Between Smudge, Lena, and my personal library, we should be safe for the moment. I looked out the kitchen window. Trees secluded the houses from one another, and this part of town was quiet enough the neighbors’ kids down the street sometimes played an entire set of tennis in the road without having to move for cars.

Lena reached over to touch my arm. “What is it?”

“I’m not a field agent.” Deb and the others would investigate Ray’s death. They would figure out who took Doctor Shah. They would stop whoever had done this, while I . . . filed paperwork and stayed out of the way. “Ray was my friend.”

We sat in silence for a time. My thoughts were manic and uncontrolled, jumping from the attack at the library to Ray to the other deaths. “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Individual vampires are tough, but in an all-out war, they wouldn’t stand a chance. More than half of them are helpless during the day, and at last count, humans outnumbered them a million to one.”

“Some sort of civil war among the vampires?” Lena scooped up the last of the ice cream.

“The Porters would have heard.” Though whether or not they would have bothered to tell me was another question entirely. “Have there been similar attacks in other countries?”

“Not that I know of.”

Most vampires were perfectly content to live in peace, but plenty of them were still monsters at heart. If they were attacking Porters with impunity here, it wouldn’t be long before others followed suit.

Meaning if this wasn’t stopped soon, we could be looking at a worldwide war with the undead.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

MAGIC HAD ALWAYS MESSED with my dreams. According to years of Porter research, brainwave excitation during REM sleep immediately following the use of magic tended to mimic the patterns seen in active magic use. And according to Porter gossip, Nicola Pallas had once awoken following a day of intensive spellcasting to find that she had transformed herself into a two-hundred-pound green rabbit in her sleep.

I wasn’t powerful enough to suffer such problems. Instead, I simply endured surreal, too-vivid dreams in which my magic failed me when I needed it most. Sometimes I reached into my books, only to find myself unable to pull my hand free. Or I would fling the book away and watch in horror as what remained of my arm slowly dissolved, consumed by the book. The worst nightmares were when I fell through the magical portal I had opened in the pages, or worse yet, something on the other side of that portal pulled me in.

Tonight was one of the bad ones. I jolted awake so hard I fell out of bed. Remnants of my dreams screamed that I was tumbling deeper into darkness. Soft fingers touched my shoulder and I shouted, slapping them away.

“Take it easy,” said Lena. “It’s me.”