“No,” she said. “I don’t think he’s been out of the house since we buried Naomi.”

“You should have called me,” I said.

“Yes,” said Ford from the ground, his voice deep enough to echo. His eyes were closed. “We should have.”

Now that he wasn’t attacking me, I could see that he was thin, too. That couldn’t be good in a man transitioning from human to vampire. Hungry vampire fledglings have a tendency to go out and find their own food.

Stefan should have fixed this before it got so bad.

If I’d had a cattle prod, I might have been tempted to use it, at least until the stairs creaked and I looked up to see Stefan coming down. I have a dusty degree in history for which I’d sat through a number of films of the Third Reich, and there were men who’d died in the concentration camps who were less emaciated than Stefan in the bright green Scooby-Doo T-shirt he’d filled out just fine when I’d seen him wear it a few months ago. Now it hung from his bones. Cleaned up, he looked worse than he had at first.

Rachel said that Marsilia had broken Naomi.

Looking at Stefan, I thought that she’d come very close to breaking him, too. Someday, someday I would be in the same room with Marsilia with a wooden stake in my hand, and, by Heaven, I would use it. If, of course, Marsilia were unconscious, and all of her vampires were unconscious, too. Otherwise, I’d just be dead because Marsilia was a lot more dangerous than I was. Still, the thought of sinking a sharp piece of wood into her chest through her heart gave me great joy.

To Stefan, I said, “You need a donor before we go out? So no one pulls us over and makes me take you to the hospital or the morgue?” He paused and looked down at Rachel and Ford. He frowned, then looked puzzled and a little lost. “No. They are too weak. There aren’t enough of them left.”

“I wasn’t talking about them, Shaggy,” I told him gently. “I’ve donated before, and I’m willing to do it again.”

Ruby eyes gazed hungrily at me before he blinked twice, and they were replaced with eyes like root beer in a glass with the sun shining behind it.

“Stefan?”

He blinked. It was an interesting effect: ruby, root beer, ruby, root beer. “Adam won’t like it.” Ruby, ruby, ruby.

“Adam would donate himself if he were here,” I told him truthfully, and rolled up my sleeve.

He was feeding on the inside of my elbow when my cell phone rang. Rachel helped me dig my phone out of my pocket and opened it. I don’t think Stefan even noticed.

“Mercy, where the hell are you?”

Darryl, Adam’s second in command, had