“God knows how this Olek character’s got them, but he’s offering them in exchange for something. I don’t know what yet. Probably just money. He sounds a little desperate. He wants to meet.”

The wulf in Lucy and Trish was trying to get hold of whatever it was I wasn’t saying, the other thing … something … But I kept it moving, just out of reach. The room’s atmosphere was dense.

“You’re not going to meet him, obviously,” Lucy said. She was in the rocker, not rocking but tipped forward, elbows on knees. She’d changed into black jeans and an olive green blouse. Any green set off the auburn hair and hazel eyes. She’d put on mascara and eyeliner and warm peach lipstick. The Curse had rebooted her interest in the way she looked, now that she was never going to look any older.

“No. Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

Trish, who’d been looking out the window at two scuffling feral puppies (our canine vibe kept the grounds full of them), turned. The Chili Peppers t-shirt had been replaced by a white cheesecloth kurta and sawn-off 501s. Bare legs of lovely Gaelic whiteness. But her wulf’s irritation (this thing I wasn’t saying was like the comedy bar of soap every grab flipped from one hand to the other) had reddened her small face.

“How can you be thinking about it?” she said. “Thinking about going to meet a vampire? It’s a trap. It can only be a trap.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. I had Quinn’s book in my hand. My hand pulsed, surely visibly. I thought: Any minute one of them’s just going to snatch it from me.

“Look, I don’t want to make a big thing out of it,” I said. “It’s not something … I don’t have to decide anything right now. Besides, we’ve got Saturday to get through.”

Saturday. Full moon. The kill. And everything that went with it. Only the fourth time we’d be going as a pack. It had become an occasional necessity. Not every month, and not on any recognisable cycle; but when the need spoke none of us argued. None of us except Madeline, who went her own way, who had fuckkilleat partners queueing, who had honourable reasons for staying out of mine and Walker’s way that one night of the month. She was stopping by tomorrow en route to Spain, where she had arrangements in place. She would land early in Rome, spend the day with us and the night fucking Cloquet’s brains out (it had become a pre-Transformation ritual for her, a last hit of human warmth before the beast got out) then leave on Friday. She had to keep their encounters brief. It was bad enough he was in love with her. If she fell in love with him, she’d end up killing and eating him. Since that would be the worst thing she could do to a human. Since doing the worst thing to humans is the thing we do. Hot tip: If you’re a human having a fling with a werewolf, break it off. Now.

“I don’t like it, either, chérie,” Cloquet said to me. He was still in green silk pyjama bottoms and black towelling robe, nursing a claret hangover of his own, albeit with the aid of a bloody mary and a Gauloise. His bony face with its large mouth and big black eyes was crimped with morning-after misery. His dark hair looked like a mouse had spent a rough night in it. “He phoned you,” he said. “He had a package delivered. He knows where we are. We’re going to have to fucking move again. Merde.” It had been our intention—mine, Walker’s and Cloquet’s—to stay here for six months. We were sick of perpetual flight. Transit lounges and hotels and border controls and time zones and languages and currencies; continual adjustment breeds deep fatigue. But the equation doesn’t change: Stillness is death. Keep killing on the same patch and watch the investigation noose tighten. Rudy Kovatch, the documents and ID specialist I’d inherited from Jake, had furnished us all with several EU passports to complement the U.S. fakes; either side of the Atlantic, that gave us a lot of room to hunt. Europe made more sense: you could be in and out of three countries a day. Tough to track.

“Lula, this is bollocks,” Trish said. “I can’t believe you’re talking about going to meet a fucking vampire, after what you’ve been through—after what we’ve all been through with those arsewipes.”

What we’ve all been through. Quite. When the vampire religious nuts had kidnapped Lorcan, Lucy and Trish had been two of the team that had helped me get him back. At mortal risk to themselves. Partly pack gravity, yes (no one ever referred to me as being any kind of leader, but I was the one they’d constellated around; there was something, some latent power), but partly because they were generous beings. Unless you happened to be one of their victims. In which case generosity wouldn’t be the first of their personal qualities that sprang to your mind.

“And while we’re at it,” Lucy said, “aren’t you remotely curious as to how he got your mobile number?”

Walker was negotiating quiet angry agony. He knew about the night two years ago when the vampire Remshi had made ambiguous contact with me. He knew because I’d told him. I’d told him because nothing had happened. Nothing had happened and I had nothing to confess. Nothing had happened and I had nothing to confess except that from that night the vague expectation that I’d see Remshi again had grown into an insistent mental mass. Now here was another vampire seeking me out. Another—or the same? When he joins the blood of the werewolf. I’d forced myself to tell Walker that, too. Made a joke of it, the phrase’s B-movie portentousness, the surely bogus archaism. Once or twice we’d tried to make it a private language idiom for anything that was never going to happen, as in, when hell freezes over, when he joins the blood of the werewolf—but the words had hung awkwardly in the air and we’d stopped trying.

“Mike and Natasha will help,” Walker said, forcing himself into practicalities. “If we take this any further it should be with them as back-up.”

I hadn’t thought of that, but he was right. Mikhail Konstantinov, Walker’s former colleague, and his wife Natasha Alexandrova. Natasha had been made a vampire against her will. Mikhail had made her Turn him so they could be together. Outdoors, with ten feet between us, we could bear each other’s odour. We had to. We were friends. They would help.

“I’m not taking it further,” Trish said. “Your kids, Lu, that’s one thing. But I’m not walking into a vamp trap for half a dozen books, even if they did belong to Jake. Sorry.”