Phaedra sat up, aura blazing. Her talons clutched at the adobe sides of the bench. Black smudges ringed her eyes and made the eye sockets appear like velvet pits. The retinas of her tapetum lucidum glowed crimson as if on fire. Her face had an ashen pallor and blue veins throbbed at her temples. A red tongue lapped between her new fangs.

I raised the cup to her. “Good morning. Welcome to the world of the undead.”

Phaedra grimaced with pain and reached to hold her jaw as if opening her mouth was agony. She winced when she scraped her cheek with her talons. She looked at me and her eyes were incandescent with anger and resentment. “Why didn’t you tell me about the pain? I feel it from my head to my feet.”

“I warned you. The metamorphosis from human to vampire will pass, but it’s the least of your troubles.”

She collapsed and rested her head on the side of the bench. “I feel so sick.”

“Take it easy on yourself. This is only the first day. Wait until you have to learn how to apply makeup without a mirror.”

Phaedra squirmed and reached for her side.

“You’ll find that it healed,” I said.

She peeked under her blouse. “Still hurts like hell.” She lay back in the bench.

I stood over her and offered my cup. “Sip?”

“No thanks. I feel like crap.” She had the splotchy pallor of a fever victim. Her skin wasn’t yet translucent.

“Funny thing, though I’m not a doctor, my diagnosis is that you also look like crap.”

She kept her eyes lightly closed. Her throat twitched and she swallowed hard.

“Whatever you do, try not to throw up in the sleeping bag.”

She rubbed her face. “When will I feel normal?”

“Human normal? Never.”

“Then when will I feel better?”

“Depends. Usually, people don’t want to be vampires, so they fight the turning. You wanted it, so it might be easy for you.” I sat on the adobe bricks. “Here’s something you have to know. It’s the iron law of vampires. Human society can never know we exist. They believe we are mythical creatures. In fact, we play along with that charade.”

Phaedra averted her eyes and I could see that she tuned me out.

I cupped her chin and made her look at me. “You mess this up and you die. The humans you tell will also die.”

“What about me? I was a human and knew you were a vampire.”

“I was ordered to kill you. I didn’t because I fudged the rules. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but the last thing I wanted was to turn you.”

“What happens now?”

“You’re one of us. You get to live.”

Phaedra lay back into the sleeping bag. She closed her eyes and turned her head.

“When you get hungry, let me know.”

“Just thinking about blood,” she whispered, “makes me want to throw up.”

I watched for a moment. She remained still and her aura cooled.

I returned to my gear. I cleaned my pistol-it wasn’t dirty but I was nervous and needed something to do. I emptied the three magazines and polished the cartridges. I reloaded the magazines and put the extra loose rounds in my pocket.

We weren’t that deep in the forest, but we were far away enough from the road so that the distant growl of motorcycles was obvious in the silence.

Was it zombies?

The motorcycles stopped in the vicinity where I’d parked the 4Runner. One engine cut off, followed by another. Two bikes.

I told Phaedra to keep quiet. I went outside and found a spot behind a growth of sumacs. I would hide there and observe the path to the morada.

The shiver along my arms relayed that my sixth sense had confirmed the advance of strangers. I waited for the snap of breaking twigs or the crunch of grass, but whoever approached were as stealthy as lynx.

An orange aura shimmered beyond the trees.

Vampire.

I stayed down despite the fact that my aura marked my position.

The vampire had red hair and a complexion like she’d rubbed her face with strawberries and dotted her cheeks with cinnamon sprinkles. Her hair was gathered back and draped behind her shoulders.

Jolie.

I felt the elation of recognizing a familiar vampire, then realized that she was here for the same reason I was. As an enforcer. I also realized that the crow I’d seen earlier was a spy and that it had been sent to confirm where I was.

Jolie’s aura glowed with guarded anxiety like mine would if I had to deliver bad news to a friend. She wore a black-and-red Joe Rocket motorcycle jacket and matching racing pants. The armored pads on her arms and shoulders exaggerated her muscularity. She moved like she was skating in slow motion so I knew she was using levitation to lighten her footsteps.

I had heard two motorcycles. Where was the other rider?

Jolie’s eyes locked onto me. The fuzz of anxiety on her penumbra sprouted short quivering tendrils. She relented from the levitation. Her heavy motorcycle boots tromped through the grass and forest debris.

She let a backpack slide off her shoulder and held it in gloved hands.

I stepped in front of the junipers and kept my pistol in a loose grip. I didn’t want to signal anything threatening. Jolie and I had a history.

If there was one vampire I never wanted to harm, it was Jolie, and here she came on a mission that might include punishing me. If I had to shoot Jolie, 45 slugs wouldn’t do much good unless they were silver.

She halted a half-dozen paces from me. Her severe expression matched my mood.

I asked, “Where’s the other vampire?”

“Right here.” The growl came from my left.

He was a squat muscular Asian in black armored riding leathers. He passed soundlessly through the junipers.

“You got a name?”

“Nguyen Trotsky Hoang.”

“You were named after a commie?”

“No. I was named after my uncle. Let’s stick to business. Where’s the girl?”

I gestured to the morada.

“Did you…” Jolie started.

The answer had to be either kill her or turn her.

“I turned her.”

The tendrils from Jolie’s aura shrank with relief. She zipped open the backpack and withdrew a long leather pouch. She undid the leather thong wrapped around one end.

Jolie peeled the pouch back like a foreskin and exposed an exceptionally phallic-looking wooden stake, the blunt end made of silver. I winced at the pungent odor of hawthorn resin, poisonous to vampires. She removed the blunt end and revealed a sharpened wooden point reinforced with veins of silver. A stake made of hawthorn and silver was the most effective and painful of weapons to use against a vampire.

“Who’s that for?” I asked.

Nguyen said, “You.”

My guts turned into pulp. I’d compromised the Great Secret and, despite the warnings, had forced a good friend into killing me or compromising herself.

Jolie cinched the thong around the stake and dropped it in the bag. “The Araneum knows we are friends yet they also gave me this.” She pulled out a short knife in a leather sheath tooled in a woven pattern. The handle of the knife was filigreed with yellow gold and platinum. Rubies decorated the pommel. The knife looked designed by the same craftsmen who made the messenger capsules.

She unsheathed the short curved blade. “I was to skin you.”

Nguyen’s mouth curled into a grin.

Not only was Jolie to kill me, she had orders to bring back my skin. Nguyen was to make sure it would get done. For an instant I felt that blade slice through the membrane holding my skin to my flesh, followed by the hellacious agony as the skin was ripped free. The imagined sensation scorched me to the marrow. I pictured Jolie flaying my body and folding the bloody envelope of my skin-I saw my face as a loose bag, the eyeholes, nostrils, and mouth sagging into ragged ovals.

Could she skin me?

Could I kill her?

My only escape was to murder these two, but more enforcers would be sent after me, and more after that until I was caught and my skin turned into parchment. I had forever to run and the Araneum had forever to catch me.