back against Graves’s. Neither of us had climbed under the covers, and I hate the feeling of sleeping

in jeans. Everything gets twisted around and pulled up, crawls into cracks it’s not supposed to, and

you end up feeling like you’ve been sleeping on nails.

I lay there, breathing softly. The sunlight flickered because a shadow moved across the window. A

faint scratching sound, and I tensed, muscle by muscle.

The shadow bobbed again, and I pushed myself up, even my elbows creaking with exhaustion.

Graves muttered and moved beside me, and the shape in the window froze. Golden light poured

past it, and all I could see reflected on the blue carpet was a distorted blur.

I grabbed for the switchblade on the pretty, postage-stamp-sized blue night table, knocking over the

lamp. It fell with a crash, Graves sat up and swore; the shadow disappeared with a final scratching

sound. I leapt out of bed, the switchblade snicking free, and was halfway between the bed and the

window before I realized yanking it open and sticking my head out might not be a good idea.

“What the hell—” Graves said in a slurred, sleepy voice.

I grabbed the sash anyway and tugged the window open, the switchblade almost squirting free of

my sweating fingers. A cool spring afternoon drenched in honey light poured in, and the garden a

story below was starred and speckled with new growth on old thorny bushes. There would be roses

in awhile, and if I was still here it might be nice to open the window on a clear day and smell them.

Instead I inhaled, dragging in the cool breeze. Grass, sunlight, the edge of soft rain last night and

more rain on the way, the aroma of the earth waking up after a long nap. I had to snatch my lefthand fingers away from my mother’s locket, the chain doing weird things because it had rotated

while I half-slept and the catch was stuck in the locket’s loop. It was warm, not icy like it would

have been if something dangerous was around, and I wondered if it had ever heated up or cooled

down for Dad.

I also caught a breath of warm apple spice, and the fang marks on my left wrist gave a throbbing

flare of heat.

Oh. “Hello?” I whispered. Tried to look everywhere at once.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Graves’s voice almost broke. He scrambled off the bed, and I

thought I saw something across the square of the garden glinting, a reflection from deep in the shad-ow of the wall. There were other windows, all of them blank. Of course: no other svetocha except

Anna and me.

Where did she sleep? Did I even want to know?

I stood there in the flood of sunshine and felt cold. The breath of spiced apples was blown away on