I scanned the image. A tall, dark and ridiculously muscled man with badly painted fangs held a woman in a sheer, clinging gown in the crook of his elbow. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed in ecstasy as he leaned in for a bite. “You write…vampire romance novels?”

“Guilty as charged.” He shrugged. “But I’m looking for a change of pace. One can tolerate heaving bosoms and turgid members for only so long. My friend here claims to be heading to Death Valley on some kind of top secret mission. I don’t believe a word of it, of course, but a trip like this could easily be parlayed into a humorous travel diary.”

The scary biker in the other booth grunted. Byron turned and waved to him. “That is, if he doesn’t kill me first. Which is a very real possibility, should I continue to release information so carelessly.”

Death Valley. The land of the dead.

The biker flipped the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and shifted in the booth, propping his boots up on the seat. The familiar insignia of the Fangs, a single tooth dripping venom, rested on the arm of his leather jacket in the form of a dusty, embroidered patch. I had to bite my tongue to keep from making a crack about the Girl Scouts, but my mouth gaped when I recognized the symbol hastily painted below it.

A dragon curled around a perfect diamond.

The dragon diamond was the Soul Eater’s pet emblem. It existed in the form of a large pendant “gifted” to the human who would be sacrificed to the Soul Eater at the vampire New Year’s ceremony. Jacob Seymour himself had given the diamond to Nathan’s wife, Marianne, and I’d selected Ziggy to be the wearer the night I’d escaped Cyrus’s house. Neither sacrifice had gone as planned.

Byron leaned over the table, a grin of pure wickedness curving his lips. “So, are you in town long? Long enough for a day of—”

“I did a paper on you in college.” I cocked my head and studied him a bit more closely. He looked more fashionably gaunt than the woodcut in the front of my copy of his collected works made him appear. “What happened?”

He sighed. “Why is it every time vampires meet, they have to share ‘how I was turned’ stories? It’s not all that interesting.”

“Most vampires aren’t major figures in literature.” I sipped my coffee and stared at him. If he lied to me, I would be able to tell. His face hid nothing, no matter how he might think he was fooling me. I could see the compulsion to lie working across his face as he considered what to say.