imagine what Shane was muttering in the other car: Great, I leave town and suddenly there are good jobs. He liked construction, and there was a lot of men and women out there, dressed in work shirts and

jeans, hammering, hauling, bulldozing, and creating.

It was a whole new Morganville. It looked . . . cheerful. Hopeful.

“What brought this on?” Claire asked. “All these new houses?”

“They’re for the new members,” Hannah said. Her voice was

calm and level, and it didn’t give away anything at all. Her deputy, the one wearing the Daylight Foundation’s rising sun pin on his

collar, glanced back at Claire. “By joining the Daylight Founda-

tion, they can receive free new housing if they want it. It’s attracted a lot of enthusiasm and support. Half of these people working out

here are volunteers.” She slowed the cruiser and made a left turn.

“There’s something to be said for leaving the past behind and

building a new future, don’t you think? Especially in a town whose

history is as dark as Morganville’s.”

Claire didn’t want to agree, because she still felt there was a lot she didn’t know and didn’t fully understand, but what Hannah

had just said made sense— or it would, if she trusted the Daylight

Foundation even a little bit.

Speaking of the Daylighters . . . they’d renovated one of the old

warehouses and built themselves a brand- new headquarters.

It was a large building just ahead, fresh and gleaming with

paint and shining metal, with a big rotating sign on top of the

roof. It shone soft gold in the sunlight as it turned— the same

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symbol that was on the Daylight Foundation pin the deputy wore.

A simple image, something that should have looked hopeful. Sun-

rise, a new day, all that.

Claire didn’t believe it. What she did believe was that the build-

ing, for all the cheerful way it had been painted, looked like it

would be easy to defend if it came to a fight. The windows were all high, narrow, and didn’t look like they opened at all. Thick walls, too. In fact, if you ignored everything but the construction, it could just as easily have been a prison.

Hannah pulled up in the generous parking lot— a newly paved

one, still fresh and black, with bright white stripes marking off

spaces. There were about fifty cars already present, but they filled less than a third of the available slots. You could put half the cars in Morganvil e in here, Claire thought, and have room left over for mas ive bus parking. Two police cruisers were already in place, plus Hannah’s and the one pulling up in the next slot that carried Shane and Dr. Anderson. She thought she might have recognized a few other vehi-

cles, but nothing jumped out at her with any certainty.

There were, she realized, no vampire- dark- tinted cars in the lot