The front room with all the windows is crowded with people who look like they’ve just come from a gallery opening—well dressed, but with something a little artsy about each one of them: oversized rings here, fuchsia hair there. I look around, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that everyone here is older than we are, and I’d take bets that we’re the only high-school students to ever attend one of her parties.

“I’m going to find Francesca.” Kat takes Owen by the hand and leads him through a doorway, leaving the rest of us alone while she shows off her prize. At least she isn’t going to hang around and babysit.

Rayne puts her hand on my shoulder and whispers in my ear. “Good thing we brought our own cute boys, because there’s nothing but old men in this place.”

“You’re not kidding,” I say. All of the guys in this place are in their twenties at least, looking like they just got off from their nice, responsible jobs. Nobody is paying any attention to us; they’re just standing in small clumps, drinks and tiny plates of even tinier food in their hands.

Griffon slips his arm around my waist. “Want me to get you a drink?” He glances at a long table filled with bottles and glasses.

Rayne looks at me and shrugs, answering the unspoken question about whether we should drink real drinks or not. I look around. No keg in sight. Since we were at a fancy party, maybe it was time to be a little fancy. “Um, a glass of wine. White.”

“Sauvignon blanc or chardonnay?” Griffon’s grin gives him away.

I shove him in the arm. “You pick.”

“I’ll help,” Peter says, and the two of them walk off into the crowd.

Rayne drags me over to the window. “Wow, check out this view. You can see the Golden Gate and the boats in the marina from here.” I stand next to her, watching the lights on the boats bob up and down on the water. “What exactly does Kat’s boss do again?”

“She owns a clothing store on Union Street,” I say.

“Must be some expensive stuff to afford a place this nice.”

I wrinkle my nose, remembering the nearly empty store with its artsy, highlighted displays. “I suppose,” I say, absently picking at the paint stain on my jeans. At least I’d traded my Vans for some black flats.

Rayne nudges me with her shoulder. “Places like this always make me uncomfortable. I don’t think I’m meant to hang around rich people.” She glances around the room as if she’s looking at the exhibits at an aquarium.

“Me neither,” I agree. I see Peter and Griffon across the room, laughing at something the guy next to them said. I watch how easy Griffon is in this place, with these people; he seems to melt into any environment and look like he belongs wherever he is, like some sort of social chameleon. I wonder if that’s a skill you can learn.

Rayne follows my gaze. “I wish Peter was as into me as Griffon is you.” Her voice is tinged with sadness.

“He is! What are you talking about? I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

Rayne’s cheeks blaze with pleasure and she turns back to the window to try to hide it. “You think so? It’s just that you can tell that Griffon would do anything for you. I mean anything.”

I think back to that day on the roof, where Griffon said that he’d die for me if that’s what it took. “He is pretty amazing.” I swallow hard to keep the image of him clinging to the side of the building out of my head. “But so is Peter. We’re both lucky.”

Rayne stands up straight and pokes me in the side, nodding toward the drinks table. “Who’s the old lady? She totally looks like she’s hitting on Griffon.”

I turn to see a woman standing close to him, almost pushing Peter out of the way. She’s gesturing as she talks, the massive diamond on her right hand catching the light every time she moves. The woman puts her hand on Griffon’s arm every chance she gets, in a way that seems more than friendly, and makes me more than curious. Most Akhet have a habit of touching people in order to get information, but she’s taking it a little far. Griffon backs up a tiny step, but she follows him, closing in on what anyone can see is his personal space. He’s smiling, but shaking his head at everything she says—his face is a mask of embarrassment. Griffon hasn’t glanced over here, but he must know that I’m watching. Drinks in both hands, he turns to walk away, but she folds something into his back pocket at the last second.

As much as I want to, I can’t pretend I didn’t notice. “Who was that?” I ask as the two of them hand us our drinks. I take a sip of the golden liquid to try to push down the annoyance that’s rising inside of me. Rayne stands next to me with her arms folded across her chest, always ready to be on my side, which is one of the things I love about her.

Griffon laughs, his dark eyes looking endless in this dim light. “It’s no big deal.”

I’m not sure what to say, because I know what I saw.

Peter grins and shrugs his shoulders. “You might as well tell her.”

“What?” I look at Griffon in confusion, wondering if the woman is Akhet and he can’t say anything. Peter doesn’t know about us. I told Rayne everything when Veronique tried to kill Griffon, but Peter doesn’t have a clue about past lives or Sekhem—any of it.

“She just gave me this.” Griffon digs around in his pocket and holds out a crumpled business card.

It’s thick and has letters embossed in silver. “ ‘Mary Belle’?” I read, and look back up at him.

Griffon rolls his eyes. “She’s an agent.”

“Apparently she owns the biggest modeling agency on the West Coast,” Peter says. He grins. “At least that’s what she said. And she set her sights on your boyfriend here. Practically begged him to come in and see her. Apparently he’s got ‘the look.’ “

I smile, feeling like an idiot. She’s not Akhet. Just a cougar. “I could have told her that.”

“Did you think she was hitting on me?” Griffon grabs my hand and squeezes.

“No,” I say. Rayne shoots me a look. “Yes. Maybe.”

Griffon leans in and kisses me. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s no one but you in this place.”

“Smooth talker,” I tease, relief making me relax at last.

Rayne takes a drink and looks around. “Wonder where the people with the teeny tiny food are. I’m starving.”

“I saw some trays near the kitchen,” Peter says, reaching for her hand. “You guys want anything?”

I hold up my wine. “I’m okay,” I answer, watching the two of them disappear into the crowd.

Griffon and I stand quietly for a few minutes, and I can’t help noticing some of the women in the room glancing our way. Or, rather, Griffon’s way. All the eyes on him make me a little jealous, but I get it. With his dark skin and golden eyes, Griffon draws attention everywhere he goes.

Just as I’m starting to get uncomfortable, I feel his hand on my arm. “The guy by the bar told me this place has a great view. Let’s go find it.”

“You can see the boats from this window.”

“Yeah, but he says there’s a better one. Grab your jacket.” Griffon leads me out of the room toward a doorway at the end of the hall. The cold, wet air hits me as soon as we push it open, and I pull my jacket tighter. The fog hasn’t completely rolled in yet and you can still see some stars in the black sky overhead. There’s a set of stairs that snake along the outside of the building, and Griffon heads for those.

“You first?” he asks, looking up.

I turn to him. “Why? So you can watch my butt from below?”

He holds up his hands in surrender. “You caught me. I was going to say that I was just trying to be polite, but look who I’m talking to. The human lie detector.”

I follow his glance up the stairs. They go up three stories and disappear at the roof. “Can’t we just enjoy the view from down here?”

Griffon kisses the palm of my hand. “You know this is a different rooftop. Nothing’s going to happen, I promise.” He makes a big show of looking around. “No Veronique in sight.”

I smile, but it just pokes at the guilt I’ve been carrying around with me, because I haven’t told him about running into Veronique. At first I could never find the right time, and now that it’s been almost a week, I don’t know how to bring it up. It seems like she listened to me, though, because I haven’t seen her since.

“Let’s go check it out,” Griffon says. “And if you don’t like it, we can come right back down.”

I totally agree when people say you should face your fears. I just don’t want to face mine. I hear loud laughter from the hallway on the other side of the door and suddenly, desperately want to be alone with him. “Okay. But just for a minute.”

As soon as we reach the top, I suck in my breath. The view from up here is really amazing. I can see over the Marina Green to the dark water under the Golden Gate Bridge. The cars on the bridge look like a river of light as they flow to Marin, where the edge of the fog licks at the hills.

“There’s Alcatraz,” Griffon says, pointing to some tiny dots of light in the middle of the water.

“Would you believe I’ve never been there?”

“I haven’t been there this time,” he says. “But I visited last time, in the seventies, when they’d just opened it up to the public. It was pretty creepy back then—they did this one demo where they’d lock you in one of the solitary confinement cells for two minutes. It was pitch black and silent, and two minutes seemed like forever. I heard they don’t do that anymore, though.”

I watch Griffon as he speaks, loving that this conversation about a trip he took in a past lifetime seems normal. Our normal. “We should go and check it out.”

Griffon takes a step away from the stairs, and I notice the rooftop deck for the first time. The surface is covered with wood like a regular deck, but it runs the whole length of the roof, the fact that we’re the only people up here making it look even bigger than it already is. Over in one corner are a nice outdoor table and a set of chairs, and closer to us are a thickly cushioned couch and some chaise longues that look like they’d be more at home in a living room than on a roof in the middle of the city. “Hey, a fire pit.” Griffon walks to the big copper bowl by the couch. “And there’s wood.”

I slowly walk over to him, feeling safer as I move away from the edge of the roof. Griffon reaches into his jacket and pulls out a silver Zippo lighter. “And now we have fire.”

“Do you always carry a lighter with you?”

“Habit. I got used to having one.” He gestures with his fingers like he’s smoking.

I make a face, trying to imagine him with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

“Come on,” he protests. “That was, like, forty years ago. Everyone smoked then. It’s not like it is now.” He bends down, flips the lighter around with one flick of his wrist, and holds the flame to the small sticks of wood in the bottom of the pit. “Even in this lifetime, a nice, solid lighter seems like a good thing to have.” He blows on the flame and I can hear the wood crackle as it catches fire, a few sparks shooting up into the sky before they burn out completely.

Griffon flops onto one of the lounge chairs, patting the small space beside him. “Let’s pretend we’re camping. Somewhere high up in the Sierras next to a little lake in front of our roaring campfire.”

We sit quietly for a minute, staring at the flames. “Two truths and a lie,” I say, bringing up the game that made me like him in the first place. “My turn.”

“Make it good this time.”

“I’ll make it easy. I know you stink at this. Okay; I once got attacked by a bear while camping, I’ve been snorkeling with dolphins, and I can make chocolate chip cookies without looking at a recipe.”

Griffon makes his thinking face, scrunching up his mouth until I have to laugh out loud. “Um, for some reason I believe that anyone who inhales chocolate like you do can whip up a batch of cookies blindfolded in the middle of the night, so I’m guessing that one’s true.”

“You’re one for one.”

“Last month you told me that you’d been to Hawaii twice, so I’m going to say that you’ve been snorkeling with dolphins.”

I frown. “I never told you about Hawaii.”

He looks at me like I should know better. “It was May fifth. A Sunday. And we were sitting in my living room watching TV. A commercial for an airline came on, and you said that you’d been to Hawaii twice, once when you were three and then again two years ago.” Griffon smiles. “Is that good enough?”

“Show off.” I laugh. It’s hard to argue with someone who has an eidetic memory. “It’ll do. So the lie?”