“There are more like you?” I asked. “And more places like this?”

“I don’t think there’s anywhere quite like Nowhere, but there are a fair number of slayers who have turned in their stakes.”

“Is that how you came to be in your current line of work?” Reg asked.

“This work existed long before me. It’s amazing what can happen when we stop trying to kill each other and find time to talk to each other. Vampires were just getting organized back then, developing the council and clans and houses. They were interested in more civilized solutions than smoking bad vamps. It became practice to pay slayers handsomely for carrying out this mortal punishment. Some families—like the Sicarius line—saw it as a disgrace.”

“And what about Salvador Sicarius?” I asked, pointing to the old guy. “What did he think?”

“Who, Sal?” he played along. “He was one of the ones in the dark. His family never told him any of this, but he would have agreed it was a disgrace.”

“What changed?”

“Oh, you know the story. Boy meets girl. Girl turns out to be a vampire. Boy changes his entire worldview. Girl dumps him anyway. Etcetera.”

I thought of my own boy, of the way he’d tasted like apple when he kissed me, and I wondered if, given a little more time, he would change my entire worldview too. Would I end up like Lina, still stuck in Nowhere, watching over her human love? I shivered, suddenly grateful our hearing was just a few nights away.

Twenty-Seven

Silent Night

The night of the hearing seemed to rush up on us. One week, we were anathema to all vampire-kind, and the next week, we had a priority appeal before the Elder Seat, with the backing of an Ancient. I should have been preparing a statement along the lines of In your face, old folks! But as I sat at the carved kitchen table, in the dim light of the slayer’s cottage, I found myself at a rare loss for words. The three of us sat in virtual silence, waiting for Lina to arrive. The fact that she was picking us up had Sal all twitchy, which, it turned out, was an even worse state than grumpy.

“She’s late,” he said, checking his phone against a clock on the wall. It was exactly thirty seconds past 10:00 p.m.

I rolled my eyes. “She’s barely late. And we have tons of time.”

Our hearing was set for midnight, and Nowhere was in northern Iowa, just south of the Minnesota state line. It wouldn’t take us long to reach Minneapolis.

“Late is late.” Sal scratched at his beard, then ran a smoothing hand over it. “Just shows her lack of consideration. Not that I’m surprised.”