Before I could respond, he disappeared.

“How bad is it?” were Bones’s first words when he strode into his co-ruler’s house.

Mencheres glided up to the entrance, his expression grim as he held out an iPad.

“Very bad,” he said simply.

Bones took the tablet. One look at the screen explained Mencheres’s urgent summons. Despite our shock at Trove’s revelation, we’d flown until we were exhausted, then commandeered cars after that to get here. Now we knew that Trove hadn’t merely been hoping Bones and I would show up at the fund-raiser tonight. He’d been preparing for it.

VAMPIRES AMONG US! screamed the headline on the Web page. More damning, as Bones scrolled down, were the pages and pages of status reports on Madigan’s experiments, complete with video clips showing a glowing-eyed child murdering several fully grown opponents on command.

Since the hard drives had been fried, only one person would have had this information, though of course, the former White House chief of staff’s name wasn’t anywhere on the documents.

“Trove,” I hissed. “While he was droning on, we weren’t the only ones being filled in on the full scope of Madigan’s experiments. So was anyone with eyes and an Internet connection!”

“More sites are appearing as conspiracy theorists and cryptozoologists repost the information,” Mencheres said in somber agreement. “Tai is attempting to take them down to slow the progression of information, but . . . there are too many.”

To illustrate his point, Mencheres minimized that page and opened a new one.

WE ARE NOT ALONE, BUT IT ISN’T WHO YOU THINK, the new headline announced, followed by extensive pathology reports on Katie’s tri-species nature—and what had made that merging possible.

I was too devastated to even curse as Mencheres opened site upon site filled with even more information meant to inflame ghoul and vampire relations. He was right; it was too late to contain this. It had gone viral, just as Trove intended.

Granted, most people viewing these scanned documents wouldn’t know who Specimen A1 was, let alone believe that in vitro fertilization from a half-vampire egg would result in a quarter-vampire child who’d been able to absorb ghoul DNA into her genetics. I mean, I was Specimen A1, and I still had a hard time believing it. Throw in the fact that most humans didn’t know that vampires or ghouls existed, and the reaction, judging from the comments, was open derision.

But the problem wasn’t humans, who’d think all of this was a hoax. It was everyone else who’d know that it wasn’t.

At last, Bones handed back the tablet even though I’d still been reading with a growing sense of doom.

“We need to—” he began, then stopped abruptly when a slender blonde with porcelain-doll loveliness opened the main door without knocking.

“Need to what?” Veritas asked coolly.