The tricky part wouldn’t be keeping a secret from the slayer but figuring out how to get him to play his part. It was the final promise we’d made to the Elders—to keep the slayer home on Halloween.

That particular deception turned my stomach in knots, but, of course, it was the only option. He may have been a loner, but this was still his home, and he’d die before seeing it overrun with vampires, especially the Blood Clan.

“Sal would do anything to protect Nowhere,” I said.

“He’d do anything to protect you.”

“From what? Eternal life?”

“He doesn’t see it that way.”

Lina’s head dropped back in the seat, her face turned toward the cottage with a faraway expression.

“You still love him,” I said.

“Worse. I miss him.” She pointed to the cottage. “He’s right there, and I miss him.”

“You can see him anytime you want. He says the fence probably won’t even work on you. Or I could bring him to All Hours . . .”

“No!” She snapped. She took a steadying breath, just like a human would, and it looked so natural I almost believed she needed the oxygen. “It’s hard to see him. Watching him age is painful. Every day, every year, closer to an end—a real end.”

“He’s a stubborn ass for not letting you turn him,” I said.

“I’ll give you stubborn ass, but you have to understand that he made me an offer too. We both refused.”

“But his offer isn’t fair,” I protested. “Turning mortal on purpose is like . . . like committing suicide!”

“Some days I want to take him up on the offer,” Lina confided. “At least then we would pass the days and years together. The more he ages, the further away from me he gets, and one day, it will be too late.”

I tried to imagine Dexter growing older without me, becoming an adult, a husband, a dad and, eventually, an old man like Sal.

My voice came out in a hush. “And when that day comes, the day when it’s too late to change your mind . . . what then?”

Lina cast one more wistful gaze at the cottage, as if she could see right through the walls to the man sleeping inside.

“It took three thousand years to find him. It will take an eternity to forget him.”

The way she said it, like she would spend that eternity drowning in sadness, almost made immortality sound unpleasant.

I unbuckled my seat belt, reaching around to shake Reg awake. A thin line of drool had escaped his mouth, and I added drooling while sleeping to my growing list of the worst things about being human. It was certainly one of the grossest bits.