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planted rose thorn, which had caused her to bleed all over Saloman’s beautiful tomb. Her ancestry was the key; the blood of Tsigana, one of Saloman’s original killers, flowed in her veins. She was one of the few people in the world who could have awakened him, but she’d done it without meaning to, without even believing in vampires. And in return received a whole a lot of trouble, plus the strength of an Awakener, which made her potentially more powerful than any vampire hunter and a match for even the strongest of the undead. She’d unleashed Saloman on the world and found a love she’d never imagined.
    Her life was enriched, not worsened, by what she’d done. As for the world . . . But she had to speak or she could ruin everything she’d been trying to mend for John Ramsay. Her head began to ache and she rubbed it distractedly while she let a rueful smile form on her lips. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I haven’t decided yet.”
    John said, “When I’m better, do you want to go out for a drink?”
    Elizabeth blinked and must have looked startled, because he said hastily, “Just as friends. I’m not daft. I know you’ve got a husband and twelve kids. But I’m glad you came to see me.”
    Elizabeth smiled. “So am I. And I’d love to go for a drink as friends, even though I don’t have any kids. When will they let you go home?”
    “Soon,” he said with new confidence, and Elizabeth thought that it was probably true now.
    She rummaged in her bag for a pen and a scrap of paper. “I live in St. Andrews,” she said, “but I’m away a lot. I’ll give you my number and my e-mail address. If you write yours down for me too, then we can stay in touch. If you want.”
    “I want.”
    Leaving his room, she felt buoyantly hopeful for him. Though she wasn’t quite sure what the hunters had expected her to do, she suspected that if his story was real, they wanted it quashed. It was one of the basic hunter principles: to keep the existence of vampires secret in order to prevent human panic, chaos, and a vampire war that humans couldn’t possibly win. If an encounter couldn’t be kept secret from the victim, then the victim was sworn to secrecy and occasionally even recruited into the hunter network. John Ramsay was in no condition to be recruited, but everything in Elizabeth had rebelled against denying the possibility of his story. He needed to believe in it and his own sanity in order to move beyond it and recover.
    Which, she thought tiredly, as she trailed back along the long ward corridor, he would do now. A wave of nausea hit her and she had to pause with her hand on the wall, waiting for the moment to pass.
    She should have eaten today, but she’d been too busy rushing off to meet Joanne, and then traveling over to Glasgow. She stared hard at the wall, as if that would throw off the dizziness, but she knew from previous episodes that it would go only in its own good time. In her heart, she knew too that food intake had nothing to do with it. Repressing the familiar surge of panic, willing herself not to faint, she tried to concentrate on her surroundings rather than on the weird, unspecific pain that seemed to grip her entire body, or the exhaustion that made her want to slump to the floor.
    She was standing outside the patients’ dayroom. A few people in dressing gowns and a few more fully dressed sat around reading newspapers and watching the television. The screen was full of a fuzzy, shaking mountain, while the announcer reported a major earthquake in a mountainous region of Peru.
    That is suffering, Elizabeth told herself severely. Feeling tired and sick because you forgot to eat breakfast is just pathetic. Pull yourself together, Silk.
    The pain began to dissipate, the veil of mist to lift from her mind. She was glad to hear, as she eased off the wall and walked shakily down the corridor, that no casualties had yet been reported. It wouldn’t stay that way, of course. In any major