I sobered as I remembered John Doe’s horrific injuries, and my mouth felt dry. “Which of the rules did he break?”

“All of them. Long before he attacked you. We just haven’t been able to finish him off.”

“No one deserves that.” I tried to force the image of John Doe’s maimed body from my mind. “If you’d seen him, what they did to him…”

“I did see him,” Nathan said matter-of-factly. “I was the one sent to execute him.”

“You?” The wounds in John Doe’s chest. The missing eye. The splintered, destroyed bones of his face. The man sitting beside me had done it all. “How?”

“I started with a stake to the heart, and when that didn’t work, I thought I’d chop him into little pieces and bury him in consecrated earth, but he got in some good hits. I’m lucky to be sitting here right now. Someone must have seen us fighting, because the police showed up. The rest—”

“Is history,” I whispered.

Nathan shifted uncomfortably beside me. “Not really. He’s still out there. That’s why Ziggy’s been on the prowl for vampires. We know Cyrus is in town, and he’s the only outlaw vampire in the area. I keep an eye out for any new fledglings that pop up. I find them, kill them and report back to the Movement.” He stretched his legs to get comfortable. “They give me six hundred dollars a head. Figuratively, of course. I don’t have to bring them actual heads.”

I had to remind myself he was talking about ending people’s lives, despite the casual way he mentioned it. “You kill them? Why?”

He looked at me as if I had antennae growing out of my head. “Because they’re vampires.”

“So are you!”

“Yes, but I’m a good vampire,” he explained patiently. “Good vampires get to live, bad vampires get a one-way ticket to wherever it is we go when we die. It’s not rocket science.”

I shot to my feet. “Did you ever think maybe some of them might be good vampires? I mean, do you even check first or do you just go all kill-happy on them?”

“I give them a chance to change my mind but they all turn out the same way. It’s just not possible for them to be good vampires,” he insisted.

“And why not?”

“Because they weren’t made by good vampires.” Releasing a huge sigh, Nathan picked up The Sanguinarius. “Every fledgling I’ve encountered so far has gone the way of their sire. The blood tie is incredibly strong, which makes it nearly impossible for a new vampire to fight the will of the blood in his veins, the will of his sire. The book will explain it a lot better than I can.”

“Well, I’m here now, so why don’t you give it a shot?” I arched a threatening brow and put my hands on my hips to show I wasn’t moving until he answered my question.

“You’re a very aggravating person, you know that?” He set the book on the table. “The Movement doesn’t want any new vampires made. We’re trying to whittle our species down to nothing. Hence the extinction part of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement. Some vampires aren’t so into the idea. So they start creating new vampires.