Jo staggered back, putting her hands to her eyes. When she would have fallen, a strong hand took her arm and kept her from landing in the pools of black blood: She remembered it all. The research she had done. The sites she had visited. The pieces she had written on her blog that had been taken down. Conversations with Bill, speculation, questions.

She dropped her palms and looked up at Syn, who was holding her up.

With a shaking hand, she reached to his mouth. And though she expected him to jerk back, step back, push her away, he did not fight her or try to protect himself.

His upper lip gave way under her fingertip.

“This isn’t cosmetic,” she mumbled. “Is it.”

He didn’t have to answer. None of them did.

She had started on the trail of the supernatural in Caldwell on a whim, only for the work to become a necessary distraction. But never in her wildest imagination nor in her jumpiest paranoia… had she ever imagined she would stand in the presence of exactly what she had been looking for.

“Say it,” she demanded. “Say it!”

Syn closed his eyes. “Vampire.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Balthazar left the battle site and re-formed in front of the Brotherhood mansion. There was lesser blood splashed across his leathers and dripping off one sleeve of his jacket. As he shook his arm, a black stain speckled the stone steps and he frowned at the glossy, stinky liquid.

Then he looked up at the great house’s gray expanse with its diamond-pane windows and slate rooflines—and thought of the people who lived inside the hundred-year-old walls.

No, he thought. Not here.

There should never, ever be any trace of a lesser here.

Taking a bandana out of his ass pocket, he bent down and wiped off the old granite. Just as he was finishing the job, a set of headlights rounded the hill from the back side and he squinted into the glare. The box van was white and solid-walled, and as the panel in the middle opened and slid back, Zypher leaned out the front window.

“You good?” he asked.

Balthazar nodded. “Let’s do this.”

As he got inside, it was shoulder-to-shoulder room only. With Syphon behind the wheel and Zypher riding shotgun, it meant that Blaylock, John Matthew, and Tohr had only the one bench seat to fit on.

“I’ll ride in the back,” Balz said as he dematerialized into the cargo space and sat his butt on the carpet.

The side door was shut again and Syphon hit the gas. As they started down the mountain, Balz ran some quick math in his head. Blaylock had dislocated his shoulder the night before in the field and suffered a minor concussion. John Matthew’s left leg had gotten kneecapped three nights ago, and still wasn’t right—har, har—and Tohr’d recently been stabbed in the gut.

But they had to use everybody and none of them complained that they’d been called out of mandatory R&R—

The van came to a hard stop on the decline, Syphon stomping on the brake. As everybody lurched forward and caught themselves on whatever they could, guns were taken out.

“What is—”

“Do you see something—”

“Holy fuck—”

“Who has it,” Syphon snapped. As everyone “Has what’d” him, he wrenched around and glared into the back seat. “The Jolly Rancher. Who’s got the fucking Jolly Rancher?”

Cue the eye contact between everybody in the van.

“That fake watermelon smell triggers my gag reflex,” Syphon bit out. “And I get carsick which is why I have to drive. So if the person who’s sucking on that red square of vomit-inducing nasty doesn’t spit it the fuck out now, I’m going to make sure I throw up in their lap.”

Pause. Longer pause.

And then Zypher cursed, turned his head… and spit the candy right out—

Onto the window he’d just put up. Where it stuck like a Post-it Note.

As everyone in the van fell into a chorus of Ewwwwwwws, the bastard picked the thing off, put down the window, and flicked it out into the bushes.

“You happy, Penelope,” he muttered as he reclosed the window. “Now, do you want to take a Tums and put a hot compress on your forehead, or can we get on with this?”

Syphon ten-and-two’d his hands and assumed the self-righteous composure of a deacon. “Not everyone has a stomach of steel.”

“No, shit,” Zypher said under his breath as the van started moving again.

In the back, Balz propped himself against the van’s side-wall, tucked his arms in, and closed his eyes. A little catnap was just the ticket. As long as Zypher didn’t decide to replace that Jolly Rancher with anything else that was artificially fruit flavored.

Lord help them all if he broke out the Starburst.

* * *

As Syn uttered the word that had been bounding around Jo’s brain, she expected to feel fear or be overcome with shock. Instead, a strange calmness suffused her tense body, easing all her muscles. The relief was eerie.

Then again, on some level, she had known all along, hadn’t she.

“We don’t know about you,” she said to them. “So you hide in plain sight and prey on humans—”

Loud curses rang out in the empty building. And then one of them said, “Don’t put your human bullshit on us. We’re hunted and trying to survive. You are a threat to us, not the other way around.”

Somebody else chimed in, “Those movies and books got us all wrong, sweetheart. So don’t get judgy until you know the truth we live.”

“Don’t call me sweetheart,” she muttered. Then she shook herself back into focus. “So what are they.”

She pointed to the corpses on the ground, the ones with the black blood and the stink. The ones that moved though they should be dead.

“They are our hunters.” The one with the Boston accent stepped forward. “And we just want to live our lives in peace. There’s none of that biting people and turning them, no soulless defilers of virgins, no garlic or capes or bats or wooden stakes.”

“You took my memories… I saw you here. Several nights ago. With a man with a goatee—”

“Male, with a goatee,” he corrected. “We don’t use the term ‘man,’ and yeah, you did. But listen, here is not the place for this kind of conversation.”

“But there’s not any place for this talk, is there.” She looked at Syn. “You’re going to take my memories again, aren’t you. Or are you going to kill me here and now?”

Jo was amazed she could be so calm. Then again, when the paranormal became real, it was as if you’d entered a video game. The action was in front of you, but the implications didn’t go further than two dimensions. After all, if vampires existed, was death even a thing?

“No,” the Bostonian said. “We’re not going to kill you.”

She looked at the bent-back man on the concrete again and thought of the decapitated body she’d seen wrapped around the fire escape. And then the one that had been skinned alive in that alley.

“But you’ve killed humans before.” She refocused on Syn. “Haven’t you. So what makes me different? I’ve got a lot of memories to erase. It’s got to be easier just to slit my throat, especially given how many times you’ve done that.”