“Here.” She kneels down beside me, offering me her arm. “You really need this.” Blood wells in the fresh wounds, but I just stare at it in a daze, until she gives me a sad smile. “Go ahead, Auggie. Trust me.”

And the thing is … I think I do.

LITTLE WHITE PICKET FENCES

Once you’ve survived multiple vampire attacks, a collapsing factory, and getting inappropriately touched by an angel, you develop a kind of hubris about your threshold for suffering. But if I may be honest, the oppressive silence in the Fulton Heights High library might be what finally does me in. That, and Algebra I. Again.

Two weeks after living through a brutal, near-apocalyptic showdown that leveled an entire building and left Colgate Woods littered with corpses, I’m sitting at a table near the reference section, facing off against my dreaded archnemesis: the quadratic equation. The clock ticks ominously as I screw up one practice question after another, and every time I try to ask Adriana for help, the librarian glares at us. It’s times like these that I almost miss being constantly on the brink of death, because at least I wasn’t bored.

In the end, I accepted that offer of vampire blood. No matter what doubts I had, the police were closing in, and they were going to have lots of questions I wasn’t sure I wanted to face. At some point during my brief and harrowing moment at Rasputin’s mercy, all of the witches had simply vanished—leaving Viviane and me alone in the middle of an exploded building, near a clearing full of dead bodies. Eager to leave, and too weak to move on my own, the choice kind of made itself.

“I’m sorry, Auggie,” Viviane says as we wander through a quiet neighborhood after sprinting from the arriving cruisers—a reenactment of our escape from the rave. “I guess I’m not sure what else to say. I’m sorry you went through this, and I’m sorry I tried to use your parents against you. When I met him back in the seventeen hundreds, Azazel told me he intended to create a world of harmony and peace, where vampires would no longer be confined to the darkness. And I believed him.” Smiling up at the stars, she shrugs. “It was exactly what I wanted to hear, told to me exactly the way I needed to hear it. Well, who knows? Maybe that really was his plan all along.”

“But you saved me.” I study her, her face still Daphne’s. “When Rasputin sabotaged the ritual, and when he tried to kill me, you stopped him.”