“Doctor.” One of them nodded, and reached to open the door for him. “First room on the left.”

Claire followed him in. The guards eyed her, but neither moved to stop her. They just closed the door quietly behind her.

It was odd, but the smell struck her first. Vampires generally didn’t smell of anything … maybe a faint rusty whiff of blood if they’d just fed, or faded flowers at the worst, but nothing like the cloying, damp, sickroom aroma that had sunk deep into the room’s thick carpet and velvet drapes. The place looked beautiful, but it smelled … rotten.

Oliver stepped out of the first room on the left and closed the door behind him. He had his sleeves rolled up to expose pale, muscular forearms. There was a fading bite mark on his right wrist, and a bright smear of blood. He looked … tired, Claire thought. Not the Oliver she was used to seeing.

When he saw them, he straightened to his usual stick-up-his-butt posture and nodded to Theo. His gaze passed over her, but he didn’t say anything. It’s like I’m not even really here, she thought, and felt a surge of anger. We just risked our lives for you, jerk. The least you could do is say thanks.

“How much did they tell you?” Oliver asked Theo, who shrugged.

“Not much,” he said. “She has been bitten, yes?”

“By the master draug. Magnus.”

Theo paused and went utterly still, his gaze locked on Oliver’s face. Then he glanced down at the bitten skin, and the faint bloodstain. “That won’t work,” he said. “You know that. You only endanger and weaken yourself.”

Oliver said nothing. He just stepped aside and let Theo proceed into the room.

When Claire would have followed him, just like the shadow she appeared to have become, Oliver’s hand flashed out and grabbed hold of her shoulder. “Not you,” he said. “She is too ill for human visitors.”

What that meant, Claire thought, was that Amelie was beyond distinguishing between friends and, say, food. She shuddered. She’d seen Amelie go savage, but even then it had been Amelie in control, just in full vampire mode.

This would be different. Very different, and very dangerous.

Oliver was not looking at her, though he still held her shoulder in a tight grip. He said, in a distant voice, “I suppose I should thank you for finding him.”

“I suppose,” she said, and pulled loose from him. He let her do it, of course. Vampires could smash bone with their kung fu grip if they wanted to hold on to something badly enough. “Is she that bad, really?”

“No,” Oliver said in that same quiet, remote tone. “She’s much worse, as he’ll presently see.” He looked at her then, and Claire saw just how … empty he looked. “She will die soon.”

“Die—but I brought Dr. Goldman …”

“For easing her pain,” he said. “Not for saving her. There is no saving one of us from the bite of a master draug, save by measures that are … fatal themselves.”