James was gone, but my duffel bag had been repacked and the weapons bag sat open beside it. James knew that I had several weapons stashed in secret locations around the room in case I suddenly found myself under attack. He had obviously not attempted to search out all the hiding places, leaving me to the final task of gathering up my toys.

Within five minutes, I had the last of my weapons packed and the bag zipped. I shoved my hands through my hair as I stared down at the leather jacket that lay across the bed. It wasn’t my usual duster, but a softer one that fell only to my thighs. James had left a note saying that he was having the duster mended after the attack in Spain and that he had replaced some of my worn clothes with fresh. So much for a break from the fighting.

But I had had my chance. After returning from Peru in September, Ryan had offered to let me rest and recover from the massacre at Machu Picchu, but I didn’t take it. I couldn’t sit still, had to keep moving, anything to push back the thoughts humming in my brain. So the warlock sent me out to hunt the naturi and vampires on the Continent, still moving, still hunting, but close at hand should he need me.

In Berne, Switzerland, I found an earth naturi wreaking havoc in one of the local hotels. The owner had initially blamed the chaos of broken dishes, upset furniture, and over-r grown gardens on a poltergeist. I was there only two nights before I spotted the lithe creature. Standing barely above four feet and dressed in all red, it resembled a sapling willow tree with long, slender arms that ended with sharpened fingernails. It took me another week of stalking the spindly little monster through the quiet courtyard garden before I finally disposed of it.

In a lonely town south of Liege, Belgium, I encountered an animal clan naturi. In English mythology, the creatures are often referred to as will-o’-the-wisps or hinky punks. The creature was leaving a trail of corpses through the outskirts of the forests of Ardennes. The naturi would often take the form of a large black dog, pretending to be lost or wounded as it lured its prey deeper in the woods. I had initially thought it was a werewolf gone mad without its pack, but the naturi soon proved me wrong.

Then the South of France, to track down a creature that was leaving behind a number of bodies that had been drained of most of their blood. Most had been an assortment of animals like large cats and dogs, but then two children and one adult went missing on three separate occasions. I passed more than a month in the region searching for the vampire that continued to kill even though I was in its current hunting ground. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sense the undead creature.

Dawn had just begun to creep over the horizon one cool morning when I felt the naturi lurking nearby. It was another week before I discovered that I was hunting a naturi from the wind clan. The four-foot, bony creature had bat-like wings that it wrapped around its thin frame when it walked on the ground. It was an odd mix of human and dog with its long, narrow snout and fangs poking just over its bottom lip. This strain of the wind clan had started the old popular fairy tale of the streghe, from the island of Corsica. This one either had moved farther north in search of better hunting grounds or had come through one of the doors that had opened in Europe and was on its way to Corsica. It never made it. I could only guess that it was trying to frame a nightwalker for its crimes against man by taking the blood, since it had no use for it. After two weeks of hunting, I finally destroyed the creature shortly after midnight near the Mediterranean shore.

I had forgotten about Mira until that moment. I had successfully pushed her to the furthest reaches of my mind, burying her under centuries of memories that I never wanted to recall again. Yet, after incinerating the body of the wind naturi, I wandered down to the rocky shore and washed my hands in the warm waters that clapped softly in darkness. Mira had once said that I smelled of the wind and the sea. I had been born in a small village near the sea and could only guess that some part of that beginning was imprinted on my being. And she could smell it, sense it when no one else could.

Up until my travels with Mira, my experiences with vampires had been extremely limited. In fact, they generally didn’t extend much past a few dark threats of torture and death. None had told me about how my powers felt or that I smelled of the sun. For countless nightwalkers, I had been death.

But my relationship with Mira would always be different. More than three months ago, we had bonded in a way neither of us had thought possible. We joined powers and destroyed countless naturi across England. And while she managed to remain sarcastic and indifferent, I could taste her fear that night like stomach acid in the back of my throat.

Both our worlds had changed that night. She became a threat to her own kind and I now had a deep connection to a creature I had sworn to kill. Even now, I could sense her emotions with very little effort. While the emotional world of the vampires had always been open to me, it had been somewhat thin and hazy compared to Mira. Her emotions entwined with my thoughts and soul in such a way that it became difficult to distinguish hers from mine. If I wanted, I could let her wash over me until I was drowning in her. Yet I fought the temptation, erecting mental walls to keep her out, but not before I took a small taste. She was walking down the hall toward my room. She was worried—worried and scared.

My only warning was a soft knock at the door before the lock clicked and Mira walked in. I guessed that she had gotten the room key from James. She had changed out of her blue jeans and into a pair of tight-fitting black pants and dark blue silk shirt that buttoned up the front. Mira paused beside me, looking down at my two bags before walking over to the windows and pulling open the curtains. The view was nothing spectacular, just the front of another building looking down on Bay Street, but for Mira, I don’t think it mattered. She was home.

“I spoke to Ryan about Thorne’s death,” Mira suddenly announced. Her voice was just a pale ghost drifting through the room toward me, soft and ethereal. I jerked at her sullen tone, almost surprised that she had broken her silence.

Standing at the end of the bed, I could see only her profile. Mira leaned forward, touching her head to the glass as her eyes fell shut. I folded my arms over my chest and strengthened the walls around my own thoughts. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want her slipping into my brain, but there was something in her emotions, some chaotic quality that I didn’t want leaking into me either. “What did he say?”

I was stunned she even wanted to discuss Thorne. We had been sent to protect Thorne so that he could replace his maker in the triad. Unfortunately, he was killed shortly after we found him, poisoned with naturi blood. By the tension in her shoulders, the failure continued to haunt her.

“Ryan located the witch coven that killed Thorne. A naturi had contacted them that night and had told them to kill me,” she said, the words stumbling to me. “They hadn’t even been hunting him. He was probably killed because that witch couldn’t be sure which mug I would drink from, so she spiked them all.”

The guilt lacing her tone was unmistakable. She had blamed herself for not protecting him when she first met him and now she blamed herself because he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite her general blasé attitude about life, she took each task assigned to her seriously.

On the other hand, I couldn’t muster an ounce of guilt when it came to the death of the nightwalker. I hadn’t known him beyond the fact that he was a vampire living “out in the open.” In truth, if I had known about him prior to meeting Mira, I probably would have killed him for the danger he posed to the people of London.