Two boys on the beach at night, one human and one undead, their fingers touching discreetly in the sand as fireworks explode against the stars; a dark stone on a stretch of rugged coastline, the fragment shaped like a shark’s tooth; a tablet computer showing the image of a guy with glasses and screwed up hair, and a pang of deep regret—he’s cute, but doomed; incense casting a ribbon of smoke into candlelit air, a needle kissing a fingertip, and blood dropping into a bowl held by the same guy.

Held by me.

I fall back out of the vision, gasping for air, the night sharpening around me. Both vampires regard me with curiosity, and once again I have no idea how much of what I just experienced was shared. My thoughts are hyper but occluded, something heavy pulling them in a direction they don’t want to go.

I wish I could just forget that night on the beach.

The voice isn’t mine, but it rings in my head, and I gasp again as I struggle free of it. I feel him; I feel Gunnar’s memories like soot coating my hands, like I’ve been touching something forbidden and the evidence is all over me. I blink up at him, startled and afraid I’m going to fall right back in again, but the thread tying us together finally breaks.

“Auggie, are you okay?” Whether he knows I’ve been prowling around in his head or not, he sounds concerned for my well-being. And, if anything, it only serves to piss me off.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you? The Corrupter worshippers?” That picture of me flashes bright in my thoughts, his sense that I was cute, but doomed. Was that the past or the future? I haven’t held a bowl of blood yet, so the visions were at least a mix of the two. “I’m going to guess the League, because you don’t exactly look like a Rasputin groupie.”

Gunnar is dumbstruck, those dramatic eyebrows jumping halfway up his forehead, leaving Jude to grin with sly satisfaction. “Ding ding ding—a correct guess on the first try! Looks like I’m not the only one who has a problem telling the whole truth.”

“Fuck off, Marlowe!” Gunnar snaps.

“Everything he said about the Syndicate is straight from Duclos’s pitch to new members,” Jude continues. “She’s got him completely brainwashed. In fact, I’ve always wondered if she was the one who pushed Gunnar into severing with me.”

“Shut the hell up!” Gunnar shouts loud enough to be heard from the road—on the other side of the building. “You don’t know the first thing about Viviane or the League. You’ve never even met her!”