Jon poked his head out of the pass-through to look at Meena.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going to get a couple of Cokes and avoid the whole being-rolled-up-in-a-carpet thing, ’kay, Meen?”

She glared at him. “Yeah, real great, Jon.” She looked at Alaric. She could handle this. It was no different than one of Taylor’s I’m-so-fat tantrums. Well, maybe a little different. “Look, Mr., uh, Wulf. I appreciate your trying to warn me about this. I really do. But there’s no such thing as vampires. They’re made-up. We writers made them up. I’m sorry we did such a good job that we made the whole world paranoid, but it’s true. They’re fictional. Blame Bram Stoker. He started it.”

“No, he did not, actually,” Alaric said. “They existed long before Stoker was ever even born, in almost every culture and on almost every continent on this planet. They are like mosquitoes…they feed off the blood of others. They cannot exist without a host.”

“And how do you,” Meena asked, playing along, “know so much about them?”

“I battle vampires almost daily in my profession,” he said in a bored voice. “They are loathsome and brutal creatures. A group of them almost killed my partner some months ago.”

“Oh, really,” Meena said. She’d crossed her legs and was now jiggling one bare foot up and down. Vampires! Seriously?

Get over it, Harper, Shoshona had said. They’re everywhere. You can’t escape them.

It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t she escape stupid vampires? Work, TV, Leisha’s salon, and now here, at home.

They really were everywhere. Even handsome-but obviously deranged-strangers who broke into her apartment, trying to kill her, were raving about them.

“They cornered us in a warehouse outside of Berlin,” he went on, looking far away. “It was partly my fault. I got cocky. I thought there were not so many of them and that we could take them. But there were more than I thought, and they caught us by surprise. Here.” He reached into the inside pocket of the dark, close-fitting sports coat he wore. “This is a picture of how my partner looks now. His name is Martin.”

What Meena saw when he handed her the photo sent a physical shock wave through her. She wasn’t expecting…that. It was a picture of a man with half a face. Where his features should have been on the lower half was only skull. It had clearly been shredded by fangs.

Meena could only stare.

Alaric took the photo from her limp fingers and said, putting it away, “But a photo, I know, doesn’t prove anything. Next you will say what happened to his face could have happened in a car accident.”

Meena stammered, “I…I wasn’t going to say that.”

She didn’t know what she was going to say. She looked over at Jon. He was still busy in the kitchen with the sodas. She wished he would hurry up. She was feeling less and less certain that Alaric Wulf was actually deranged with every passing second.

Why that should be more unnerving to her than the alternative, Meena wasn’t sure.

“Here,” Alaric said. “These are photos of the four girls who’ve been recently murdered in your city, their bodies found in city parks the next morning, naked and drained of all their blood.”

He scattered four photos onto the coffee table in front of Meena. They were pictures of the women, taken from the chest up. The one thing they all had in common was the multiple bite marks they had not just on their throats, surrounded by ugly purple and green bruising, but all over, as if they’d been savagely attacked by someone…

Or something.

Meena gazed down at the photos. Jon, coming back from the kitchen holding three glasses of soda, joined her on the couch and stared down at the photos as well.

“These are the girls they’ve been reporting about on the news?” he asked.

“Yes,” Alaric said.

“But it didn’t say anything about them having died from being bitten,” Jon said. “It said they died from being strangled.”

“Because the mayor’s office doesn’t want to start a panic,” Alaric said.

“But you’re not saying Lucien did this,” Meena said in a faint voice, still unable to tear her gaze away from the photos. She worked in a world where photos like these were faked every day…a world where duping viewers into believing something this incredible could happen was what she and her fellow writers strived for. She was trying desperately to find some sign that these photos had been faked, that they’d been an invention of someone like herself or Shoshona.

But the images looked heartbreakingly real. She recognized the girls’ faces from photos she’d seen on the news. Photos that had carefully shown nothing below the chin.

“No,” Alaric said, taking a sip of his soda. “The prince is not behind these murders…insofar as he himself did not commit them. But one of his kind did. One of his minions.”

“Minions?” She stared at him. “You said I’m a minion.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Different kind of minion. To become a vampire, one must be bitten three times, then drink the blood of one’s host. I take it that you didn’t do that last night, did you?”

Meena’s eyes widened with horror. Jon, sitting back on the ottoman, raised his eyebrows to their limits.

“Whoa,” he said. “I’ve heard of some kinky stuff, but that’s-”

Meena interrupted him.

Because, really, she’d heard about as much as she could.

“Excuse me,” she said, knowing she was lashing out because suddenly, she was frightened…frightened of the photos she’d just seen but had no rational way to explain. But more than that, frightened of some things she’d suddenly begun to piece together in her mind. “But you can’t just come in here and expect us to believe that there’s this gigantic vampire conspiracy out there that the rest of humanity knows nothing about but that my boyfriend is the head of, and that you, somehow, have been privy to. I mean, what are you, anyway? Some kind of vampire hunter?”

“Yes,” Alaric said simply.

Meena sagged against the back of the couch. “Oh,” she said. “Right. Of course you are.”

Because after the week she’d had, what else was he going to be?

“Seriously?” Jon asked. He looked excited. “How do you get a job like that? Are there benefits?”

“You have to begin training very young,” Alaric said, not taking his gaze off Meena. “And there’s a hiring freeze right now.”

“Yeah,” said Jon. “Of course. There are hiring freezes everywhere. But the thing is, I think I would be exemplary in a position like that. Because you know, I’m very good with my hands, and I’ve always really, really hated vampires. I mean, Dracula was like my favorite movie when I was a kid. Tell him, Meen. The part where they stake him-”

“Decapitation is more effective,” Alaric said, still not taking his gaze off Meena.

“Now, see,” Jon said, “I’d be even better at that. I was on my high school baseball team. I could really swing a bat. Meena, seriously. Tell him.”

Meena didn’t say anything. She was watching Alaric. He’d reached into his inside pocket again. This time he pulled out a small gold medal, which he flung down onto the center of the coffee table as casually as if it were a coin. Jon snatched it up and held it toward the light from the lamp beside the couch.

“Cool,” he said, squinting at it. “What is this? I recognize this. On one side…isn’t this…?”

“The papal seal,” Alaric said in the same bored voice he seemed to use habitually.

“The Pope?” Jon glanced at him. “No way.”

“That is my employer.” Alaric continued to stare at Meena. She stared right back at him. She noticed in a detached part of her brain that his mouth was too small for the rest of his face.

The rest of her brain was screaming that it couldn’t be true. It wasn’t true. She and Lucien had had that whole long conversation about vampires, back at his apartment…

Oh. God.

“And what’s this on the back?” Jon asked. “Meena, here, you look at it.”