That would be nice, if we were vampire rabbits like Bunnicula. The reference pulled a bittersweet memory to the surface of my consciousness. I’d mentioned the children’s book the night after Nathan had helped me escape Cyrus. That was when Ziggy, Nathan’s adopted son, had died. I sank onto the bed, crushed by the weight of my sadness and the heartbreak I’d felt for him that night.

“You think I let him die?” Nathan’s accusing voice rang through my head. I’d said cruel, bitter things to him, but in the end it had been a kind of therapy for both of us. He’d broken down and cried, and I had held him on the floor in the ruins of a breakfast he had destroyed in his anger. We had been out of blood, and had to settle for human food rather than drink the last bag Ziggy had left behind.

I narrowed my eyes at the fruit basket. Human food was a last resort. A vampire would have left a nice, body-temperature bag of O Neg as a housewarming gesture.

Max came in just as I stood and grabbed the basket.

“Son of a bitch! I knew I smelled a dog.” He kicked the bed, then sat on the edge as I tore open the cellophane.

“I believe the expression is ‘I knew I smelled a rat.’” Inside the basket were apples, cherries, oranges and a cluster of delicate blush blossoms clinging to a slender branch. My face fell. “Oh.”

“Dogwood,” Max said with a sneer of disgust. He grasped the twig and snapped it, then ground the pale flowers on the carpet with the heel of his boot. I followed him back to the cabin, where we buckled in just in time for takeoff. “She was here. She wanted us to know she was here. And she’s already got a head start on us,” he said, raising his voice over the whine of the engines as we took to the sky. “I should have known it the second I saw that bitch in Breton’s office. He had no intention of letting me go after Nathan, not even when he gave me the kill order! She was already on the fucking job! She hopped another jet and took off while we were still in the building. She even had time to leave us a ‘gift.’”

All I could do was lean back in my chair and try to calm myself. The Movement was trying to sabotage us. The Soul Eater was going to become a god. My first sire had risen from the dead. My current sire had two assassins tailing him. And the only thing that could stand in the way of all this chaos was me.