I looked up and around. I started to ask, not that I was really curious, but Shane did it for me. “Who?” He had his arm around Claire, and she was huddled against him, quietly wiping tears from her face.

She pointed.

Myrnin—who to this point I had honestly forgotten about, because he’d done nothing, said nothing, reacted to nothing—leaned suddenly forward. “Where?”

“Right there,” Claire said. She pointed again, straight over my shoulder through the front window. “Standing on top of that building. Can’t you see him?”

“Who are you talking about?” I asked her. There was nothing on the roof where she was pointing. No—there was a passing shadow, something that shifted when I tried to fix my focus on it. Like fog, disappearing. “There’s nobody.”

“Magnus. That’s him. I swear, he’s right there. Watching us.”

Michael and Shane were both eyeing her oddly. “Claire, there’s nobody there. Nobody,” Michael said. Myrnin said nothing. His dark eyes were intent, staring at the spot where she pointed. After a moment, he silently sat back and folded his arms.

“You think you can see Magnus,” I repeated. “The leader of the draug. But I promise you, there’s nobody there.”

“And I promise you, he is there. I—I can see him.” Claire bit her lip and took a deep breath. “I could always see him. I don’t know why. When he was taking the vampires in the beginning, I saw him a couple of times and tried to follow him. I think that’s why he came for me, in the house. Because I could see him.”

Thoughts began sparking in my head, igniting into a fuse that burned directly to a very dangerous conclusion. “You can tell him from the others? The ones we can see?”

“The rest of the draug? Yeah. They’re copies of him, but they’re not as … as present, if that makes any sense. They’re just reflections. Pieces of him that have split off. I think somehow they’re all … connected.”

“She’s correct,” Myrnin said. “I tell you now what only Amelie and I know about the draug …. The master draug is the seed from which all others spring, and they are his thralls. Not mindless, but close to it. He is the thinker. The planner. He is the one we have to stop. We have to find a way to trap and kill him. Once we do, the others will fall. They cannot exist long without a master.”

He met my eyes, and that was when I realized that Myrnin was thinking exactly the same thing that I was. That as pathologically cold as I was right now, he was there ahead of me.

Vampires ain’t like most of us, I heard my grandmother whisper in the back of my mind. Cold ones. Cold at heart. Selfish. They don’t survive all this time otherwise.

I wondered what she’d say about me, now.

I exchanged a look in the rearview mirror with the vampire, and held it. Then I said, “We’ll talk about this later.”