“He’s out by the pool,” she says, and motions to a sliding glass door on the other side of the room. “You should say hi. I think he’ll like you.”

Something twists inside me, tighter than a screw. I don’t want him to like me. I don’t want to meet him at all. But whoever he is, he might know about Jane, and right now, that’s all that matters.

The party buzzing outside, I cross the bedroom, still watching the girls. Their faces are blank as fresh canvas. It’s like they’re expecting someone to step in and finish them, to put the color in their eyes, a pink swirl on their cheeks. Are they here because they want to be? Or because they have to be?

I’m at the glass door, flicking open the lock, but at the last moment, I turn back.

“Do you need help?” I ask, and it’s a ridiculous question. I’m a vampire who could devour them in an instant. But I was also a wide-eyed girl once, just like them, sitting around waiting for the world to break my heart.

The three of them stare up at me from the bed, the expressions on their faces never changing.

“We’re fine,” they say without inflection, but they keep looking at me, right through me, and my flesh tightens on my bones.

“Suit yourselves,” I say, and with my hand unsteady on the door, I wrench it open and step into the night.

Outside, the air is sweet with summer, the pungent scent of chlorine leaking in at the edges. The pool glitters in the moonlight, the shape of a teardrop, blue and spotless as a phony lagoon from a movie set. There are girls everywhere, the same as inside the house, but I see him immediately, the man they’re all performing for.

He’s standing at the rim of the pool, next to a row of plastic lawn chairs, each one filled with another vacant-eyed girl. Where does he find them all? Or worse yet, do they simply find him?

He’s older than the rest, maybe thirty-five, with thick eyebrows, a square jaw, hair the color of midnight. A stern face like a military father, a face without pity. He’s holding a drink, a bourbon on the rocks or some other nostalgic man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit nonsense. As I move toward him, he turns to look at me, seemingly pleased with what he sees.

I smile, even as I wish him dead. “They tell me you’re in charge.”

He waves me off. “Nobody’s in charge here,” he says, his dark gaze piercing into me like a blade. “We’re in this together.”

“Really?” I nearly laugh in his face. “Because I met your girls in the bedroom. They don’t seem to be in charge of much.”