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  “Is Kristi the only one here?”

  “No, there are a dozen more on site. Male and female, all young, all pretty, and entirely ours. This is the way it was before, with humans serving us the way they should.”

  On the couch, Kristi whispered dreamily, “I can hear the ocean. It’s so relaxing.” She stared at one of the walls as if she were looking out a window at the pounding surf.

  “What did Hector think of this new arrangement?” Luca asked. In the past, donors had been housed here for a few hours, perhaps a day, then their memories were wiped and they were returned to their rightful places in the world.

  Maybe she heard the disapproval in his tone, because she stiffened and her dark eyes narrowed, but she contented herself with saying, “He saw the logic of the arrangement.”

  Maybe. If Marie could glamour that many people for that long without irrevocably damaging their minds, that would certainly make feeding the Council less of a logistical problem. He shrugged. “I can see the benefit, I guess, but I’m still not interested.”

  Marie shrugged, too, then closed and locked the door. If Kristi was so willing and the glamour so perfected, Luca wondered, why bother with the lock? Marie turned, headed for the stairway with a sway in her hips. “Find whoever killed Hector,” she said without looking back. “I know you’ll be looking regardless of what the Council says or how long it takes the fools to reach a consensus. The murder of a councilman can’t be tolerated, or we’re all at risk.”

  Was her concern genuine, or was she simply throwing up a smoke screen? After all, her insistence that humans should be subservient was in line with the rebels’ way of thinking, but not unusual at all in the vampire world. Probably all of the Council members felt the same way, even though they bowed to necessity when it came to keeping their own existence secret.

  Luca followed her back to the entryway, then let himself out. The hot summer sunlight seemed to eat at his skin, but he didn’t show any reaction as he strode away. When he was out of sight of the building, he checked to see if he’d been followed—he hadn’t—then he began backtracking. He knew who had killed Hector, but not the Council member behind the murder. How deeply did the betrayal go? How organized were these rebels, and how close were they to bringing disaster down on them all? Yes, he was hungry, and the hunt called to him, but he had control over even his most basic needs, and feeding would wait … for now.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Potomac neighborhood

  Her captors left her alone more frequently these days than they had in the beginning. Nevada Sheldon had been twenty years old when she’d been taken, a college student oblivious to the dark world beyond—and yet so close to—her own. She’d certainly had no idea that she was a witch. At first she hadn’t believed them. True, she’d had good instincts all her life, and on occasion small wishes would come true, but she’d never considered those little oddities to be a sign of power. Everyone had things like that happen, right?

  The power she possessed now would have been frightening and unmanageable for the girl she’d been then, but now she had the strength to move forward and make the best of what she’d discovered, what she’d become.

  Nevada didn’t know if the vampires who had taken her and her family almost three years ago thought she was totally cowed, or if they were so arrogant they didn’t think she could possibly harm them or interfere with their plans. She voted for arrogance, because no one topped the vampires in that. Three years ago she hadn’t known they even existed, but since then her survival had depended on learning as much about them as she could, and fast.

  And yet, they needed her; they needed her to break the spell cast by an ancestor she hadn’t known about until they’d told her about her witch blood, which was something else she hadn’t known about, much less that she was evidently descended from a long line of über-witches. Because they needed her, they’d assured her that she wouldn’t be harmed, but at the same time, they had no qualms about threatening her parents and her younger brother and sister to make her do what they wanted.

  She’d been terrified at first. She hadn’t known what they were talking about, only that she and her entire family had been kidnapped by these monsters, then separated. She was kept in luxury in a large bedroom in a mansion, while her family was kept, the vampires said, in a dungeon somewhere. After being held in total seclusion, except for the monsters, after being scared half out of her mind, finally it had occurred to her that she had a weapon against them: herself. They used her family to force her to do what they wanted, but, by God, they had better keep them alive and at least reasonably well-treated or she wouldn’t do a damn thing the monsters wanted.

  Standoff. After trying unsuccessfully to bully her, they had finally relented and shown her cell phone pictures of her family, and every now and then they would place a call and she’d be allowed to talk, very briefly, to one of her family just to reassure her that they were still alive.

  So long as her family was alive, she would try to do what the vampires wanted. They set up a work area in the middle of the huge bedroom, bringing in tables and a comfortable chair, and then they had brought her tons of really old books, books so old she was afraid to turn the pages because she kept expecting them to fall apart under her fingers, but they never did. There were so many books that they were stacked everywhere, piles of them, some of them so huge and heavy she couldn’t lift them and had to either call one of the vampires for help or shove and tug at the books herself to get them out of the way. She did a lot of shoving and tugging, because as a general rule she’d rather eat ground glass than ask a vampire for help.

  For the first several weeks, she’d been at a complete loss. A witch? Her? If she’d been a witch, wouldn’t she have stopped them from kidnapping her family? But they’d told her she “must learn”—yeah, that was real specific—and the threats against her family had spurred her to at least pretend she was doing something, so she’d begun leafing through those old books. She didn’t like touching them, had to force herself to look at the pages. They gave her a creepy feeling. The paper smelled … weird, as if wasn’t really paper at all, but something else she couldn’t identify. And some of the pages were stained with what she thought was blood, which really gave her the creeps. If these books were about witchcraft, it was the bad kind of witchcraft, not the kind that was all about being one with nature and treating people with respect, stuff like that.

  Some of them were in some kind of weird language she couldn’t read. How the hell was she supposed to “learn” if she couldn’t read the language? On the other hand, if the vamps had been able to read the books, they wouldn’t have needed her; likewise if they suspected she really had no clue how to learn what they insisted she learn, so she kept her mouth shut and dug into the books.

  The books that were in that weird language she shoved off to the side—why waste time with them?—and began concentrating on those that were sort of, at least, written in English. Even though she understood all the words, they were strung together in ways that didn’t make sense. Light of the dark, dark of the day—yeah, right. It was gibberish. But the monsters took their gibberish seriously, so Nevada tried her best to do what they wanted.

  Then, slowly, the words in the books began to resonate with something deep inside her, began to take on meanings that went beyond the words themselves. She couldn’t quite put her finger on exactly what it was, maybe something like a current she could ride, a door she could step through, or both. But there was something—and it called to her. So what at first she had been doing out of desperation she began doing willingly, and then even eagerly, though she hid that from her captors.

  Six months into her captivity, she successfully cast her first simple spell. It wasn’t anything much, she’d tried to reheat some food that had gotten cold because she was distracted by her reading—the food was pretty terrible because vampires weren’t interested in eating at all, so being cold had pretty much made the stuff inedible—but the