I give a distant nod—thinking of the proposition I made to Jude only minutes ago.

“While at court, I met the occasional undead, and I realized that the scary stories I’d heard growing up in a Brotherhood household were mostly nonsense.” She shrugs. “Anyway, Erasmus had heard of me through mutual friends, knew what I could do, and … well, maybe he had a little crush. Either way, he offered me an escape, and more power than I could ever dream of, if I joined his cause.”

“So you did.” I sound absurdly reasonable. “Did you even believe in the Corrupter?”

“Not then, but it didn’t matter,” she says. “Kramer’s group was small, and a shape-shifting sorceress whose glamours could disguise them and shield them from Sensitives was better to have around than another true believer.”

“So that’s how you kept me from being able to tell you and Gunnar were vampires.”

“To be honest, Auggie, I’m still patting myself on the back for that, because I wasn’t even sure it would work!” A goofy, conspiratorial grin splits her face, and I have to fight the instinct to smile with her. “Glamours aren’t true transformations, just an interference with the field of perception.” She waves one hand over the other, the air rippling, and I watch the varnish on her nails turn from black to red to silver. “It’s essentially a smoke screen, and your access to the Dark Star’s power is deepening every day. No matter how gifted I am, there’s no way I could keep him from recognizing one of his own children forever.”

My hands go still. “So you know who the Corrupter really is.”

“Yes.” Viviane hesitates. “I met Azazel once, Auggie—face-to-face. It was in France, more than a hundred years after I was supposed to die, and it changed everything.” Her tone becomes hushed, even rapturous. “He knew me, knew everything about me. He said I had a destiny that … Well, it was the moment that my commitment to the League stopped being about repaying Erasmus and started being about something much bigger.”

“That’s why you want a global vampire takeover, and a … a deathless existence until the end of time?” I glare at Viviane Duclos, wishing I still needed my glasses so I could take them off and make Daphne’s face disappear. “For your destiny?”

“No, Auggie.” She frowns peevishly. “Believe it or not, aside from the Syndicate’s relentless power-tripping, the League is pretty okay with the status quo. If you spent time with Gunnar, you know that the only thing he wants is to go surfing again and flirt with boys on the beach—to live normally. We don’t want humans corralled into farms, and we definitely don’t want hell on Earth. In fact, we seem to be the only ones who don’t want that.