I gritted my teeth at the way he emphasized “human,” followed by a little cluck of his tongue, taunting us with his mock pity for our sad circumstances. Or maybe he did it to scare us, to remind us we were prey for the rest of the room. A quick ripple of fear threatened to wash over me, but I steeled myself against it. I would not give them the satisfaction.

The door slammed shut behind us, causing the hundreds of candle flames to flicker in a wave around the room. Not so long ago, a rolling fire in a room full of Elders clad in black robes would have been exactly my kind of drama. But something had shifted in me in the last couple of months, and after letting a little color into my life, this scene now seemed more drab than dramatic.

In fact, as I looked around the room at all of the bloodless skin, faded like river rocks worn down by an endless flow of water, and all topped by the same dark eyes and shiny black hair, it struck me how one-note and boring it all seemed. The guests were as much of a letdown as the venue. Lina shone like a diamond in a bowl of ashes, and I half wondered if the Elders were keeping their distance from her out of reverence or out of fear they would catch her blondness.

If you asked me, this crew could benefit from a few highlights.

“Thank you for the kind introductions,” Lina said, warm but formal. “If only we could stay until dawn, catching up, but we have a journey home to make yet tonight, at mortal speed, so the sooner we get started, the better.”

“Yes, of course,” Adante said. “Let us begin.”

Twenty-Eight

A Bunch of Old Folks . . . Really, Really Old

“By Blood and Bone, by Starlight and Shadow, I call this conclave to order.”

The voice that spoke the pronouncement was clear and melodic, and belonged to an Elder girl who looked barely older than us in human years. She, Adante, and the other ranking elders had formed a line on their makeshift dais, while Reg and I stood before them in the center of the room, Elders circled around us.

I narrowed my eyes at the Elder girl. With her doe eyes and slick black ponytail, she could practically pass as a teenager. I wondered if she had voted against us when the Elder Seat decided to cast us back to mortality.

Hypocrite.

“Well?” she asked.

It took a beat for me to realize that they were waiting on us to speak.

“Oh,” I said. “Was that it?”

The Elder girl looked offended.

“I just meant . . . it was so . . .”

“So efficient,” Reg supplied. “How refreshing to be back among kindred who waste no time getting right to business.”

“Kind of you to say,” the Elder girl answered. “But, of course, we are no longer kindred.”