"It occurred to me," he said in an unhurried storytelling kind of voice, "that if I was correct in my suspicions I was about to confront a vampire capable of enthralling one of our own kind—though Daniel is very young. I thought at the time that the vampire might have been a witch before he was brought over."

"So dangerous you brought her with you rather than another vampire?" Bernard's tone was heavy with contempt.

Stefan shrugged. "As I said, I thought Littleton was a witch. Nothing I haven't dealt with before. I did not really think I would be facing anything I could not handle. Mercedes was my insurance, but I did not think she would be necessary."

"Yes," said Marsilia sharply. "Let us tell the room why it is that Mercedes Thompson would be someone you would go to for help." Her eyes were narrowed and her fingers played with the fringe of the black Spanish shawl she wore. I didn't know what she was so angry about, she knew what I was.

"Mercedes is a walker," Stefan said.

The energy level in the room picked up remarkably, though none of them moved. I would have thought that all of the vampires had been told about me, but apparently not. Maybe she'd been angry because Stefan had forced her to reveal my existence to the rest of them. I wished I knew exactly why they were so worried about me—maybe then I wouldn't feel like a chicken in a den of foxes.

The boy next to Marsilia quit rocking. When he looked at me, I felt it, like a flash of ice running over my exposed skin. "How interesting," he said.

Stefan spoke hurriedly, as if he were trying to distract the boy from me. "She agreed to come with me as a coyote, so the vampire would not know that she was anything other than part of my costume. I thought the ruse would protect her, and her partial immunity would help me. I was both right and wrong."

His recount from that point was very detailed. When he told them that he'd smelled the demon's scent that told him Littleton was a sorcerer as soon as he'd parked my car at the hotel, Bernard broke in.

"There are no such things as sorcerers," he said.

The boy beside Marsilia shook his head and, in a light tenor voice that would never drop to adult tones said, "There are. I have met them—as have most of us who are more than a few centuries old. It would be a very bad thing, Mistress, if one of us were a sorcerer."

There was a heavy pause, a reaction to the boy's comment, but I couldn't tell what it meant.

"Continue, please," said Marsilia finally.

Stefan obeyed. He'd known that everyone in the hotel was dead when we entered the building. That's how he'd found Littleton so easily: it was the only room where someone was still alive. Stefan had known the woman was in the bathroom before I had. Vampire's senses, it seemed, were better than mine.