Pennyfeather was standing behind me; I sensed his cold, angular presence. Oliver’s man, but mine now. He knew which knee to bend, and when. “Send out search parties,” I commanded without turning from the sight of the last of the thralls dying. “Find Magnus at any cost, and bring him to me. And Oliver. I will require his head, of course. We must settle the question of who rules immediately.”

Pennyfeather didn’t move.

I became aware of a great stillness around me. The shrieking was done, the draug finished here, and the vampires, my vampires, were watching me.

Like Pennyfeather, unmoving.

“You heard me,” I said, and whirled on Pennyfeather …

… Just as he buried his slender silver knife in my heart.

I grabbed for it, wrapping my cold hands over his, and saw nothing in his face but my own death. “No,” I whispered. “No, I am your queen—”

“You’ll never rule here,” he said. “You should have remembered that.”

The silver coursed through my body, poisoning me. He left the dagger in me. It paralyzed me, and I could only watch as the vampires of Morganville left this place, and left me to die among the blackened corpses of our greatest enemies.

Not over, I thought. I wanted to shriek it at him, at all of them. This is not over!

But all I could do was watch them go. Amelie’s creatures. Oliver’s. Never mine.

I will have you, I promised them, in a burst of terror and fury. You should have made sure of me, Pennyfeather.

Because I would find a way to survive. To take this town, and our future, from them.

Somehow.

The draug I had poisoned was still alive, though blackened and crippled. Dying fast now. But it dragged itself to me and stared down into my open eyes.

And it pulled the silver dagger out of my heart.

For a long moment, I still was unable to move; the silver had weakened me, blackened me within. The draug dropped the dagger.

“Why?” I asked it.

And Magnus’s voice answered me, echoing through his own creature. “Waste not,” he said, “want not.”

And then he laughed, and the draug finished dying.

I retched up silver and stumbled to hands and knees, then upright.

The war was still on.

Magnus first.

But after that, those who’d betrayed me.

Amelie, my sister. And Oliver, whose creature Pennyfeather was.

Mine.

CHAPTER TWENTY

EVE

I stood on the sidelines, with Michael, and watched the vampires go to war.

It wasn’t much of a seeing-off parade, really … just the two of us, standing together, holding hands. But I’d always thought of myself as the cocky sidekick type, and cocky sidekicks don’t have to go to war, right? They get to cheer from the sidelines and … be cocky.

I didn’t feel particularly cocky anymore. I felt terrified, and even with Michael holding my hand, I’d never been more aware of how much was at stake, how much was bound to go wrong. “What if it doesn’t work?” I asked him. “What if—what if none of them come back?” I could just see the nightmare of being trapped in Zombieland Morganville, the draug haunting every source of water we had.