“Alexis can’t always talk,” said Sumi. “She’s died too many times. It broke something inside her, and now everything she does uses up a little of the lightning in her lungs, and when it runs all the way out, she has to be dead again until someone puts it back. She can sign, though. So I’m going to watch what she says, and then I’m going to say it to you.”

“No embellishments, Sumi?” Eleanor managed to make the question sharp and gentle at the same time, like she already knew the answer but was willing to be kind about it.

Sumi narrowed her eyes. “I can embellish when I’m echoing somebody who doesn’t need me to communicate for them, that’s fine, that’s fun, they can catch me out and call me a liar and we’ll all laugh and laugh and laugh. Putting words in someone’s hands when there’s no one else around to tell you what they meant to say, that’s not fair. I don’t want to do that.”

“All right, all right, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Sumi’s eyes remained narrow. “People always mean something. Sometimes what they mean is ‘you can’t be trusted to remember to be kind,’ and then I want to bury them up to the necks in marshmallow fluff, so they’ll remember how I choose kindness every single day.”

Alexis looked wearily amused. Her hands moved. Sumi scowled.

“I am not like Jack, you take that back right now,” she said.

Alexis shook her head.

Kade cleared his throat. “Sumi’s promised to repeat what Alexis says fairly and accurately, and begging your pardon, ma’am, but I got the feeling we don’t have a lot of time to waste deciding what we’re going to do about the situation. Jill has Jack’s body, and she’s set on becoming a vampire while she’s still wearing it.”

“And if that happens, even if we catch her, we can’t switch them back. Jack wouldn’t like being a vampire,” said Sumi. “Living on human blood, when it’s all messy and dirty and filled with disease—no, she wouldn’t like it at all.”

Kade’s lips thinned to a hard line, and he said nothing. He knew Jack well enough to suspect she might like being a vampire a little too much, maybe even more than Jill would. As a vampire, Jack wouldn’t need to worry about getting sick, or be afraid she’d touch the wrong thing and somehow dirty herself beyond repair. She’d never been big on sunlit strolls or fancy dinners. Vampirism might suit her very, very well. An analytically minded vampire, fully trained to the inexplicable sciences of the Moors …