Author: Molly Harper

Ow.

As I stretched my aching jaw, I realized Jeanine was trying to prevent hurting me too badly. The stun gun was enough to keep me in line, but she didn’t trust herself to really lash out. She needed me. And the only reason I could think of for keeping me alive would be to—

“Gabriel,” I groaned. “You want Gabriel here for whatever weirdo ritual you have planned. I’ve been relegated to bait. This is insulting.”

“Don’t be insulted, Jane,” she said, her lip drawn up into a bewildered pout. “It’s a compliment, really. Gabriel cares for you. He’s almost obsessed with your safety and happiness. As soon as he realizes you’re not at the shop, he’ll come running here looking for you. And your … predicament is just the incentive he needs to cooperate. Do you realize that I’ve been trying to contact him for decades, but the first time he ever responded in any way was when I told him I was going to talk to you, to hurt you? Personally, I don’t see the attraction.” Her rosebud features grew dark, petulant. “It’s not fair. He cared enough to turn you completely, to make sure you could take care of yourself, fend for yourself. He turned me into less. He made me into a ghoul.”

“You are not a ghoul. You’re a hypochondriac. You travel with a humidifier, for goodness sake.” When a lightning-quick flash of insane fury crossed Jeanine’s features, I had an idea. If there was no bait, there was no trap, no reason for Gabriel to be here. Jeanine would be left with no big evil plan. She wouldn’t be able to hurt him. And with me gone, Jenny would finally get the house. Now that my life seemed to be finally, truly coming to a close, I found I didn’t mind so much. Annoying her didn’t seem so important now. It really sucked that I was reaching some level of emotional maturity moments before imminent death.

I snickered loudly, making my voice as condescending and Courtney-like as possible. “You don’t even have the guts to come after me yourself. You had Foot Boy do your dirty work for you.”

Jeanine rolled her eyes but didn’t respond. I dug deeper into the bitchy-insult well, lowering my voice to a sly, sneering tone. “You know, Gabriel told me all about your little crush on him, when you were human. Following him around like a little puppy dog, making a nuisance of yourself. I pointed out that not much has changed, since you’re still doing pretty much the same thing. And we laaaaaaaughed. Did I mention we were lying in my bed, naked, at the time?”

Jeanine’s teeth ground together as she barked out, “Emery!”

Emery turned and really walloped me. Unfortunately, he did it at just the right angle, so that my temple barreled into the corner of a china crate. I slumped to the ground, my head spinning, blood seeping through the neck of my sweatshirt. I was vaguely aware of my arms being pinned under my back, the ropes biting into my wrists. So, instead of dying to protect my beloved, I was going to wake up with a headache and a serious case of pins-and-needles in my arms.

Overall, not my most well-thought-out plan.

As unconsciousness tinged the edge of my vision, I glared up at Jeanine. “I don’t like you.”

Jeanine grinned, patting my cheek. “I’m glad we’ve got that out in the open.”

From the dark, bottomless pit of oblivion, I heard shouting. I blinked a few times. I heard Dick’s pained howl and his voice moaning, “No, baby, no,” over and over. When my eyes could focus, I saw him in the corner, Andrea’s body pressed against his chest, his face buried in her neck.

Gabriel’s voice was louder, stern. “Stay down, Emery!”

I sat up, wincing at the numbness in my arms. I shook my head, trying to fling away the last fuzzy spots in my head.

“Gabriel?” I peered up, seeing Gabriel choking Emery against a wall as Jeanine stood nearby, wringing her hands. She looked so helpless and panicked. It seemed that faced with the object of her obsession and fury, our mutual sire, all of her high-flown evil plans had evaporated, and she was reduced to dithering like a flustered schoolgirl. I almost felt sorry for her.

But not really.

Gabriel dropped a barely conscious Emery at the sound of my hoarse whisper. Emery slumped against a stack of crates, toppling them over. I heard Jeanine gasp as one of the unlit hurricane lamps shattered near her feet, soaking her cloak in the lamp oil.

“Jane?” he murmured, probing my temple gently with his fingertips. Between the barely healed cuts on my arms, the head wound, and the drying maroon blood soaked into my sweatshirt, I imagined I wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests soon. Sadly, at this point, I think Gabriel was used to seeing me this way.

“I’m really sorry about this. Emery got me from behind.” I groaned. “That’s not what it sounds like.”

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Bored and annoyed, a little worried about Emery’s mental state. But yeah, I’m fine,” I grumbled, trying to push to my feet. “Nope, I was wrong, my head really hurts.”

“Come upstairs,” he said, taking my arm and supporting my weight. “Jeanine, I’ve called the Council here. You’ve gone too far this time. When they see …” Gabriel’s voice broke as he took in the sight of Dick huddled protectively over Andrea. “There’s nothing I can do to help you.”

“That’s not true,” Jeanine mewled. “You and I have a long-owed debt to settle, Gabriel.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” he growled, pushing past her and dragging me with him.

“All of this is your doing! Your fault. You made me what I am!”

The pitiful voice, the sight of Jeanine’s twisted baby-doll visage, were playing Gabriel’s guilt strings like a virtuoso. I could see the conflict play out on his face. After everything, he wanted to try to find a way to help her. He turned, leaving me to stand as my sense of equilibrium returned. “I shouldn’t have left you alone, Jeanine,” he said. “And I’m sorry for that. But I was afraid of you, afraid of the things you would do. I was ashamed of you. I thought that you would listen to Violette, that she could teach you.”

“She didn’t teach me anything!” Jeanine pouted. “It was just more rules! More rules than my Grandmama had. Don’t feed from the weak. Don’t kill for the sake of killing,” she said, mimicking a heavy French accent. “It was so much worse than my life. You left me with that. I didn’t have anyone to turn to. Please, just give me more of your blood. Make me whole. The Council will understand that I was sick and not in my right mind, that I had no choice but to do what I’ve done, especially when you talk to them.”

He took a deep breath. “I won’t do that, Jeanine. I won’t speak for you and I won’t give you another drop of my blood. There’s no such thing as a re-turning.”

“Yes, there is!” Jeanine screamed.

“Jeanine,” he growled.

I cleared my throat. “Gabriel, let’s not antagonize the crazy with the stun gun.”

“Jane, don’t help. Wait—she has your stun gun?”

I shrugged my shoulders, my expression apologetic.

“I can make you happy, Gabriel, if you just give me the chance. But now that you have her, you don’t even think of me,” Jeanine begged, her voice reedy and desperate. “Can’t you see what she’s done to me, by coming between us? I need you.”

Oh, Lord, it was Gabriel’s kryptonite, a lady in distress. But instead of reaching out to Jeanine, he simply shook his head.

“I can’t keep living like this,” Jeanine cried, real tears of blood streaming down her cheeks now. “I won’t keep living this half-life. I want the gift of immortality or no life at all!”

“I gave you the gift of immortality,” Gabriel said, his voice cold now. “And you’ve wasted it.”

With a mad cry, Jeanine sparked the stun gun and moved it to the hem of her cloak. “I’ll end it now. I’ll take you all with me.”

“You won’t do it. You’re terrified of death,” I told her. I thought reminding her of the immediate dusty consequences would make her drop the stun gun, but Jeanine seemed to take my words as a challenge. She sneered and pressed it down, the arc of electrical energy combusting the lamp-oil-soaked cloth with a bright orange glow. Within seconds, her clothes were engulfed. Gabriel threw me behind him. But Jeanine stood perfectly still, a shocked look freezing her face in a mask of horrified regret, as if she couldn’t believe what she had done in a toddler’s fit of temper. Her panicked hands beat at the flames as they licked up her clothes, toward her face. There was a horrible scream as Jeanine’s body seemed to disintegrate before our eyes. Her face turned gray, then black, then crumbled into dust. The flaming cloak crumpled to the floor.

I watched as the puddle of oil caught, the fire inching toward the piles of boxes and wooden crates. The flames speared higher and higher, until I thought they might be brushing against the ceiling. We would be trapped. River Oaks would burn. The cellar was going to catch like a Roman candle if—

I shrieked as a blue-white cloud exploded in my face. Dick was standing over Jeanine’s remains with the fire extinguisher I kept near the cellar steps. With tears streaking down his deadened, inanimate face, he sprayed foam over the remaining hot spots, dropped the red tank with a clang, and shuffled back to Andrea without a word.

The cold blast from the fire extinguisher seemed to revive Emery, who slowly pushed himself up from the floor. Gabriel sprang to his feet, putting himself between Emery and me.

“Mistress?” Emery mumbled. His dull, unfocused eyes caught sight of the pile of ashes and the red cape, absorbing what it meant. He howled, “No! No !”

Emery scanned the room for signs of Jeanine, for an explanation of what had happened. Seeing Dick crouched over Andrea, Emery cried, “That is my mate!” When he advanced on them, Dick looked up with what can only be called a predatory snarl and roared. Even I jumped back. Gabriel’s grip tightened around my arm.

“Emery, I think you should back away and sit still until the Council gets here,” Gabriel seethed.

Emery’s brow furrowed, even as he circled Andrea, trying to find a weakness in Dick’s defenses. “What council?”

“The Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead. The governing body of vampires who are going to lower the boom on you after what you’ve done,” I said.

Emery snorted derisively. “We’re vampires, Jane. We’re above the law, the constraints of human society. There are no rules for us anymore. It’s why I wanted to be a vampire in the first place.”

“Actually, there’s a whole butt-load of rules, Emery. The Council has rules for everything, especially when it comes to abducting and forcibly turning humans. It’s bad for our public image. All those months at the bookshop, and you never bothered reading anything, did you? You bought into Jeanine’s promise of a ‘dark gift’ without even thinking about it. And now, you’re going to get the Trial.”

“What’s the Trial?” Emery asked, his bravado suddenly gone.

“What you’ve done to Andrea is going to pale in comparison.”

As if on cue, Ophelia arrived at the top of the cellar with her Council posse: gaunt and grumpy Peter Crown, a Colonel Sanders lookalike improbably named Waco Marchand, and cool blond Sophie. I was never so glad to see bureaucrats in all my life. It was like a pale, elegant cavalry. Emery had lost all nerve at this point and was cowering behind a junk pile.

Ophelia, a 300-year-old teenager who was wearing skinny dark-wash jeans and a Jonas Brothers T-shirt, took in the sight of Andrea’s crumpled body, the pile of ashes on the floor, and my bloodied, chainsaw-massacre-survivor look.

“What did you do this time, Jane?” she demanded, rolling her eyes.

“This time, it really wasn’t me,” I protested.