“Actually, other than the whole ‘mortal peril’ thing, it wasn’t that bad.” I sighed. He pulled his shirt over my head and covered my blood-soaked bra. “I’m OK.”

“I—”

“Don’t,” I told him, tapping my finger against his lips. “Just get us out of here. I need some juice and a cookie.”

“Blood-donor jokes are not appropriate right now.” He growled.

“It’s my blood loss, and I will joke about it any way I please,” I said, slumping against the wall as Cal tried the door again.

Several failed experiments later, we discovered not only that the handle made it very difficult for Cal to open but also that there was something holding the lock in place from the outside. Cal rolled up the leg of his jeans and ripped a black canvas holster away from his leg. He unsheathed what seemed to be a short bronzish sword, broad and flat, shaped a bit like an oak leaf. It was the perfect length to wear against his calf, just less than two feet. It looked worn, old, but cared for. It shone in the dim light as he tapped it against the door, looking for a weak point in the lock mechanism.

“What—what the hell is that?” I spluttered.

“It’s my sword.”

“I can see it’s a sword. But how long have you had it?”

“When I tell you these things, they tend to send you on conversational tangents.”

“Cal.”

“A long time,” he admitted. “I carried it into battle as a human. It’s not as impressive as some of the other specimens I’ve collected over the years, but it’s the one I’m most comfortable with.”

“Are you telling me that all this time, you’ve been walking around with a sword strapped to your leg?” I yelled.

“I never leave home without it,” he said.

“How do you get through airport security?”

He grinned, shoving the blade through the mechanism holding the door shut and twisting it viciously. The innards of the lock tinkled to the cement pad like broken toys. He wrapped his shirt around the handle and yanked the door open.

Cal burst out of the building in full vamp mode, expecting whoever had shut us inside to be waiting for us. But the clearing was empty, quiet, oddly removed from the blood scene inside the shed.

I took deep lungfuls of the clean, cool air, feeling suddenly dizzy. I’d come very close to dying. Again. It was a habit I seemed to have picked up since meeting Cal. And the idea that I could have been killed in some bizarre vampire sex accident scared me. The idea that I could have left Gigi alone, to fend for herself, scared me. But none of these things scared me nearly as much as the fact that some dark, perverse side of my nature was screaming at me to drag Cal back into the shed and do it all over again.

I was going to need serious therapy if I survived this.

I looked up to find that Cal was watching my every move and expression, as if he expected me to burst into hysterics at any moment. I wasn’t 100 percent sure that he was off base with that. I reached into my backpack and pulled out a pack of Skittles. I needed blood sugar, and I needed it quick.

“You feeling OK?” I asked, deflecting.

“Oddly enough, yes,” he said, stretching his arms over his head. “I feel energized, better than I have in weeks.”

Now would not be the time to mention that the energy most likely came from snacking on live, human me. Instead, I chewed my fruity candy, slumped against his bare chest, and leaned my head against his collarbone.

“Good.” I sighed as he lifted me. “You can carry me home.”

15

If you choose to let your vampire guest feed from you, keep a heavy silver object handy. Also, remember to take vitamin and iron supplements.

—The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

I managed to get back to the house before collapsing completely. Cal propped me up on the couch, forcing as much orange juice into my system as possible and covering me with a soft blue fleece blanket. He tried to make me some toast but nearly set my kitchen on fire. So I settled for valerian tea and lemon drops.

I was going to need serious therapy and a new toaster.

As far as we could tell, whoever was running the grow operation had returned to the site and seen us rooting around in the shed. But their decision to eliminate the problem “naturally” by dosing Cal with pollen from the fangwort plants left us with even more questions. Did they know what we were looking for? Did they know that one of us was a vampire, or had they just assumed and hoped for the best? Did they know that they’d dosed Cal, specifically? I guessed that they probably didn’t. If so, I said, they probably would have stuck around to see the job finished.

Cal seemed to find that insulting.

I hadn’t quite processed the whole thing. I was tired and weak and really wanted the “mortal peril” business to stop. I had wanted Cal, wanted him desperately. But that sort of encounter was very different for me. It didn’t feel wrong, but the idea that I had that sort of passion in me, that sort of violence, scared me.

There was no reason for fangwort to have this effect on vampires. I couldn’t find any chemical or physiological reason for the plant to make Cal all bloodthirsty. I found that frustrating to the point of throwing one of Jane’s books across the room. Unfortunately, Cal was in the way at the time and took my books away for the rest of the night.

He also said, for the safety of his cranium, that I should just chalk the strange vampire reactions up to “general mystical forces” for now.

Another irritating mystery was Cal’s ability to pull back from bloodlust and settle for plain old lust. From what we’d read, the vampires affected by the poisonings were so overwhelmed by thirst that they tore their victims apart indiscriminately, even if those people were close friends or lovers. And if I tried to ask him about it, he found creative ways to leave the room.

It was doubly upsetting to Cal, knowing that a vampire of his age had lost control so quickly and that the substance was capable of affecting vampires in airborne form. He’d been lost, he said, to the call of my blood, even though he knew it was wrong and he didn’t want to hurt me. The possibility of it being used as some sort of aerosol weapon against vampires, and therefore the humans around them, seriously concerned him. But considering Cal’s ability to “pull himself out” of his bloodthirsty state, we assumed that the inhaled pollen was less potent than the ingested version. That made sense, as much as any of this made sense. A vampire’s digestive system was a bit more active than his respiratory system.

Once I’d convinced Cal that tearing through the Council offices like a wrecking ball, searching for the person who’d locked us in, wasn’t a good idea, he finally settled down enough to sit still and drink a bottle of clean donor blood. Cal had worked too hard to get the answers he needed to risk exposure through a bloody, destructive tantrum. Besides, if anyone was going to have the stakey hissy fit all over Mr. Evil Pollen, it was me. The courts were more lenient regarding human-on-vampire violence. I could get away with it.

I was afraid that Cal would distance himself from me, either because I was pushing him or because he was afraid he’d hurt me. But rather than shutting down and shutting me out, Cal seemed afraid to let me out of his sight. From the moment I walked through the door, Cal was with me. He helped Gigi cook before I arrived home, to make sure I would eat. When I got into the shower, he joined me and scrubbed my back.

It felt like home. It felt like having a family. It felt … a little claustrophobic.

OK, the shower thing I didn’t mind so much.

But when he tried getting up before sunset so he could “have dinner” with us, I blew up.

“What is going on with you? What if we didn’t happen to have the kitchen blinds closed? Is this because you’re trying to make up for the, uh—” I looked toward Gigi, who was applying herself to her last-minute math homework with too much earnestness to be genuine. “The incident? I told you, I’m fine. It’s no big deal.”

Cal put his reading aside and cast a sidelong glance at my sister. “Gigi, would you mind going into the office and getting a file marked ‘Blue Moon Financials’?” he asked.

“I know when I’m being sent out of the room, you know,” she said, frowning into her salad.

“Good, then you know I’m doing it to avoid being rude to you, which is a mark of respect,” he countered.

She growled and launched a grade-A flounce from the room. “I hate when logic works against me.”

“I told you, I’m fine, nothing a few iron supplements couldn’t take care of,” I whispered, knowing that Gigi was listening outside the door. “If you’re trying to prove to yourself that there aren’t any aftereffects of the pollen—”

“It’s not that,” he said, stroking the still-raw bite mark I’d hidden under a collared Beeline shirt. “I can feel something coming, Iris, something that’s going to resolve this mess. It’s a sort of tickle at the edge of my brain telling me I’m close to a solution. My time here is coming to a close.”

“Oh.” I slumped back against the couch. “Oh.”

I hadn’t thought of Cal’s leaving in days. He was enmeshed in our home now, our lives. I forgot that he only considered it a temporary situation, and an inconvenient one at that. Cheeks pink, I averted my eyes and wanted the floor to swallow me.

“I don’t want to waste what time I have left with you,” he said softly.

“Oh.”

Why couldn’t I stop saying “Oh”?

He smiled, affecting a cheerful tone of voice. “The good news is that I will be exacting bloody, anatomically detailed revenge on the person who nearly killed you—twice. And, of course, you’ll have your life back.”

My expression must have been hurt, because when Gigi walked back in with the file, she faltered a bit. I recovered, smiling. She frowned and handed Cal the file.

Cal flipped through the file, sending a pile of papers sliding into my lap. It was the Vee Balm Inc. Articles of Organization. The papers were filed three years before, in Delaware, a state known for its leniency toward vampire businesses. The papers outlined the initial statements required to form a limited liability company and helped the state track the company’s officers, inventory, and property. I glanced over the papers before handing them back to Cal.

“Hey, what’s this?” I stooped to pick up a battered yellow Post-it half stuck to the third page of the document I was holding. I peeled the note from the page and handed it to Cal.

“It’s just copying instructions,” Cal said, reading the note aloud. “Copy 2x, one to 1420 Hillington Drive, one to PO Box 0609, both Half-Moon Hollow KY 42002/1—PO BOX—SECOND REQUEST—was pissed on phone.”

I took it from him. “Let me interpret for you. It means someone else in the Hollow requested a copy of Vee Balm’s company charter paperwork before you did. And apparently, they had to ask for it twice and were not happy about it. Also, the office staff is careless about where they leave sticky notes,” I said, looking the Post-it over. “Why would someone from the Hollow request a copy of the company’s charter? Was it sent to the Council’s PO box?”

Gigi shook her head. “No. All Council office boxes start with a double zero. It’s a special designation through an agreement with the postal service to get free postage. This is a standard box number.” Cal raised his eyebrows. “What? Sammi Jo’s mom works at the post office.”

Cal stared at us for a long, drawn-out pause, his expression thunderstuck. A wide grin split his face, and he sprang up from his seat. He clutched Gigi’s face between his palms.

“You, my sweet girls, are brilliant,” Cal said, giving her cheek a smacking kiss before lunging for me and giving me a long, wet kiss.