Now that we were not touching, I could see the awkwardness the older vampires I’d met exhibited—as if he knew how he should act but couldn’t quite feel it anymore. As if by giving up his Scooby-Doo shirts and his beloved Mystery Machine, Stefan had given up his last firm anchor to his humanity. Still, the Mystery Machine, Stefan’s old VW bus with the cool paint job, remained parked in his driveway, so I had hope.

“You didn’t see Kyle?” I asked.

“I didn’t see him. I don’t have your nose to follow a scent, and I didn’t want them to know I was watching. They were just a little too alert for my comfort. I could smell blood, though. I don’t know whose it was.”

I would. He waited, and I considered.

“Let’s go around back,” I said. “I can slip in through the back porch; there’s a dog door Kyle put in for Warren. I can check out the house and call you in when I find him.”

“I think that sending you into the house alone is the stupidest of our many options,” said Stefan repressively. “Ben should be at the front door, you should go to the back—and wait in the yard, Mercy—and I will go in.”

The oldest and most powerful vampires acquire names that define their most prominent characteristic. Stefan’s name among his kind was the Soldier. This was the sort of situation in which he excelled. I felt the relief of having an expert make the calls.

“They are only human,” Stefan said, and there was a familiar look in his face, though I was more used to seeing it on the wolves: hunger. “I will kill them, and Ben will kill any who get past me. You can let us know if anyone tries to get away out the back, and we will kill them, too.”

Stefan had always liked people. I hadn’t noticed before that he also enjoyed killing them. Maybe that was part of the new, more vampiric Stefan.

So much for letting someone else make the calls.

“We don’t need to kill them,” I pointed out reasonably. “As you said, they are only human, and there are only two.”

“That we know of,” he said.

“We don’t know anything about them,” I told him. “We aren’t even certain that the two men in Kyle’s living room have anything to do with the people who took the pack.”

Stefan raised an eyebrow—he was right. Who else would they be?

“We don’t know who is backing them or what their endgame is,” I continued doggedly. “We don’t even know if Kyle is there. What I do know is that we can’t go in to kill.”