shake this off. It’s no problem for them as long as the arrows come out soon; they’re not leaving them in the sun or anything. Just

breathe, okay? Breathe.” It wasn’t so much what she was saying as

the fact that her voice was steady and calm, a lifeline in a tossing ocean of chaos.

Eve took a deep breath, and her sobbing slowed and hitched to

a stop. She sat back as the ambulance doors slammed shut and one

after the other the big vehicles pulled away onto the two- lane

blacktop heading toward downtown Morganville— if Morgan-

ville had anything that could be described as a downtown. She

wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, smearing what little eye

makeup she had left. The glitter of her ruby wedding ring caught

the light, and for a moment Claire’s wall of numbness shuddered

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behind it. “Did you see Michael?” Eve asked. She caught her breath

on another sob, and her reddened eyes held Claire’s. “Did he look

okay?”

Claire couldn’t say that, because the sight of his icy skin and

blank eyes had thoroughly unnerved her. “He’ll be fine. You know

he’s tougher than this,” she said. Which was a totally true thing,

and beyond any argument.

“I know— God, why did this happen? What do they want

from us?”

Eve said it as a rhetorical wail, but it was the question that

churned in Claire’s mind over and over. Why? They’d been heading back to Morganville to warn Amelie about several things, not the

least of which was the deadly growth of an anti- vampire organiza-

tion called the Daylight Foundation— and the fact that one of

Amelie’s most trusted agents, Dr. Irene Anderson (once of Mor-

ganville), had joined the other side.

But they’d been met by the local police instead of Amelie’s peo-

ple, and things had gone downhill from there. The cops had first

separated out the humans— Claire, Eve, and Claire’s boyfriend,

Shane, plus the prisoner, Dr. Anderson. Then, without any warn-

ing, they’d taken down their vampire friends, who had just been

wheeled into the ambulances and driven off to fates unknown.

Claire twisted in the seat to look into the car behind them.

The cops hadn’t had an easy time getting Shane into the other

cruiser; they’d ended up handcuffing him and threatening a Taser-

ing. He sat stiffly in the backseat, staring holes into the distance as if it were in for a beating. Next to him, Dr. Anderson slumped

against the window as though she didn’t care whose prisoner she

was anymore.

Claire knew why they’d separated her from Shane, and she

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Rachel Caine

knew that Eve needed her right now, but she wanted desperately to