Trust me, I mouthed, and hoped she could read it. If she’d had the broken bottle in that moment, I was pretty sure I’d have been leaking all over the floor, especially when two of the four men went to Michael, grabbed him, and dragged him away.

He wasn’t better. Not even a little bit better. And it scared me to see him shaking and whimpering like that, as if every demon in the world had crammed itself into his head at once.

It scared me a little more to see the black promise in Eve’s eyes as they handcuffed her and pushed her out after him. Then I watched them load up Pete and Liz, too.

The driver came back over to me and nodded. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘You might have some promise after all. If you hate vampires, we can use you. We can always use good men.’

‘I don’t think you understand what that word actually means,’ I said, and walked on my own back to the van. On the way there, I discovered a sudden and urgent need to throw my guts up next to the dumpster. It smelt like rancid Chinese food, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t why I felt so bad.

Betrayal had a bitter, horrible taste all its own, and no matter how much I rinsed my mouth out with bottled water, I couldn’t get rid of it.

I wondered if Claire was tasting it, too. If I was feeling this, what could she be suffering? Because she was the one who felt things too deeply, cared too much.

I hoped she wasn’t just as wrecked as Myrnin, when all this was said and done.

The drive that came after that was surprisingly long, and the sun was already coming up when we arrived … at some kind of a farm, from what I could see of the landscape. We’d made it out of the city and into the country, although there were plenty of little one-Starbucks towns. On the east coast, ‘in the country’ wasn’t the same as it was in West Texas, where you could drive for two hundred miles and hardly glimpse a ruined shack, much less a town square.

The last town I’d been able to spot with any kind of signs had been Meldon, and since I didn’t want to pull out a map and try to figure out our location, I just filed it all away for later.