Yes, David liked the focus. It was made to live through another, the symbiosis complete and beautiful. But Nina’s soul was hers. To graft it to another ... was that right?

But as I looked at Ivy’s hope and Nina’s ragged exhaustion, I figured what was right didn’t matter much. “She might still need to take in her aura with your blood,” I said, and Ivy grasped my hands. They were shaking, but her need to do this was absolute.

“I don’t care,” Ivy whispered, alive and filled with hope, more beautiful for having seen her despair only moments before. “I want this. It feels right. I love Nina. She ... loves me. I can’t see her like this, and I can’t end it. Please!”

I felt light and unreal. “I don’t know what it will do to you. What happens when you die? Will both your souls perish?”

“I don’t care!” Ivy shouted, and I turned to Al and Trent, wanting their opinion.

“It’s Nina’s soul, free of her consciousness,” Al said. “Unlike that ill-fated attempt when you, ah, tried to bind with that soul, Ivy likely won’t notice a thing. But there will be far-reaching repercussions from this.”

“I don’t care,” Ivy whispered.

“Well, I do,” I said, very aware of how much he liked breaking people with their own desires. “Tell me why you want this, Al, or nothing happens.”

“Rachel!” Ivy cried, and I clenched my teeth and faced Al squarely. Behind him, Trent and Jenks waited, scared but trusting me.

Al’s smile went wickedly crafty. “Ivy will be the first of a new kind of master vampire,” he said, and Trent made a soft sound of understanding. “A living one. The newly undead will look to the living for their continued existence, much as they do now, but it’s the undead who will be bound to the living, not the other way around. It should impart a measure of ... morality that’s absent now.”

I hesitated, seeing the hope for the end of a long-kept guilt in him, and Al dropped his eyes, embarrassed perhaps that I knew him so well. “The soul Nina sips from Ivy will be her own,” Al said. “Where is the guilt in that? Freely given, freely held. The undead will lose their clout. It will fall to the living. Where it should be.”

The undead controlled by the living? I thought, seeing the sense of it.

“I want to try,” Ivy said, and I turned to Nina.

Nina stared at us, her gaze pained and her desperation shining. “Ivy can have my soul,” she whispered, voice ragged, in ribbons. “She already has my heart,” she panted, head drooping so her hair hid her face. “Oh God, it hurts. That you might be able to do this hurts. Please. Just do something. I can’t exist like this.”