Bianca frowned. “That’s not good. I’d hoped I’d be able to talk to your ghost and make sure you were protected all the time. I can’t stay here permanently.”

“We should be all right,” Balthazar said. “Relatively few vampires know the ways to trap or repel ghosts. He won’t try this house again. It’s the rest of town we’ve got to worry about.”

“You really know how to cheer a girl up,” Skye said, and he smiled at her apologetically.

Bianca, who now had a very odd smile on her face, said, “You know how to call us if you need us. Skye, thanks again for everything. You’re in good hands. Balthazar—it’s nice seeing you like this.”

Like what? Balthazar wondered, but it was enough to bask in her approval. Though his old love for Bianca had finally shifted into something simpler and less romantic, he thought he’d always have a weak spot for her smile. He lifted one hand in farewell as Bianca faded slowly from sight—returning to Lucas yet again.

Skye tucked a lock of her thick brown hair behind one ear as she said, “I’d forgotten you two used to go out.”

“That was never—Bianca was always with Lucas, really. Our relationship was more about hiding their romance.” And if he’d been fool enough to forget that for a while, he thought, he had no one but himself to blame.

“But you liked her, didn’t you?” This girl had seen right through him. “Do you still?”

“No. I mean—of course I care about Bianca. I always will. But she never wanted what I wanted. It took me a while to accept that, but I have.”

Why did it feel so strange, talking about that with Skye? It felt like … like talking about one girlfriend to another. Bad form. Though of course Bianca had never really been his girlfriend, and Skye—that couldn’t happen, for her sake.

They’d cleared the last remnants of ice from her bedroom, and he’d double-checked the entire first floor and fixed the locks—though Redgrave’s phobia of wraiths meant that the doors probably could be left wide open from now on without the tribe returning. Tonight’s crisis was taken care of: time to look toward the future.

“You’re going to take the bus to school in the morning, right?”

Skye gave him a look across her darkened bedroom. “Of course. I’m not going to walk along the road again by myself. But what do we do after that? If they came after me on one of the main streets in town, they’d come after me in school.”

“I’m working on that,” Balthazar said. He didn’t want to make any promises before he knew for sure. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Wait—you’re leaving?” She looked stricken.

“I promise you, they aren’t coming back tonight.”

“But you could still stay here. My parents wouldn’t see you.”

“There are a few things I need to take care of. If I did that here, I’d keep you up.”

“Like I could sleep after this.” Skye sighed, but more in tiredness than frustration. Balthazar disliked leaving her, but for the moment she was safe, and he had to think about protecting her in the long term.

“Just go to school tomorrow and trust me, okay?”

He tossed the words out lightly, a phrase and nothing more. But Skye’s expression became solemn as she said, “I trust you.”

She really meant it.

He hadn’t realized, until that moment, how badly he’d wanted to hear her say that.

That night, he returned to the cheap hotel room he’d rented on the edge of town, when he’d believed he would be here for only a handful of days. Obviously he’d need a longer-term solution, with Redgrave on the scene. The danger to Skye wouldn’t go away in a day, or a week. This required long-term thinking. This required commitment.

Balthazar went to bed around midnight. Though he, like most vampires, preferred to remain awake at night and rest during the day, he knew that behaving this way separated him too completely from human society. There were times he’d allowed himself to drift into a vampiric existence; those were the times when he’d looked up to see that a year or a decade had come and gone without his having had a single meaningful experience. No more, he’d decided.

Besides, if he wanted to help Skye, he’d need an early start.

And he did want to help her—more strongly than he could have imagined he would after only a couple of days—

Refusing to think about it anymore, Balthazar went to sleep.

And dreamed.

1988.

How long had he been out of synch? Five years? Closer to ten, maybe. Balthazar’s jeans and T-shirt weren’t quite right—everybody wore jeans washed out pale now, and the stripes on his shirt’s sleeves had gone from ubiquitous to unfamiliar. But he could pass. He could manage.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t left the house in Chicago for ten years. He’d made trips to the hospital blood banks and the butchers, to get the blood he needed. He’d walked to the nearest bars and walked back. Sometimes he went to the store for cigarettes. But depression hung a kind of veil over everything—clouding it, making it more distant than it really was.

Now that Balthazar was pushing himself out again, that veil was gone. In its place was a world transformed.

Like cars. When had cars become so dull? Everything was white or gray, boxy and boring.

Women’s fashions were interesting—sort of like the 1940s on acid. Big hair, big shoulder pads, brilliant neon colors: It would take some getting used to, but he’d give it points over the 1970s.