Somewhere in the cemetery, his assignment was escaping. He looked from the jagged stones at the top of the hill to the dying woman in the seat beside him and swore. With a final, vehement curse, he pounded the steering wheel and sped away.

Chapter 14
The Past Comes
Back To Haunt You

March’s private rooms were at the back of the house. She led me to a huge conservatory, a glass bubble filled with verdant plant life and flowering trees. The floor, an intricate mosaic of tiny tiles, wound in paths around beds of soil. The snaking trails converged in the center of the room, where water trickled down the face of a craggy boulder that nearly reached the ceiling. In front of the impressive fixture, a striking red Shinto gate stood watch over an elaborately set tea service.

March indicated I should sit at the delicate, wrought-iron table, and despite my simmering anger, I did so. “That’s an aggressively spiritual symbol you have there, considering what you are.”

“What, a vampire can’t be spiritual?” She looked astonished in a worldly way, a contradiction that didn’t surprise me. The woman was as hard to read as a book written backward. “The Shinto tradition is concerned mainly with the spiritual affairs of the living. As I am eternally living, I don’t see the harm in believing something.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I explained as she poured blood from a Victorian-style teapot. “I thought it was an overtly spiritual thing for you to have, considering you’re a vampire pimp who sneaks up on people to murder them in their sleep.”

She grimaced, a smoke-roughened laugh escaping her bared teeth. “Now, why did you have to use that word? It’s such a nasty label for what I do.”

“What about ‘kidnapping’ or ‘false imprisonment’? How do those suit you?” I made no attempt to hide my suspicion as I refused the blood she offered me. She’d held me hostage—granted, I couldn’t have gone anywhere during the daylight, anyway—and tried to kill me. Just because she’d decided to offer me breakfast instead didn’t mean I’d roll over and we’d become bestest friends.

As crazy and paranoid as it seemed—and it did seem that way to me, after I’d applied said paranoia to every person I’d seen on this trip, from tollbooth operators to truck stop waitresses—I couldn’t help but suspect she knew what I was up to in the desert.

I couldn’t tell from her Cheshire Cat smile if she really did know or if she’d just picked up on my discomfort. “Well, we can just put all that behind us. Your sire is the fledgling of my sire, after all. That makes us practically family.”

I glared at her. “Practically. Except Cyrus isn’t my sire anymore.” I hesitated. “He’s…dead.”