Now I understood his desperate fear, and his certainty he couldn’t protect me. But he had no right to keep me in the dark about my own mortality.

On the other side of the store, Max still hummed. The tune brought tears to my eyes.

I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

The heart that remained pounded in my chest as I ran to the door.

“Carrie, wait!” Nathan called after me.

I sprinted up the stairs to the sidewalk. The nights had grown somewhat warmer, and the rain that splashed the pavement didn’t freeze.

For whatever reason, Nathan didn’t follow me. While I hadn’t wanted company, I certainly didn’t want to think he’d just thrown up his hands and said, “Oh, well.”

Not when Cyrus could kill me at any second.

I walked past the alley. Though my blood had long since washed away, I imagined I could smell it. My old, tainted blood, my former sire’s blood.

It had been on his hands, his face, his clothes when he’d leaned over me that night.

The memory of the Soul Eater tearing through Cyrus’s chest was suddenly so much clearer. Cyrus had told me the Soul Eater had killed his own sire. So he must have removed Cyrus’s heart as an insurance policy. No one would betray someone who could kill them via remote.

Cyrus had taken my heart to ensure I wouldn’t betray him. Did he think I would return to him?

As I walked, I periodically checked my skin to make sure it wasn’t flaking away to ash and embers. Although he was no longer my sire, I knew Cyrus well enough to realize this was yet another installment of his torture. He could destroy my heart whenever he felt like it, and I’d never see death coming. All I could think of were Cyrus’s memories of his father holding him down, cutting him open. His scar had faded but it mirrored my own. Did his father still control him with possession of his heart?

I walked around all night. Occasionally, I’d question The Sanguinarius. Why did we grow second hearts? Eventually, I settled on the most likely explanation, that the vampire heart was needed to push larger quantities of blood to our abnormally strong limbs. The old heart was rendered obsolete, yet somehow maintained a vital connection to our life force, even if it wasn’t connected to us physically.

Ancient peoples believed the heart to be the seat of a person’s soul. Maybe they were on to something. The fact I could be removed from this plane of existence if my human heart is destroyed appeared to prove their hypothesis. I promised myself I’d research it, if I lived long enough.

Several times I found myself nearing Cyrus’s neighborhood and turned back. When the sun began to rise, I headed back to the apartment. My legs had grown tired hours before, but my anger propelled me to stay away.

Nathan hadn’t come to look for me. Ziggy’s van still rusted beside the curb, and I saw light in the living room windows.