He was barely holding the envelope, balancing it casually between two fingers as if it were a piece of junk mail and not my lifeline. I snatched it from his fingers, and the truck was roaring away before I could say thank you.

Not that I was going to thank him, but he could have had the decency to wait two seconds to find out.

I waved off the exhaust and clutched the envelope to my chest, marveling again at Sal’s inexplicable connection to the immortal world. Last night, as Reg and I had quibbled back and forth over how much postage we would need to send our letters to the other three clans, scattered across the globe, Sal had finally gotten fed up and given us a better option.

He’d instructed us to place our letters, unstamped, in the mailbox just outside his white picket fence, but instead of turning up the little red flag to alert the postal carrier of mail, he had turned up a black flag and sealed the mailbox shut. By morning, the letters were gone.

“That’s our uncle Sal.” Reg’s voice floated over to me, and I looked up to see him flanked by Dexter and Poe on one side, Sydney and Sophia on the other. “You ready, Charlie?”

I forced a casual smile onto my face and joined the group.

“Actually Reg, can you hang back a minute?” I waved the envelope quickly, then rolled it between my hands, so none of the writing would be visible. “Sal—Uncle Sal—brought us something. It’s about Mom and Dad’s estate.”

The lie fell easily from my lips. A hundred years of hunting had taught us that much at least. How many lies had we told to lure our victims? How many lies had we planted in their minds after the feeding was done?

“Okay if we catch up?” Reg asked the others.

They gave us directions to the coffee shop, which were literally “turn right at the one stoplight,” and walked ahead. Reg and I waited impatiently for them to get a solid distance out of earshot before we unrolled the envelope.

The return address read simply:

Clan of Starlight

“Not our best hope,” Reg pointed out.

He was right, but hope I had anyway, and I ripped the envelope open in one pull. A quick scan of the letter, and my face fell. As expected, the Starlight Clan had refused our request. The letter claimed all clan members had been queried and none had stepped up, but I suspected they’d been advised not to step up, given the tone of the message. It was polite enough, but a final paragraph made the clan’s position clear.

As you may know, the Starlight Clan helped draft the Treaty of Annis and has long supported minimum age limits on immortality. The young can be so impulsive—more likely, for example, to overfeed without considering the consequences.