“Nothing good,” she replied. “But then, that kind of describes our day, right?”

“Speak for yourself. It describes my whole life.” He reached out and took her in his arms, a sudden and unexpected crush that drove her breath right away. “Except for you.” He kissed her, and despite everything, despite the hurry and the vampires and the draug and the doom hanging over them, it felt like sunlight shining right through her skin, melting her bones into soft, pliable gold. It couldn’t have lasted long, that kiss, but it felt eternal to her, as if it might echo forever. “I can handle anything now.”

“Well,” she whispered with their lips still touching, “as long as you have a flamethrower.”

He laughed, and let go … but kept hold of her hand.

Myrnin led them into a room that had obviously started life as another ballroom … but in the course of what could have been only hours, or at most a day, he had managed to transform it into a chaotic mess that reminded Claire strongly of his original laboratory. Books were stacked, scattered, and dropped everywhere, some open to a possibly important reference, or maybe just opened at random. He’d dragged furniture in to improvise work space, with limited success, and he’d taken the shades off the elegant lamps to let the bright incandescent bulbs glare freely. The room smelled strongly of oil and metal, and … burned hair?

Myrnin strode across the deep maroon carpet (now liberally smudged with spots of dirt, oil, and who knew what else) to what had once been a giant sideboard, except that he’d ripped it away from the wall and shoved it into the middle of the room. It held about a dozen books, scraps of metal, bars of silver, and nails; he swept the whole thing clean with one dramatic gesture and then unfurled a set of blueprints across the lavish marble top—already stained from at least one chemical spill.

It was a map of Morganville. A standard-issue civilian kind of map, but there was a clear plastic overlay on it, marked with careful, precise handwriting and colored dots—Myrnin’s writing, though far more controlled than Claire had ever seen it. The entire side of town from the border up to the TPU gates had been colored in flat black, simply marking it out.

Draug territory.

“Now,” he said, and set random pieces of junk at the four corners of the map to hold it open. “Obviously, we’re here.” He pointed to a red dot overlay on the building at Founder’s Square. “This is the police perimeter around us.” A solid red line, as precisely drawn as with a compass. “This is the outer ring of our defenses.” Another ring, but this one of individual red dots, spread evenly. It reached as far as Lot Street, where the Glass House—their home—sat empty. “There is nothing within this circle that has not been drained of standing water, or salted with silver if we couldn’t drain it, so the draug cannot get here easily.”