chapter twenty-seven

I reached into the pocket with my shock-gun. "Don't even think about it." "I wouldn't dream of hurting Smudge!" she protested, but I could see the

hunger in her eyes. She barely noticed my companions. By now, her condition would have stripped her of her own magical abilities, but if she wanted to, she could rip open Smudge's cage and snatch him away before I could move. Which was, no doubt, why red flame had begun to ripple over Smudge's body.

Deb sighed. "Hon, if the two of you are this jumpy around me, you're really not going to like Nicholas."

I retreated a step as she opened the back door of the sedan. Three more vampires emerged. Two guards gripped the arms of the third, a handcuffed figure with a heavy blanket cloaking his head and upper body.

One guard, a woman built like a snowplow, had a set of sharpened wooden stakes strapped to her thigh. Her choice of weapon meant Nicholas was one of the vampires who could be killed by wooden stakes, and in all likelihood, she wasn't. The second guard was smaller, almost classically nerdy, save for the semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder. His ears were slightly pointed, and the lumpy bone structure of his face made his condition obvious to anyone who knew what to look for. His tortoiseshell glasses perched on a lump at the bridge of his nose.

Deb nodded to both in turn. "Sarah and Rook have the pleasure of being Nicholas' keepers today."

Either of them could probably kill me between one heartbeat and the next, but it was Nicholas who made me want to get back in Nidhi's car and put a few hundred miles between us. Beneath the hood of his blanket, he made Deb look positively healthy. Yellow-and-purple blotches covered his white skin like bruises. His lips made me think of bloated purple leeches, and his limp brown hair hung past his eyes like greasy seaweed.

Smudge was a tiny furnace in his cage, glowing like an eight-legged coal in a barbeque. I saw Lena's grip tighten around her bokken. A low growl emerged from Jeff's throat. I don't know if he was even aware of it.

Blood oozed from cracks in Nicolas' lips as he smiled, revealing incongruously white teeth, clean and straight and perfect. I got the sense that he not only knew exactly how he was making the rest of us feel, he was enjoying it.

"This is the ghost-talker?" I asked.

"Strongest one in the Midwest," Deb confirmed. "They've got a prettier one down in Dallas, but you said you were in a hurry."

Nicholas stepped toward me, dragging his guards like a dog straining at the leash. Up close, his breath smelled of rotted meat. A silver chain was locked around his neck like a collar, and a smoldering wooden cross hung over his flannel shirt. Both guards clutched him by the arms, their fingers digging deeply enough to make a mortal man scream in pain.

I had been hoping for a nice Sanguinarius Meadus from the Vampire Academy novels. I had no idea what species Nicholas was. Possibly an experiment, fed and transfused with blood from other species, mutated into a tool and a weapon.

Over the centuries, vampires had deliberately worked to preserve as many subspecies as possible. Even the most monstrous and dangerous were kept around, locked away from "civilized" vampire society on the off chance their powers might one day be needed. I wondered how long it had been since Nicholas had seen the sun, or been given any kind of freedom.

"You think we should head inside before someone calls the cops?" Lena suggested.

"Nobody will call the police," said the woman with the stakes, her voice low and dreamlike. "The neighbors will pay no attention, and the family inside is sleeping."

"How long have you held them in a trance?" asked Nidhi. "Did you check to make sure they were okay?"

Sarah's face crinkled in confusion.

"They should be fine," I said softly. "I read that research paper, too. 'In the first twenty-four hours, side effects of magically-induced sleep were rare. Of the observed effects, the most common was bedwetting.' Better that the family has to do an extra load of laundry than someone starts taking potshots at us for breaking and entering."

"When did you read that?" Nidhi asked.

"At dinner last week. You were making enchiladas. You had the papers on your coffee table." I gave her a halfhearted shrug. The study had been done four years ago by a pair of Porter researchers, a continuation of a project started in Hungary. "I see words, I read them."

"Then you know one person in that study ended up in a coma for a week." "And the longer we argue about this, the longer those people stay asleep."

Deb pulled a tin from her back pocket, popped the lid, and snatched a live snail from inside. She crunched it down, shell and all. When she noticed me staring, she extended the tin and grinned. "Help yourself."

I grimaced, and my stomach threatened to evict my lunch. Deb just laughed and shoved the snails back into her pocket.

She had been a friend once. I wasn't sure what we were now. Her laugh was sharper, honed by bitterness and cruelty. The last time she was at my house, she tried to kill me with a Tommy gun, but she had the decency to feel bad about it afterward.

"Do you miss it?" I asked as we walked up the driveway. "Being human?" She sighed, knowing exactly what I wasn't asking. Do you miss the magic?

"As long as I stay fed, I feel stronger and healthier than I ever have. Don't let the skin condition fool you. And there are plenty of other advantages." She cocked her head and gave me an appraising stare. "You might even appreciate the lifestyle."

Give up magic and start a lifelong diet that would make a Klingon puke? "I don't think so."

She smiled slightly. "Isaac, do you remember the moment you first realized you were mortal? That no matter what happened, you would never live long enough to read every book you wanted to read? That you'd die having accomplished only a fraction of your goals?"

I had been eighteen and fresh out of high school. Ray Walker had taken me to New York to meet with a Porter who worked for one of the big publishers. It was the first time I truly understood just how many books a single publisher put out every year.

I had known intellectually that nobody could ever hope to read or learn everything, but that was the moment I did the math and started to understand

how many books there were in the world, and how many more were being written every day. For every book I explored, there were literally hundreds I would never have the chance to know. Likewise, for each bit of magic I mastered, an infinite number of possibilities went unexplored.

"What would you give for an extra century?" Deb asked, giving me a knowing look. "Time to read and learn twice as much as you could in this life?"

Trade my magic for greater knowledge. "Is that how they convinced you to let them turn you?"

"Let's just say their form of persuasion was more aggressive than mine." She chuckled bitterly and climbed the concrete steps to the front door. A wrought-iron railing bordered the small porch, and a sunflower-decorated sign welcomed us to the Sanchez home. Deb tried the doorknob, which was locked. She didn't appear to exert any effort, but the doorframe suddenly splintered inward. "There are other benefits, too."

The house smelled like dog fur and old Play-Doh. I stepped cautiously onto the brown plush carpet of a cramped family room. A thirty-something Hispanic man was asleep on the couch. A three-legged black Lab sprawled on the floor in front of him. On the TV, two New York cops interrogated a drug addict. A birdcage hung by the window. Inside, a blue-and-white parakeet lay with his head in his seed dish.

It was creepy.

Nicholas doffed his blanket and strode through the room, pulling the rest of us in his wake. He moved so smoothly he appeared to float over the floor. He stopped abruptly, reaching out to touch a patch of wall on the arched entryway that connected the family room to the kitchen. "Victor Harrison," he murmured, as if to himself. "He was afraid."