“Take a look around.” She gestures broadly at the mall and everything beyond it. “Against all odds, human beings lucked into a complex nervous system and a sense of self-awareness, the ability to learn—opposable fucking thumbs!—and what are you doing with those gifts? You’re poisoning your own planet! This dumb, blue ball rolling around all alone in the Milky Way has the precise and inexpressibly rare conditions necessary to foster life, and mortals are doing everything they can to destroy it.” She slaps a hand down on the tabletop, her eyes flashing. “You flood your air with deadly chemicals, dump trash into the oceans, and bring back diseases that killed millions when I was still alive!

“Humans are a menace. No matter how many warnings your ancestors left you in your unending piles of history books, you’re all determined to make their same catastrophic mistakes and learn those lessons the hard way.” With an agitated flick of her wrist, she withdraws the Daphne glamour, her cheekbones regaining their dramatic angle. “There are no mortals left on the planet with a living memory of World War I, and even now, as the last veterans of World War II die off, your governments are reenacting all the same conditions that led up to it. The ‘war to end all wars,’ or so we once thought.” Her eyes track the Sunday shoppers crossing the food court. “Humans are born with a self-destruct button and an itchy trigger finger, and you can’t wait to damn us all to hell.”

“You’re…” I try to make sense of what she’s saying. “This is an environmental thing?”

“Everything is environmental!” she exclaims, tossing out her hands. “How are any of us supposed to carry on if you all fuck up the climate so bad you starve to death, or resurrect some mutated strain of smallpox you can’t stop?” A fly circles Jude’s abandoned coffee cup, and Viviane waves it away. “Your leaders know what they’re doing, and they don’t care, because they’re greedy—and because a hundred years from now they’ll be gone anyway, and it’ll be someone else who reaps the whirlwind. It’ll be us.”

I squint at her a little. “Just so I have this straight, your endgame is … solar panels?”

“Our endgame is no end,” Viviane replies with passion. “The League of the Dark Star wants a future where life continues to flourish, side by side with the undead. What we want is nothing more or less than peace on Earth—a new age, where vampires don’t have to hide, and mortals can’t wreck everything we all depend on.” She curls her hands into fists. “Humans are incompetent stewards of this planet, and they can’t be trusted to run it any longer. If you truly value the life you have, Auggie, then the League of the Dark Star is your one hope.”