I was still convinced she hid something. “Thanks for the hospitality.” I hoped she felt the sarcasm of my words as a bite.

“Well, sweetness, I got a whole bunch of human business coming in tonight. Episcopal Women’s Altar Society bus trip. Told their husbands they’re going to a Bible summit on gay marriage.” She stood, indicating I should do the same.

I could take a hint. She was done supplying me with information that would lead to the death of her sire. “Just one last question?”

After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded. “Why not?”

“How come he didn’t take your soul?” We began to walk down the path. I thought perhaps she’d decided not to answer.

Then, without a hint of deception or theatrics, she said simply, “He took someone else’s.”

A chill went through me at the memory of how he’d taken Cyrus’s wife, Elsbeth, without a thought for his son’s happiness.

March shrugged, as though the fact her soul was spared by the death of another’s was par for the course. “I’m not going to say it was right. But I’m glad it wasn’t me who died.”

I believe there is a defining moment in everyone’s life where they seal their own fate through words or actions. My parents did it when they got in their car to visit me in college and, six hours later, wound up bleeding to death on the side of the road. I’d done it when I’d gone to the morgue to view Cyrus’s body, and he’d gone from being another John Doe to the creature who haunted my nightmares.

A creeping wave of icy foreboding seized me. I couldn’t tell when, I couldn’t know how, but I knew March had already set in motion the events that would lead to her death.

“You’re not dead yet,” I reminded her, my throat suddenly dry. “But you will be.”

My warning didn’t alarm her as much as I imagined it should have. “Well, we’ll all be gone someday. No sense in fearing it.”

“I’ve died. Fear it.”

We sized each other up for a grueling minute. I would have paid several thousand dollars to know what she thought, but her mask of emotional obscurity was firmly in place. “Last town before the true desert is Louden. Drive like hell and you can get there before sunup.”

I didn’t see March again after she left me in the foyer. She didn’t say goodbye, so much as “pleasure doing business with you,” and even then I didn’t truly believe it.

The supplies that had been removed from my bag were returned to me, along with some I doubted I’d have any use for: sleeping pills, chloroform, bungee cords and gauze bandages. I looked them over and raised my eyebrows at the butler.