“Where are we even going?” I said finally. “I’ve never been to your place.”

“My place is a shoe box with a hot plate.” He’d turned the car around and was coasting down Dashiell’s driveway. “So let’s go to my parents’ house. There’s more room, they’re out of town, and I have to let the dog out, anyway.”

I just nodded tiredly. I couldn’t believe it was only 8:00 p.m. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the stress, or just jet lag, but time was starting to fuzz together for me. Had it really been less than a day since Jesse had picked me up at the airport? And here we were again, with Jesse driving and me falling asleep against the window like it had all been a dream.

“We’re here, Scarlett,” Jesse said softly. I sat up, blinking in the unfamiliar glare of a motion-sensor security light. We were parked in the driveway of a sprawling two-story house with well-tended landscaping lining the path toward the front door. There was a string of colored lights doodling over the shrubbery, and there were so many delicate white icicle lights lining the roof that for a second I almost believed we were somewhere truly cold. Then I recognized Jesse’s parents’ house.

“You sure they won’t mind?” I said sleepily.

“I’m sure. They’re with my mother’s people in Hermosillo. Mexico,” he added.

I sat up suddenly. “For the holidays, right? Oh, Jesse, I’m sorry. I’m keeping you from them.” Honestly, I kind of kept forgetting about Christmas. My parents had made a huge deal out of it every year, but now they were gone.

He shrugged. “It’s only the nineteenth. I wasn’t planning to head down there for a couple of days anyway. And if I don’t make it, I don’t make it.” Off my look, he said, “Christmas comes every year, Scarlett. And I’ve missed more than one because of work stuff. It’s no big deal.”

“I’m sorry.”

He waved it off. “Come on in, say hi to the pup.”

I brightened. When we’d worked together before, Jesse had brought me to meet his parents’ hyperactive pit bull mix, a muscled knot of energy named Max, who had introduced himself by knocking me down in an effort to show his undying love. Not because I was anyone special, but because I was there. I love animals in general, but dogs are the pinnacle of pet ownership, as far as I’m concerned.

This time when Jesse opened the front door, I was braced and ready. The dog shot out onto the porch, ridiculously fast in the poor lighting, and came right over to put his two front paws on my stomach, trying to lick my face. “Goofball,” I said, laughing. I scrubbed at his neck and ears with my short fingernails until he dropped down to go greet Jesse.

“Oh, so you do remember me,” Jesse said, mock offended. Max’s whip-tail wagged hard enough to sting as it hit my leg. Jesse scratched his back for a minute and then bent down to grab a long cord that was fixed to the porch. He ran it through his fingers until he found the metal clasp at the end and fixed it to Max’s collar. “Go run, boy.” To me, he said, “Come on in.”

I hadn’t been inside his parents’ house before, so I stopped just inside the doorway while Jesse walked to an adjoining wall to hit the lights. The two-story foyer lit up with a warm glow, the light stretching into what looked like a living room on the left and a sunken dining room on the right. “Watch your step,” Jesse advised as he led me through the dining room, which featured a huge, ten-foot Christmas tree with a neat row of gorgeously wrapped presents under it. Jesse pointed. “Those are just the fake ones,” he said, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. “They took a big carful with them when they left.”

“My mother used to wrap empty boxes and leave them under the tree too,” I said absently. I stepped closer to look at the ornaments. There were a lot of the nice Hallmark ones—I pressed the button on a Muppets trinket that made Waldorf and Statler holler belligerently—and even more of the homemade kind. I touched a small, neat frame made out of popsicle sticks. There was a picture inside of a handsome, smiling boy of about eight. “You?” I asked.

“Nope, that’s my brother, Noah. This one’s me.” He pointed to another frame a few inches lower. This one was haphazardly glued together, with messy red coloring along one side of the popsicle stick.

“Not much of an artist, huh?”

“Hey,” he protested. “I was six! That’s damn good for six.”

“Remedial,” I informed him. “Remedial arts-and-crafts work.”

He grumbled, but gave me a few more minutes to study the tree before saying, “Hey, I heard you say something to Corry before, but I forgot to ask. Is it really true that vampires need to be invited into a house?”

I turned around, forgetting the ornament I’d been examining. “Yes.”

His brow furrowed. “Why? I mean, what’s stopping them.”

“Magic,” I said briefly, but he made a rolling gesture with his index finger to indicate I should keep going. “Honestly? I have no friggin’ clue. Something to do with families and blessings and faith. You could ask Kirsten about it.”

He held up his palms in surrender. “Okay, okay. So that means vampires can’t come into this house, right?”

“Uh…yeah, that’s my bad.”

“The null thing again?”

I nodded. “The protective magic forms a bubble around the house, covering every possible entrance—all the doors, the pipes, the vents, the windows, even a damn chimney. It’s actually kind of like my radius.” I pointed in the direction we’d come from. “But anytime I get within ten feet of an exterior wall, I short that section out. Not the whole thing, it’s not built that way, but that specific area that touches my power.” Concern had spread across his face. I added, “As soon as your family comes back, living in the house and loving each other, it’ll come back, though. Don’t worry.”