“If you had a ladder.” He was already walking up behind her, plucking the picture from her fingers, placing it on the shelf.

Kristi was determined to ignore the length of his body, pressing up against her back, the smell of him—a little cologne, a little musk—mingling in the air. He was just too damned close.

Jay hesitated a bit too long for comfort and she thought he was feeling it, too, that hint of electricity in the air between them, the awareness of the opposite sex in such close proximity. She wondered if he, like she, was thinking how she’d broken up with him, thought him too young, too familiar, too hometown while now…Oh, Lord, she was not going to remember how he’d once made her feel, how she’d looked forward to kissing him, to touching him, to feeling his weight atop her….

He pressed closer and she noticed the wall of his chest against her back, the stretch of his arm over her head.

“What’s this?” he asked and broke the spell.

“What?”

He was fingering the shelf of the bookcase, which was higher than his head. “I don’t know…wait…hell…here, take this.” Standing on his toes, he placed the picture into her hand again and, as if he had been totally unaware of the charged air between them, said, “Move to the side.” As she got out of his way, he reached upward as high as he could.

“What is it?”

“I think there’s something up here, like a little niche in the back of the bookcase where it meets the shelf. I think there’s something in it….” He was straining. “Now, if I can just get my finger in there…. What the hell?” He pulled his hand back and rocked back on his feet. From his fingers dangled an intricate gold chain. Hanging from the chain was a small glass vial filled with dark reddish liquid. It glittered and swung in the soft light.

“Oh, God,” Kristi said, her stomach turning. She knew without a doubt that she was staring at an ampoule of Tara Atwater’s blood.

Vlad slipped through the long hallway, the tunnel that connected the abandoned basement lab to another building, another forgotten chamber deep in the heart of the campus, a room few knew of. This secret place was carved out of the ground by Ludwig Wagner centuries before as a place for his own private trysts. Marble lined the walls of the subterranean spa, where warm water was piped from an underground spring to the massive tub in the center of the room. Candles had been lit. There was no electricity down here.

She lay in the middle of the tub, the water lapping over her perfect body, the sound of drips from ancient pipes the only noise over a soft gentle rush of air within an old ventilation shaft.

Elizabeth.