“Oh yeah,” Sal said, his attention back on the stove. “Steal someone’s blood, inject them with venom so they pass out and then violate their brain. A kindness indeed. Nicest thing I ever heard.”

I made eyeballs at Reg behind Sal’s back. He was letting the old man win. Reg opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Sal went on.

“And what happens when it’s more than a little . . . when it’s a wound that won’t heal? It’s not just one or two memories to erase, is it?”

Sal’s meaning was heavy, and we all fell silent, thinking of the boy and what the Elders had to do to make him forget. Total amnesia. Reg and I had panicked once we realized we . . . I . . . had taken too much. He was so close to death, and to kill a human for any reason other than self-defense was to violate one of the highest vampire laws. Thanks to the Treaty of Annis, to turn him at his age would have been even worse.

So we panicked. We dumped him outside that emergency room, even though we knew the memory work we’d attempted was useless. Vampires could manipulate the mind only when the person was under the influence of our venom—a poison that became more potent with time—and the more blood lost, the harder the memory work. It was a delicate thing to pull the threads of memory—keeping some and discarding others. Sometimes the threads got tangled into a knot that couldn’t be undone. The Elders had to send in a team later to wipe the boy’s mind entirely.

For a few minutes, the only sound was the scrape of Sal’s spoon against the bottom of the pan and the quiet bubble of whatever was inside the pot. It smelled more amazing with every passing second, but I had lost my appetite.

Finally, Sal’s shoulders sagged. “You’re young. Impulsive. You weren’t in control of yourselves.”

I glared at the back of his head, feeling more patronized than pitied.

“Okay, yes,” I said. “We made a mistake, but this punishment is still beyond. We had never left a mess that big for the Elders to clean up before.”

“Well . . .” Reg squinted one eye and scratched the side of his face, where a fine stubble was sprouting from his new human skin. “There was that one time, in Burma, with the—”

“Oh, right.” I’d forgotten.

“And that other time, in Helsinki—”

“And New York.”

“And Peru.”

“We agreed never to speak of Peru.”

I frowned. Maybe we were just teenagers.

Sal covered the pot with a lid and joined us at the table. “Well, now that I’ve got you in such good moods, here’s another ray of sunshine for you.”

He pulled a folded envelope from the front pocket of his plaid flannel.