I picked at a scab through the hole on the right knee of my jeans. It was a lulu. I’d fallen down a hillside while out looking for American ginseng. It was called devil’s club, for some reason. Good stuff, and Gran always needed more. She’d scolded me when I came home with bloody knees.

The owl ruffled its feathers. I pulled back into myself, all the misery in the air pressing down on me. Gran had taught me how to make myself a fist inside my head, to shut out the confusing babble of other people’s feelings. But the touch hadn’t warned me that she was about to leave me.

Dawn was coming up. Gray light brushed the horizon. I didn’t want to leave her here, alone in this bleached place that reeked of despair. But I couldn’t hang out much longer—an adult would remember I was here and wouldn’t be fobbed off by me saying my dad was on his way. I didn’t exactly know what would happen then, but I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.

Oh, Dad. Please hurry. Please be coming here.

The elevator at the end of the hall dinged. My head jerked up, like an old dog’s. The elevator had been going off all night, each time making that wheezing little bell sound, like it couldn’t possibly open its door after mustering up all its energy to announce it was here.

“There she is,” someone said. I glanced down the hall in the opposite direction without turning my head, using my peripheral vision. It was a heavyset redheaded nurse, her hands on her hips. Behind her was that doctor, quick and ferret-like in his white coat, and a woman in a flowered dress that screamed “social worker.”

I slid off the chair slowly, as if I hadn’t heard them. The elevator door was opening. I couldn’t make it all the way down there unless I started running now. But I could jag down the stairs and escape that way.

I still had the Packard’s keys. They jingled on their wire loop, and I walked, head up, purposefully, toward the elevator.

“Hey! You! Kid!” It was the doctor. He didn’t even remember my name—that was evident. “Hey!”

The elevator’s doors wheezed open. I ran through what I knew of the layout in my head. It was like Gran’s game of What’s On The Table, where I would have to remember and describe every object with my back turned, or after she’d laid a fresh cloth over everything. Good training, she’d said. Use that old meat twixt your ears, Dru. You mind me now.

My heart pounded in my ears. My head was heavy. I heard feathers brush the air as Gran’s owl took off from the windowsill, and a moment of glassy, exquisite pain lanced through me. I didn’t dare look back to see the owl.

Besides, the normal people here wouldn’t see it. That was what “different” meant. It’s just another word for lonely.

Get to the stairs. Once in the stairwell you can get to the ground floor and get out. There’re fire exits, too. Then you can hole up at Gran’s house and—

“Hey! Kid!”

A man stepped out of the elevator. My heart leapt into my throat, started pounding. I didn’t realize I was running until my slapping footfalls threatened to jar my head off my shoulders. A short, despairing sound burst out of me as the doctor yelled again.

The man from the elevator opened his arms. Tall, pale blond crew cut, his jeans creased and rumpled, his T-shirt stained with motor oil. He was always so clean and neat, it was a shock to see him like this. I didn’t care. There were dark deep bruised circles under his eyes, blue like mine. Like Mom’s. His were sharp winter blue, cool and considering, with lavender lines in the irises.

I didn’t wonder or care about that either. I ran right into his hug. I realized the motor oil was splashed on his shirt to cover up something else, something reddish, and I could feel a bandage around his ribs. It didn’t matter. I hugged him so hard he made a slight whoof! sound, and I didn’t let go.

“Dru-girl.” One of his callused hands was on my hair, stroking the tangled flyaway curls. I hugged him even harder.“I came as soon as I could. I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry. Shhhh, honeychild, angel baby. Everything’s all right.”

I realized I was making a low hurt sound, and that my nose was full of snot. All during the night I hadn’t been able to cry, but now something broke loose in me and I began gushing. I tried to keep it quiet, though. I sobbed into his dirty shirt.

The trio—nurse, doctor, social worker—arrived about ten seconds later and started throwing questions at him. He answered each one in his slow clear drawl, and I knew things were going to be okay. He had all the ID and the papers, though God knew how he’d gotten them. I didn’t care. All I knew was that he was there, and that things were going to be all right.

And that I didn’t want to let him out of my sight ever again. Not if I could help it.

Not unless he made me.

By the time I was finished, I’d taken down enough coffee and orange juice to float a small battleship, and my throat was scraped raw from talking. I wanted a bathroom and a long, long nap.

Of all of them, the redheaded Kir reacted the most. His face went through incredulousness, puzzlement, comprehension, and finally anger. It stayed at “anger” for awhile, a thundercloud over his forehead and his aspect on, filling his hair with a wild golden curl and sliding his fangs out from under his upper lip.

I kept half an eye on him.

The blonds—Ezra and Marcus—did most of the questioning, with Bruce interjecting every now and again. Mostly they just let me talk and explain and digress and get nervous, and every once in awhile Hiro would reassure me. “It’s all right,” he’d say. “We know you’re telling the truth.”

Which kind of made me wonder. It’s not the sort of thing you say to someone you believe. And so I instinctively stuck to my decision to leave out little things—like the flushes and cold spells that went through me when I thought of Christophe. And not so little things, like the fact that he’d bitten me. The marks pulsed erratically on my wrist when I got nervous. I kept my sleeves pulled down as if I was cold.

It was unlike any other visit to the principal’s office I’d ever had. I mean, you’d think being called into a room with a bunch of older guys who ran a huge vampire-fighting organization would be like the principal’s office, right? But instead it was . . . weird. It was like they just wanted to listen to me.

They looked at me funny, too. As if I was a mythological creature they couldn’t quite place. I would glance up from my food, away from Kir or away from whoever had asked me a question, and see one of them frankly staring at me. Which made the food kind of turn to a wad of chewable cardboard in my mouth and made me wonder if I had something on my face. It would be just like me to have a bit of egg stuck on my chin while talking to a bunch of bigwigs.

“Then we got here,” I finished lamely. “And after a little bit of confusion, Benjamin and his crew showed up and took me to the room. They say they’re my bodyguards.”

“Calstead and his protégés,” Bruce said. “He’s one of our finest youngbloods. Until you know enough to choose your own Guard, it’s probably best. And the loup-garou, too—Graves?”

“Edgar Hideaki Graves.” Hiro set his fork down with a precise little click. “A finer juvenile delinquent I’m sure we cannot find.”

I half-choked on a mouthful of very cold orange juice. I almost gave myself a nasal with it, too. Whoa, wait a sec. “Edgar?” I all but squeaked.