Great. Well, at least she’d opened the door.

Shane must have figured it out, too, because he nodded to Claire, winked, and stepped through the doorway, walking on the unsteady fallen door itself. There was a faint dust of plaster in the air, and Claire sneezed, but she didn’t figure they were being particularly stealthy, what with the door blowing in and all. Shane was holding his shotgun easily, pointed at an angle toward the floor, so she imitated him. The wisdom of that became apparent when she tripped; she realized, with a cold start, that if she’d had the shotgun pointed up, near her face, she might have killed herself if she’d hit the trigger.

Shane checked the open room on the left, and she took the room on the right. Whoever had lived here, they hadn’t been more concerned with the inside of the house than the outside; it needed work, badly. The ceiling was sagging as if there’d been a bad leak that was dissolving the plaster. In fact, she could see water drops running down the wall from the light fixture, which wouldn’t have been safe if the power had been on. Even on its best days, though, this house would have earned a failing score on any of those how-clean-is-your-home reality shows; it smelled of mold and rotten food, and it felt icy cold. The furniture had the off-kilter look of a nightmare, and where there were children’s toys, they too had the look of something a serial-killing tot would drag around.

This did not look like a place where one would find Theo Goldman. Not at all.

She and Shane searched the whole house, even the attic, which revealed a bucket-sized hole in the roof through which water continued to drip. No wonder the place was falling apart. But no sign of anyone, human or vampire.

“This place needs housekeeping,” Shane said. “With my flamethrower.” It was a sign of just how bad things were that Shane thought that.

She looked up to smile at him, and although she heard nothing, she saw the sudden dawning of shock and alarm in his face, and had just enough time to gasp and try to turn around before a heavy, sweaty, muscular arm went around her neck and jerked her off balance. Shane instantly put the shotgun up to a firing position, but then realized what he was doing and put it down again. He set it carefully on the table and held up both hands in an I surrender kind of position.

Claire squeaked for air, went up on her toes, and tried to ease the strain on her throat. She was having a terrifying, white-out flashback of the moment that Magnus had seized her, had twisted until she’d felt and heard the crackle-snap of bones. Her heart was as loud as a jackhammer in her chest, and her pulse was roaring so loudly it sounded like a hurricane in her ears. She couldn’t see who held her, but it was a man’s body, a man’s hairy arm. She clawed at it, but her blunt nails weren’t going to do much. Think, Claire. Shane had taught her some basic things to do. Everyone is going to be bigger and stronger than you, he’d said, without being critical about it. You have to learn how to hit them in the weak spots.