some satisfaction in it.

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But Claire really thought she would kill him.

She didn’t do either of those things. Instead, she reached to the

podium and took up the wireless microphone and spoke into it.

“People of Morganville,” she said. “Please be calm. No harm is

going to come to any of you.”

“Liar!” Fallon said, but he didn’t have the mike anymore. And

Amelie turned her back on him to address the crowd. She was blis-

tering in the sun, and starting to smoke; she was weak, and still recovering from the wound in her chest. But even with all that, even

in stained clothes and with her hair long and wild, she looked like what she was, and always had been.

A queen.

“You’ve gone to great lengths to make us the monsters, Fallon,”

she said. “You talk of how we cannot control our bestial impulses,

our appetites. About how those different from you must be elimi-

nated, for safety, or converted to a form you find acceptable. But

here we stand, different. We could stop every beating heart in this place. In this town. We could rampage across the world, creating more and more of our own kind. But we do not. Do you know why?”

Her calm, calming voice was having an effect on the crowd of pan-

icked Daylighters. They were standing now, listening, not pushing

or fleeing. If Amelie was worried about the other guards who were

closing in on her— Fallon’s fanatical loyalists— she didn’t betray

it by so much as a twitch. “Because we are not monsters. We are you, given a curse that most of us never sought but came to accept.

Would we return to our human state if given the chance? Some

would. Some would not. But forcing us, with the knowledge that

you will destroy so many in the process . . . That’s not mercy, Fallon, no matter what you pretend. It’s murder.”

The Daylighter guards were closing in now, silver stakes out.

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Amelie sank gracefully to her knees, still holding the micro-

phone. “By all means, murder us in the sunlight you love so much.

Murder us in front of witnesses. Show them just how merciful you are, because I know you, Rhys Fallon. I know the callow heart in

you, and the selfish rage, and the bitterness. I know that you pur-

sued your humanity with ruthless purpose, and once you had it

back . . . you loathed it. You’ve created this to destroy all that reminds you of what you’ve lost.”

It was a powerful image— the most deadly vampire in the

world, on her knees, voluntarily. The Daylighters ringing her with

their weapons.

But she wasn’t striking out, she wasn’t killing, she wasn’t even

threatening.

And the guards didn’t know what to do with that.