“I expect you will know when you feel their bite,” she said. “In small, isolated puddles they are not so dangerous, but the rain keeps coming. Avoid any running streams and large bodies of still water. We’re lucky the ground soaks up so much, so fast. An advantage of the desert.”

“That’s why she built here,” Claire said. The rain was already soaking through the warm hoodie she’d thrown on over the T-shirt. She was, she thought, going to spend a lot of the day feeling cold and damp. Naomi had worn a full raincoat, with hood, though Claire felt it was less protection against the cold than against the idea of the draug drizzling down on her bare skin. “Very little rain, and people leave you alone way out here. She could control things.”

“It’s an illusion, control,” Naomi said. “You ought to understand that by now, young Claire. We are never in control of our destinies, even the strongest of us. All we can hope to do is not be too badly damaged by events.”

God, she did sound like Amelie. Depressing. Maybe they really were related after all. Shane shrugged; he wasn’t big on the concept of destiny anyway, and even less so when it was being preached by vampires.

At the bottom of the stairs, Shane said, “Which way?”

“We must keep to high ground,” Naomi said. She stood where she was for a moment, looking out over the town, and then shook her head. She pulled a device from the pocket of her raincoat; it was, Claire realized, one of Myrnin’s, with all the crazy hallmarks of something he’d cobbled together—gears, wires, tubes with strangely colored liquids. One was bubbling. Naomi adjusted a dial on the side and nodded as she returned it to her pocket. “The magic is working, at any rate.”

“Magic?”

“It wipes away the call of the draug,” she said.

“It’s not magic; it’s noise cancellation,” Claire said. “It’s just physics. You build one wave to cancel another, the way you build one to amplify another.”

Naomi just looked at her with polite, empty interest, and then said, “As you say. It appears to be working, which is fortunate, or this would be a very short venture for me. And for you.” That last was added as an afterthought.

“You said you had a way to find Theo,” Shane said. “Time to bust it out, lady. I don’t want to be out here when it gets dark. Well, darker.”

Naomi reached in the other pocket of her raincoat and took out a sealed vial. It was half full of a red powder, and she popped the cap and added a dash of water from a flask before she recorked it and shook it to mix. The liquid turned the dark red of blood. She uncapped the vial again, put it to her lips, and drank.

“The hell?” Shane stared. “Seriously, you brought a snack?”

“It’s Theo’s bloodline,” Naomi said. She grimaced and dropped the vial, then crushed it into tiny shards beneath her foot. “All the bloodlines have trace records in our libraries. It is so we can find them as we need. I could likely find him easily were he of Bishop’s bloodline, but he is not, so I must rely on this. It tastes foul, dried so …” She stopped talking, stood in silence for a few seconds and then suddenly bent over and retched violently. Then she sat down on the lowest step, as if she couldn’t find the strength to stand.