It had been her fault, really. She’d obviously underestimated him—probably because she hadn’t actually needed him. The abduction had been a compulsion rather than something demanded by her circumstances, a relic of past behavior that was no longer required. With her mirror destroyed, she didn’t have to worry about protecting her privacy here as much.

She’d been lonely, though.

“You little shit,” she said as she stared down at where she’d imprisoned him. “Did you take my fucking Book?”

He was the only one who’d been here since she’d seen it last.

The fucking bastard must have watched her flip through the pages that one morning.

Devina turned back around to the antique bed stand, now emptied of its drawers. There was, of course, another explanation, one that was utterly unthinkable. So she promptly discarded it.

The Book loved her. Of course it wanted to be with her.

No, he had taken her Book, the little shit, and even if she wasn’t thinking of using one of its spells to bring her true love, she was still going to need the fucking thing back.

It was hers, after all. And she was nothing if not possessive.

“Motherfucker,” she muttered.

Now she needed to find the goddamn thing.

The following evening, Mae was back at her garage door, car keys in hand, purse up on her shoulder. She hadn’t slept at all during the day, and First Meal had been a single piece of dry toast that had gone down like sheet metal.

“I’ll be back soon,” she called out to Rhoger.

Why did she wait for a response? Like, did she actually think he was going to sit up in that tub of ice water, and put in an order for Jimmy John’s?

In the back of her mind, a little warning bell went off. When you were talking to your dead brother and expecting him to answer, you were probably out of your mind.

Take out the “probably.”

“I’ll give your love to Tallah,” she said before slipping through the door and relocking it.

As she drove off, she had to fumble in her bag for her sunglasses. The fact that the other cars on the road had their headlights on, and her neighbors were once again streaming home from work, didn’t mean much to a vampire when it came to that barely-there glow on the western horizon. The fact that her eyes were stinging and her skin was prickling in warning under her clothes was a good reminder of exactly how nonnegotiable the whole no-sunlight thing was for the species.

But she couldn’t have stayed in that house for a moment longer.

And yes, dematerializing out was an option. She needed fresh ice, though, and the driving also helped calm her down.

It was amazing how you could be trapped even when you were free to go where you pleased.

Tallah’s cottage was on the far outskirts of Caldwell, a little stone jewel nestled in a glen of maple trees. The trip there took anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes depending on traffic, and Mae put the radio on to distract herself from stuff she didn’t want to think about. NPR didn’t work, though. Her mind still chewed on things like the fact that vampire bodies sank, not floated, in water—something she hadn’t known until she’d started taking care of Rhoger in his current state. She was also keenly aware that time was running out for her and her brother. And she worried that maybe that Book Tallah was talking about wasn’t the answer to the problem.

Maybe all she had for an answer was a Fade Ceremony, a permanently empty house, and the crushing realization that she was the last of her bloodline, left alone on the planet.

If shared memories were the best kind . . . then memories you could no longer share with the collective that were in them were the worst. That kind of solitude turned you into a reference volume rather than part of a story, and she had a feeling the losses made every thought a platform for mourning.

To keep herself from tearing up, she cast a mental line back into a sea of undesirables, and guess what came up on her cognitive hook?

That fighter from the night before.

Great.

Still, as she followed the curving roads into the country, and the population density of humans drained away in favor of cornfields and small dairy farms, she chose him to focus on. It was the best of a bad lot, as her father would have said—and it wasn’t like she had to work very hard at the preoccupation. She could picture Shawn clear as day, from his obsidian eyes, to the tattoos that covered his body, to his aggression . . . to his spilled blood on all that concrete.

How someone could go from nearly dying to just going about his business, she hadn’t a clue. Then again, she had a feeling his little leak hadn’t been the first one he’d sprung. God, if that had happened to her, she would have screamed until she lost consciousness even after she recovered.

Meanwhile, he’d seemed like he was merely stuck in the wrong lane at a supermarket.

And FFS, if she had told him to, he would have brought that male, the Reverend, back for her.

Maybe she should have taken that route. But then what? If the Reverend didn’t know about the Book, how would dragging him back to that garage have helped? And maybe the offer had just been hyperbole on the fighter’s part, a bluster courtesy of his chest-thumping complex.

Right?

As she pulled onto a dirt road that was choked with bushes and overgrowth, she was still debating the pros and cons of a decision that had been made the night before. But at least she was almost to Tallah’s and then—yay!—she had other things to think about . . . like Books that may or may not exist, and may or may not be helpful when it came to her brother’s situation.

In the meantime, she had the bad condition of this goat path to focus on. There were potholes to fight through, her headlights bouncing up and down as she tried to avoid the worst of them, and the brambles that grew up along the shoulder were so tight, the most aggressive of them scratched at the Civic’s paint job.

But then the cottage made its appearance.

As she rounded a final turn, her car pinpointed her destination, the headlights blasting the old stone of the outer walls in an illumination that was kind of unkind. The place was in a genteel state of disrepair, the front door painted in a faded red that was partially chipped away, one shutter hanging cockeyed, the slate roof showing a missing tile here and there. The grounds were likewise a shaggy mess, the rose garden nothing but a tangled circle of thorns and weeds, the front path ragged and frayed by tree roots and mole tunnels. A fallen branch big as a car was in the side yard, and that old birch tree looked like spring’s CPR of warmth and sunshine might not pull it through the winter’s cold coma.

Putting her car in park, she canned the ignition and took a deep breath. She really needed to help more around the property, but between her full-time work online and taking care of her own house, the last year had gone by so fast. Previously, when her father had been alive, he had come here and done a lot of the handyman stuff, and her brother had helped out like that, too. It was amazing how fast things degenerated, though.

Three years without upkeep and things were nearly unrecognizable. And it was hard not to find a parallel in the collapse of Mae’s own life, everything that had once stood strong and true now decaying and lost.

Her parents had seemed so permanent. Rhoger, too.

Youth and a lack of exposure to death had meant her family was immortal and the details of her life—where she lived, who she was related to, what she did—were written-in-stone facts, as immutable as the night sky, as gravity, as the color of her own eyes.