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probably whoever turned your friend, then sent him after you.”
    “Then . . .” she said, looking around at all the smiling people, enjoying the first night of their weekend, “Vampires.”
    It seemed hard to believe that on such a warm, pretty evening, something so evil could exist.
    But she had just killed one. And she had her arm around the waist of another.
    “It isn’t anyone from my clan, I can tell you that much,” he said. “Your friends at your new job have done excellent work annihilating almost every single one of them.”
    “You told David you rule over all demon life on this side of hell,” Meena said, ignoring his sarcasm. “So how can any of them do something like this without your knowing about it?”
    Lucien’s dark eyes flashed menacingly.
    “I haven’t been very . . . available lately,” he replied.
    She wasn’t sure if his curtness was due to her having touched upon a sensitive subject, or to their having reached an intersection, and the light was warning them to wait. A bus roared by, followed by a dozen taxis, making it impossible to cross.
    She could feel the tension in Lucien’s body, and saw the way he was scanning the crowds of weekend revelers around them.
    She also saw, for the first time, the faint purple shadows beneath those dark eyes of his, now easily visible in the much brighter lights along this street.
    Meena wasn’t quite sure what it meant for a vampire to have shadows beneath his eyes. At no time during her training with the Palatine had this subject ever come up.
    But she was beginning to suspect that despite the impeccable suit and lustrous hair, Lucien had not spent the months since she’d last seen him in some kind of vampire resort, relaxing in a lounge chair in the shade. He had obviously been suffering in some way.
    “Lucien, are you all right?” she asked him. “I mean . . . are you sick, or something?”
    He looked down at her, clearly offended by the question. “I told you,” he said. “I’m fine.”
    “Well,” she said, “it’s just that you don’t seem like your old self . . . not in a bad way,” she hastened to add.
    “How unfortunate,” he said. “I try so hard to be bad.”
    He smiled down at her then. She instantly wished he hadn’t.
    Because Lucien Antonescu’s smile did things to her, things that the smile of a vampire had no business doing to a girl who had joined an organization dedicated to eradicating his kind.
    But there was still a part of him that was human. Or maybe—as she’d recently begun trying to prove—even better than human.
    “You shouldn’t joke about that,” she said, nervously pushing some of her hair from her eyes. “I was serious when I said before that I think—”
    That’s when someone—a kid, walking shoulder to shoulder with a group of his college friends down the sidewalk—slammed right into Meena, as if he hadn’t seen her at all.
    “Oof,” she said as Lucien pulled her protectively against him.
    The kid spun, then landed on the sidewalk. “What the hell?” he complained good-naturedly as his friends laughed at him. He obviously wasn’t hurt, just a little buzzed on beer, and confused.
    “I’m so sorry,” Meena said to him, even though technically, he’d been the one who’d walked into her.
    The kid said nothing, just continued to laugh as his friends pulled him back to his feet, calling him rude names. Lucien, meanwhile, had already steered Meena away from the group, navigating her quickly back down the crowded sidewalk.
    “That was weird,” Meena said. “It was like he didn’t even see me.”
    “He couldn’t see you,” Lucien said.
    “Couldn’t see me?” Meena looked up at him in shock. “What do you mean? How could he not see me?”
    “No one can see us right now,” Lucien said, his face devoid of expression. “It’s called a glamour. I’m afraid I can’t keep it up for long. But it should last us until I can get you back to your apartment. You should be