Then shock followed on the heels of pain as a click sounded in my triple sets of manacles and multiple knives stabbed me at once. When that pain began to slide through my entire body, searing my nerve endings as it went, I realized they weren’t knives.

They were needles injecting me with liquid silver.

I didn’t want to give the bastards monitoring me the satisfaction of hearing me scream, but after a few minutes, I did. Then I really didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of listening to me plead for it to stop, but after several agonizing hours of being burned from the inside out, I did that, too. No mercy came, however. Only mindlessness that led to darkness.

I woke up strapped to a table in a different room. Halogen lights dotted the ceiling with sunlike brightness, and I was so tightly restrained that my movements were limited to wiggling my toes, but to my relief, the horrific pain was gone.

“Ah, you’re awake,” a pleasant voice stated. “No doubt feeling better, too. We pulled the silver out of you by dissolving it with nitric acid, then flushing it out. It’s the only sure method when it penetrates that deeply.”

I tried to crane my head, but it was strapped down tight, too. Then I reached out with my mind. Most thoughts came through with the randomness of listening to the radio while scrolling through channels, but one person’s rang out clearly, and she was in this room.

Then a forty-something woman appeared in my limited line of sight, all but a few wisps of her ash blonde hair concealed by a medical cap. Her features were schooled into a polite mask, and her pale green gaze held the clinical detachment physicians everywhere had perfected.

Don’t bother trying mind control, she thought at me. I’m inoculated.

I tried it anyway. What did I have to lose? “Release me,” I said, putting all of my lagging power into my voice and gaze.

She didn’t even blink. “You only learn the hard way, don’t you?” she said out loud.

“Always,” I replied tightly. “Where’s my husband?”

A diffident shrug that landed her right after Madigan on my hit list. “The dead vampire? In the freezer.” With the rest of them, her thoughts finished.

I closed my eyes, a wave of grief crushing me beneath its weight. When I opened them, the female doctor had disappeared. I tested my restraints by applying pressure one limb at a time. Nothing. Then I tried heaving against them with everything I had, all at once.

Not even a budge. Madigan had spared no expense setting up a vampire-proof examination table.

“Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system,” the doctor’s voice said dryly, “how about some food?”

She returned to my line of sight, dangling a plasma bag with a long tube above me. I gave her fingers a brief, calculated look. Too far away to bite off. Clearly, I wasn’t her first captive.