“Awesome.” Gunnar smiles again, showing all those perfect teeth. How are teeth sexy? They’re pieces of actual bone that stick out of your face, but I want to lick them anyway. We exchange phone numbers and then say an awkward goodbye—but he hugs me before he leaves, and it’s amazing.

“Be careful,” I call out as he skips down the stairs of the porch—but he doesn’t even look back. No one is out to kill him.

After he’s gone, the house becomes a trap, every pane of glass an easy entry for a masked murderer. The air is so still the quiet hurts my ears, and when I walk, the sound of my footsteps is unnerving. I take a knife, climb the stairs to my bedroom, and turn my desk chair to face the window, so I can be ready.

Shutting my eyes, struggling to concentrate, I think about what I felt on Ximena’s porch the other night—what I felt at Sugar Mama’s, and sitting across from Jude in the food court. If this ability to sense vampires really comes from an entity developing inside of me, I definitely don’t want to welcome it into my consciousness, but right now I’m desperate to know what’s out there, and this undead radar is my secret weapon. My only weapon.

For a long time, there’s nothing. But then something connects, wires touching in a part of myself I can’t identify, and the back of my neck prickles—a rush passing over my skin. And then I sense them—two vampires. One is about ten yards away, the other about fifteen, on opposite sides of the house. They aren’t moving.

Ironically, it’s the first time all night I’m able to relax. My guess is that the Syndicate is having my house watched, and even though that should freak me out, it doesn’t. They can’t come in, but they won’t want me to get killed by vigilante ninjas—not while my body is still pressure-cooking the Endless One. The enemy of my enemy is … okay, well, the Syndicate is still totally my enemy. But as long as they want me to stay alive, our goals are temporarily aligned, and I will gladly let them protect me from assassins.

I wake up slumped in my desk chair, my elbow throbbing worse than ever following a night of mercifully dreamless sleep. All through my early classes, I’m groggy and listless—but I snap out of my daze quick during third period when Leesha Gardner barrels into class, her face puffy and streaked with tears. When she collects herself enough to speak, she shocks the whole class. “M-Mr. Strauss is dead. Someone killed him last night!”