They turned and took off toward the stairs. He followed them, his voice raised, talking to people with supernatural hearing above and below us. “Full evac. I repeat, full evac. Clear the building.”

The journeymen looked at each other. One of them, a young girl with red hair, barely a woman, ran toward the door at the far end of the hallway. Curran and I followed. We weren’t in a hurry. We wanted to give our people enough time to leave Lakeside.

The hallway ended. Curran pushed the door open and walked into the room. A hundred feet long and about half as wide, the room housed two long tables, one at the left wall and the other at the right, each covered with a tablecloth, the floor between them empty. The alphas of the Pack Council sat on the right. The People sat on the left. I saw familiar faces, Mahon and Martha, Raphael, Desandra . . . Everyone was here.

We took our seats. I reached under the table and squeezed Curran’s hand. He squeezed back.

“We’re about to be attacked,” Curran said.

“We know,” Mahon said.

Across the room, the seven Masters of the Dead gaped at me, each holding two vampires arranged in a precise line against the wall behind them. Six familiar faces, and one new, an older man with gray hair. The red-headed journeyman was whispering to Ghastek. He glared at us and waved her off. “I don’t care who Lennart pulled out of the building.”

The gray-haired man rose, walked over, and knelt on the floor directly across from me. Oops. Looks like I sat down too soon.

“Sharrim.”

I’d heard his voice before. When we tried to escape Hugh’s burning castle, before Aunt B died, Hugh had sent vampires after me. I had slaughtered the undead, ruining the minds of the navigators who had piloted them, but I left one alive. When that vampire had spoken to me, it spoke in this man’s voice.

The People stared at us. Rowena was blinking rapidly, stunned. Ghastek leaned forward, focused on me with a laser’s precision. I wondered what Landon had told him. Maybe nothing. Wouldn’t that be funny?

“Sharrim,” the man repeated.

Showtime. I got up and walked over to him. He looked up at me, his hands folded on his lap.

“You are young,” the Master of the Dead said. “You have the power, but lack control. Think of all the things he could teach you. Think of the secrets that would open to you.”

I felt a power gathering beyond the walls of Lakeside, like a distant storm flashing with lightning on the horizon. The windows didn’t permit me a view of the sky, but I bet it churned with storm clouds. My father was coming.

“Think of what you could become.”