“No,” he said quietly. “We can, uh, tell our own kind.”

I looked up sharply. The blood drained from my face, and I could tell by the way his expression softened that my fear was visible. “You’re a—”

“Vampire, yes,” he finished for me when my voice trailed off.

“Well, that settles it,” I said, feeling oddly relieved despite the fact I stood in a dark stairwell with a guy who claimed to be a vampire. “I’m crazy.”

“You’re not crazy. We all go through this, when we change.” He looked up nervously as a pair of feet shuffled across the snowy sidewalk above us. “But this really isn’t the place to discuss this. Why don’t you come up to my apartment and we can talk.”

“No—thanks though,” I said, unable to help my laughter. “It was really nice meeting you, Mr. Vampire, but I’ve got to go. I have to work tonight, and I just might be able to get a call in to my psychologist first. With any luck, he’ll give me a nice, fat prescription for some antipsychotics so I can get back to my normal life.”

I turned away, but Nathan caught my arm. Faster than I could think to scream, I was pinned between his hard body and the harder brick wall. His hand clamped firmly over my mouth, muffling my terrified cry.

“I didn’t want to have to do this,” he said through gritted teeth. Then he dipped his head, and his body went rigid against mine.

When he moved his head back up, my heart stopped. The chiseled, handsome planes of his face were twisted, the skin stretched tight over a sharp, bony snout. Long fangs glinted in the dim light. He looked the way John Doe had, just before he’d ripped my throat open like a birthday present.

Only his eyes held a glimmer of control. Until the day I die, I will remember Nathan’s eyes, so clear and gray and heartbreakingly honest behind that horrific mask.

“Now do you see?” he asked.

My heart pounding, I nodded. He pulled away and covered his face with his hands. When he looked up again, his normal features had returned into an expression of kindness and compassion. It disturbed me more than when he’d been a monster.

“Come on. Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Numb with cold and fear and hopelessness, I let him guide me up the steps to the sidewalk. “Anything?”

“Sure,” he promised, pulling a set of keys from his pocket.

“Okay.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Why me?”

Three

The Movement

Nathan’s apartment was small, with too much furniture. The walls were lined with bracketed shelves, the kind you’d buy in a home-improvement store and put up on a weekend. Some were so laden with books that they bowed in the middle. Notebooks and legal pads, all scribbled on in barely legible handwriting, littered the coffee table. It was cluttered but not dirty.