, "to the interesting part."

"Let's hear it and be on our merry way, shall we?"

"Whoever is doing it isn't asking permission, because they don't need it." He said it without any change in his face at all. "There are perhaps four creatures on this continent who could move demons through a master's territory without my knowing how. Three of them are accounted for. The fourth has been gone three years and nobody says his name at parties."

Leviathan. He didn't need to spell it out. All three of us got there at the same time.

River said something under his breath in a language I didn't recognize.

"Yes," Destin agreed, watching him. "Quite."

My grip on that tin was going to leave marks on my palms.

"You just told me you'd have trouble hurting me," I said slowly. "Then you handed me all of that for free. So what do you actually want, Mr. Destin?"

And there it was. The first genuine thing he'd done since he opened his mouth.