It was too new. They were looking for an old book, right? This was…this was a Holy Bible. With a cross on the front.

“Look inside,” he said. She opened it. The first few gold-leafed pages were standard, the same familiar words she’d grown up with, and still believed. Eve had said they had a few churches in Morganville, right? Maybe they had services. She’d have to check.

Midway through Exodus, the pages went hollow, and there was a tiny little volume hidden inside the Bible. Old. Very old. The cover was water-stained dirty leather, and scratched into it was a symbol.

The symbol.

Claire pulled it out of the Bible and opened it.

“Well?” Shane demanded after a few seconds. “What about it?”

“It’s—” She swallowed hard. “It’s in Latin.”

“So? What does it say?”

“I don’t read Latin!”

“You’re kidding. I thought all geniuses read Latin. Isn’t that the international language for smart people?”

She picked up a book without looking and threw it at him. He ducked. It flopped to the floor. Claire flipped pages in the small volume. It was handwritten in faded, coppery ink, the kind of beautiful perfect writing from hundreds of years ago.

She was actually holding it in her hands.

And here she’d been intending to just fake it.

“We’d better get going,” Shane said. “Seriously. I don’t want to be here when the cops come calling.”

“You think they will?”

“Well, if dear old Prof Wilson keeled over after stealing the vampires blind, yeah, I think they’ll send a couple of cops over to inventory the goodies. So we’d better move it.”

She stuffed the journal back into the Bible and started to put it into her backpack, then paused in outright despair. Too much stuff. “We need another bag,” she said. “Something small.”

Shane came up with a plastic grocery sack from the kitchen, stuck the Bible inside, and hustled her out. She looked back at Professor Wilson’s lonely living room one last time. A clock ticked on the mantel, and everything waited for a life that would never start up again.

She was right. It was sad.

“Run first,” Shane said. “Mourn later.”

It was the perfect motto for Morganville.

They made it back home with half an hour or so to spare, but as they turned the corner on Lot Street, where the Gothic bulk of the Glass House pretty much dwarfed all of the other, newer houses around it, Claire’s eyes went immediately to the blue SUV sitting at the curb. It looked familiar….

“Oh my God,” she said, and stopped dead in her tracks.

“Okay, stopping? Not a great idea. Come on, Claire, let’s—”