“You knew!” Never had Jakob come so close to physically attacking a superior officer, but even now discipline compelled him to add a grudging, “Sir.”

Captain Nichols didn’t say a word. He just stood there, his swarthy face a stone mask. The silence stretched on until Jakob couldn’t take it anymore.

“Well?” he shouted. “You knew these things, these vampires were out there. You knew what we were fighting. Why didn’t you warn us, sir? Why aren’t we sending patrols out with M2s to burn these bastards into ash?”

“Specialist Hoffman, are you suggesting you could run this war better than your superiors?”

Hoffman stiffened. “No, sir. I’m suggesting that if people were told the truth, that we could do a better job of implementing those orders. That if we had been warned, Mikey might still be alive. Sir.”

Nichols didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Nothing he could say would justify sending men out unprepared. Those men were Jakob’s brothers, and they were dying at the hands of German monsters. Nothing Nichols said could make that all right. Nothing could bring Mikey back.

Lena was looking at the house. “Charles saw something the day his brother disappeared, but he didn’t know what. He didn’t piece it together until years later, after he discovered the Porters and learned the truth.”

“After he learned what we keep hidden from the world,” I said. “He blames the Porters for his brother’s death, so now he’s sending vampires after us as punishment.”

She rubbed her arms together. “Margie said Charles was never right after he came home from Afghanistan. The doctors tried various medications, but he continued to hallucinate. He woke up screaming, and began showing signs of paranoia. They thought it was post-traumatic stress disorder. His memories were fragmented, and there was so much he had to relearn. He couldn’t even read when he first woke up from the attack.” She looked at me. “It was after he started reading that the hallucinations began.”

“They weren’t hallucinations. That was his magic.” I closed the book. “In the end, after they retrieve the Silver Cross, Jakob Hoffman discovers that Nichols and several other superior officers are under the influence of dark magic. He steals the cross and uses it to unleash the vampires against Nichols and the rest of the officers who betrayed them. It’s brutal, effective, and impossible to cover up. A two-page epilogue describes the public outrage. Whole governments are overthrown, and the world unites to wipe out the undead.”

“That’s his end game,” said Lena. “Use his vampires to attack the Porters, show the world what’s been kept from them, and start a war.”

“Please tell me his mother knows where we can find him.”