Danner froze. It couldn’t be him. It wasn’t possible. He concentrated again, rechecking what his pain-wracked senses already told him. There was nothing—no empathy, no contact. It couldn’t be him. He hurried back to the doorway and peeked out into the night. A lone shadow stood in the overgrown garden, completely still. Only his coat moved with the breeze.

But it can’t be him . . . I can’t feel him!

As if in response, the man out there moved. He turned ever so slightly, just enough so that the moon could light his face. Then Stiles grinned. It was an entirely isolated expression; it didn’t spread to the rest of a face turned stony and cruel. Like an assassin.

“No,” the vampire muttered, backing away from the door. “It can’t be . . . I can’t feel you, I—”

Something sailed through the window of the dining room to his right—a white stick that hit the wall and rolled somewhere beneath the old dining table. Another stick flew into the hallway to his left, and he heard the clatter of a third as it cleared the balcony and landed in the bedroom upstairs, scaring a cloud of starlings into the night. But the last object came through the garden door right before him; it skittered across the floor and came to rest in a bar of moonlight. Almost a foot of PVC pipe, capped at both ends, one of them threaded by a short length of fuse. Burning.

“Damn you to hell!” was all Danner managed before the house went up.

17

Chapter Seventeen

Bean slammed on the brakes, skidding Stiles’s van to a halt in the middle of Sykes Road. The soldier’s sign was straight in front of him; a fluorescent arrow had been sprayed on the pavement, pointing to the right, straight at the wall of the Danner estate.

Don’t go in there, Charlie boy, it’s tainted land.