Allie merely nodded. “Stella stayed with me for the next week, and then returned to the town house across the street so that I could work without Liam’s crying to distract me, which I appreciated. We still spent a lot of time together, and I watched Liam for her while she went out in search of a blood donor most nights, but by the start of the second week of February I was in a crunch with work. I had two deadlines for the fifteenth and was stressed out, so she insisted on taking Liam with her on her nightly outings for the next week, which I thought was just crazy. You can’t take a baby to a bar,” she pointed out. “But she said she’d go to one of the coffee shops that were open all night or something and insisted it would be fine and I could look after Liam for her again once I finished my projects.”

Allie fell silent briefly then, stealing herself against what she had to recall next. But finally, she said, “It was the fourteenth of February. I had finished one of the projects, which removed a lot of pressure, and I was nearly done the second, so I decided to give myself a break and stop early that night and finish up the next. Well, early for me,” she added wryly. “It was around eleven thirty when I shut down the computer and went downstairs to grab something for dinner. It was maybe midnight when Stella showed up at the door. She’d obviously just returned from town. She said they’d found her, removed Liam’s receiving blanket, passed him off to me, and pulled out a doll that she wrapped the blanket around instead. She also gave me her necklace—” Allie touched her chest where the locket was now hidden under her blouse “—and reminded me of my promise to look after Liam if anything happened to her, and then she was gone.

“I peeked through the blinds and watched her walk across the street to her town house pushing Liam’s carriage, and then she went in, and before the door was quite closed, the town house exploded and burst into flames.” Allie paused to clear her throat and blinked a couple times to try to shift the liquid gathering in her eyes. “At first I thought maybe it was a trick to make the vampires think she was dead. That she’d somehow caused the explosion that quickly. I mean, she could move so fast when she wanted to. Scary fast,” she recalled with a disbelieving shake of the head.