But stepping over the threshold didn’t bring any rush of warmth, or welcome, or anything that I expected to feel. The Glass House felt … dead. Abandoned.

I leaned the canvas bag full of weapons and ammo in the corner by the front door and flipped the light switch. No response. The power was out in this part of town, but I hadn’t come unprepared; I took a mini flashlight out of my cargo pants pocket and dragged the bag into the parlor room. It was as dusty as ever. Shane had left a jacket thrown over the wing chair. I unpacked the weapons and ammunition and laid everything out carefully on the coffee table and sofa, easy to grab if we needed it … and then considered the empty canvas bag.

I was here, and having our own clothes would feel a whole lot more comfortable in exile. So despite the vamps waiting impatiently outside, I ran upstairs, rummaged in each of our rooms as fast as possible, and shoved shirts, pants, underwear into the bag.

I wanted to take everything, but there wasn’t time. On the way out, though, I hesitated, then put Michael’s guitar into its case and clicked it shut.

The vamps could just stuff their objections.

I came out on the porch and locked the door—habit, I suppose—and turned to see …

… Nobody.

The vamps had all vanished.

The sedan was sitting at the curb idling. All the doors were shut. The trunk was still open.

I didn’t like the feeling of the earplugs, suddenly; they felt oppressive, magnified my fast breathing, made me feel oddly suffocated. I wanted to take them out, and I actually reached up for the left one before I realized what I was doing. I could make out, very faintly, a high-pitched sound.

Singing.

Dammit.

I ran for the car, threw the bag and guitar into the trunk, and grabbed a shotgun pre-loaded with silver shot, plus a couple of the vials of silver nitrate. Then I pulled open the door of the sedan.

I wasn’t exactly shocked to find it empty. The impulse to get in and drive away—even if I’d be driving blind, given the opaque tinting—was almost irresistible, but though the vamps hadn’t even wanted to give me their names, I was the one who’d gotten them out into this. The noise cancellation headsets clearly hadn’t worked … or else something else had drawn them off. Either way, I owed it to them to find them.

So I went looking.

I mean, it was my own neighborhood. I lived here. That was the Farnhams’ house right there; I didn’t like them, because they were a mean, bitter old couple of the get-off-my-lawn variety, but they were familiar. Across the street was Mrs. Grather, who’d been a librarian since books were carved on stone or something. She was always out puttering around with dying flowers. I knew each and every person who lived on this block, or at least had lived here, before the events of the past few days. Maybe they were still locked up inside, hiding. Maybe they’d left Morganville for good.