It was a relief to fall into my sheets that night, though my dreams were anything but relaxing. 

I'd always been a vivid dreamer, possibly because of what I was and my ability to pull so many emotions into myself. I often woke with the taste of my nightly visions on the tip of my tongue as if I'd been kissed into wakefulness by the scenes filling my head. That night, I dreamt of Havik and his hawk-like eyes, of Xerex Darhan and his conniving smirk. It seemed I couldn't escape either of them even when they were nowhere nearby.

I also dreamt of Theda, the small, perky woman who dressed in modern clothes and took casual pictures with her cadre. I didn't know what her voice sounded like but I imagined it in my head, and she was screaming somewhere in the dark, imprisoned by chains and the threat of sunlight. Her voice was growing weaker, so much weaker, and the roiling, bubbling nothingness below the lounge on Eighth and Primavera was reaching up through the obstruction of the earth to smother my breath. 

I woke up with that taste in my mouth, a gag of something unliving befouling my tongue. I had barely blinked my eyes open before rushing to the bathroom to wash out my mouth.

Something clicked in my head as I scrubbed my teeth and the toothpaste lathered my lips. The word I had used in passing to give the strange magic I'd sampled a moniker was a perfect description. Unliving.

The misnomer of vampires being called the undead came about because of the nature of their magic and how it waned and waxed simulated the effects of death. This magic I'd taken into myself at the lounge, the stuff that animated Lorro, simulated the effects of life. The magic itself was dead—void—but it held energy, the very substance of life. That was why it felt so wrong.

"What does it mean?" I groaned, leaning on the sink. The porcelain under my fingers was cool, soothing. In the mirror, my scars still reflected an ember of their cyan light, though my skin was less inflamed than it had been the night before. I hurt everywhere as if covered in an unforgiving sunburn, my muscles and skin tender and warm to the touch.

Minutes later, as I sat down to my polished table and began muddling through a half-hearted breakfast, I found a new message from Havik waiting on my phone. The timestamp was just before dawn. 

"Didn't find tunnel exit. Will continue search at nightfall."

Damn. Before falling asleep, I'd hoped Havik would manage to find where the tunnel led and, maybe, find Theda. I should have known such a resolution would be too convenient.

I read the message again, frowning as I bit into my toast and set the phone aside. Shrugging my shoulders, I rose to get ready. It was one more task for me to do today. 

By three in the afternoon, I was already tired but finally able to return to Bob's Bowl-a-Rama. I'd spent much of my morning at the impound lot, attempting to haggle with a hatchet-faced employee who'd dragged his feet when retrieving my rusty junker. The afternoon was spent at the university, where I gave two rushed lectures and spent far too little time writing my next assignment.

As I drove from the college, willing my speedometer to rise higher than thirty, the sun continued to coast toward the western horizon. Night was swiftly approaching. 

I parked outside Bob's Bowl-a-rama and eyed the empty streets and the blank windows bordering the bustling bowling alley's lot. No one noticed me slip away and venture into the bland wasteland of warehouses beyond. 

The fact that no one at all—not a single curious ten-year-old, vigilant mom, seasoned veteran in a fuchsia bowling shirt, or moody teenager—glanced in my direction as I left the obvious safety of the parking lot made me think there might be a witch ward over this side of the block, and it was camouflaging the lounge from casual observation.

What really worried me was that I couldn't sense any ward, which meant it was expertly laid and powerful. 

I kept my ability to myself as I strolled the crumbling sidewalk past the lounge. I walked in the direction the tunnel had led, trailing my fingers across chain-link fences as I paced at a casual speed and let my eyes rove from building to building. The basement of the lounge was too far beneath the earth for me to sense and I was reluctant to push my ability too much today. Yesterday had shown me how little I truly know about it, and how I could get myself into trouble if I wasn't careful. 

"As if I didn't have enough trouble as is," I sighed, sticking my hands into my pockets as I leaned on a fence and took a moment to orient myself. If I wasn't mistaken, the tunnel was below, somewhere under the concrete and asphalt and yellow weeds. Telavar and Havik must have searched this area, but it was a bit of a nightmare, a mess of buildings and no addresses, all mashed together in a collage of battle-worn structures and ruins.

Even two vampires couldn't canvas it all in half of an evening. 

For two hours, I did nothing but walk back and forth along desolate, dirty streets. 

I passed along a wide alley, steering clear of the smaller, dingier ones, though I didn't see anyone else in the area. It wasn't strange for this place to be so abysmally empty, as none of these buildings were operational and thus had no employees or maintenance staff. Who'd would want to wander in an abandoned warehouse district in the late afternoon? 

Besides me, of course. 

Hushed voices brought my head up. The never-ending stretch of barbed wire laced fences was interrupted by an open gate by one of the abandoned warehouses' driveways. A van was backed up outside a raised loading dock door, and a pair of men with crew cuts and an abundance of muscle lingered at the van's tailgate, smoking.

What were they doing here?

I snuck through the gate's opening without being seen and sidled up to the warehouse's outer wall, peering around the corner as I tried to listen in on their conversation. They were a conspicuous pair, too well-dressed to be vagrants and far too intimidating to be hapless tourists. I listened to the intermingling of their words, but couldn't understand a thing they said as they spoke in some form of Arabic. 

One of them flicked his spent cigarette on the gravel driveway and crushed it with his foot. His subtle twist lifted the hem of his jacket, showing off the gun at his hip. 

A third man appeared from the shadowed loading dock. He was thinner and better dressed than the two men at the van, his autumn coat bespoke and lined with brass buttons. A pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses glinted in the light. He looked like he should be behind the counter in a library, not in a condemned area of the east bank.

The man gave the two thugs a bored look as he flattened a loose curl of hair against his skull. "Alright, go get them," he said with a gesture toward the depths of the dark warehouse. 

I tried to see what was inside, but the angle of the orange sunlight made the shadows too thick.

The second man flicked his cigarette aside, and together the two bulky men brushed by the scrawny librarian and entered the warehouse. I watched the librarian take out his cellphone, call someone, and enter into a quiet, stilted conversation.

The men reappeared, carrying a long wood box between them. Initially, I hesitated to call it a coffin because its design was too crude, too simplistic, and aside from its shape it looked just like a battered shipping crate. But, as the two men carelessly dropped the box from the loading dock to the van's bumper, something—or someone, I should say—inside the box snarled with rage and indignation.

"Careful!" the librarian shouted, holding the phone away from his ear, covering the receiver. "The box is just pine! It'll break and kill her if you throw it around!" 

Her? I bit my lip as I scrooched behind an overgrown mulberry bush. As the men shrugged and lifted the coffin into the van's bed, I threw out a strand of my ability, aiming carefully for the box. My consciousness remained inside my body, but a small fraction of my thoughts went into that thin line, tasting what essence awaited me. 

It was a vampire in the coffin, as I expected—but what wasn't expected was the essence's familiarity on my tongue. 

It's Theda! She's alive!

I recognized her essence from my trip to her apartment. She was furious, her magic a virtual tidal wave of power trying to rip the blessed nails off her coffin and break the bonds around her. She must be wrapped in chains, but I couldn't be sure without a visual confirmation.

The woman was fighting with every scrap of rage she had—but she was slow with exhaustion. She was tired, but strangely not hungry. I didn't sense any hunger in Theda's magic, though I did detect the beginnings of hopelessness radiating like a bitter, rotten glaze maligning her soul.

Fists clenched, I watched the scene unfold before me.

What could I do? I was a willowy, inactive collegiate woman and Theda was being thrown into a van by two large, armed men being supervised by a third who had the look of magical inclination. I quickly threw a whisper of my soul around all three of them, though I grew dizzy from the distance.

The large men were just human, but the blond librarian was a magi.

A magi's essence and magic were different from the calm, cold mire of a vampire's or the crackling storm of a Fae's. The magi carry an internal inferno, an uncontrollable blaze they must bind to spells or runes in order to harness its energy. The guy standing at the end of the loading dock had his magic tightly wound in a column of red fire.

If he'd been alone, and if I'd been able to sneak up on him, it may have been possible to slam my soul into his magic and to throw it out of control, wounding or disabling the magi—but it was also possible he would retain control of his powers and I'd find myself cornered by a pissed off magic user, making no mention of the two human gunmen. My soul didn't work against them.

There was nothing I could do but watch Theda get packed up like luggage, and it infuriated me.

The men shut the back of the van up with a clatter of doors closing.

"What are you doing?" the magi demanded, once more holding the phone away from his mouth. He gave up trying to converse with whoever was on the line and snapped the phone shut. "You're supposed to move the other one as well."

The men ignored him as they walked to the van's front. I shrunk closer to the wall, kneeling down into the dirt and high, prickly weeds as I willed myself to be invisible.

The magi let out a sound of aggravation. "Dumb and Dumber, Emial said to get both of them out of here before nightfall!"

Both?

The man going for the driver's seat tapped another cigarette out of the pack he kept in his front pocket. "Fuck Emial. What's he going to do, drink my blood?" His words were heavily accented, almost inaudible to me at a distance. He and his cohort shared a laugh, though I didn't understand what was funny. Wouldn't Emial drink his blood? Why would he not?

"He told you to move both," the magi seethed, stomping out of sight around the passenger's side of the van. I couldn't see him, but the push of his magic was obvious now that I'd tasted it.

"I'm not taking two at a time, khar. There is not room. We come back for second."

The blonde magic user kept up a steady stream of complaints as he got into the van, the door clattering in its track before slamming shut. The van's motor turned over and the headlights blinked on in dazed disorder. They drove out of the driveway and I watched from the weeds, almost desperate to stop them, knowing there was nothing I could do without help—though I did whip out my phone and snap several photos of the van's retreating license plate.

The gate was controlled remotely, because one of Theda's kidnappers must have hit a button to make it start rolling shut. Either that or the magi hit it with magic.

I swore as they turned a corner, disappearing, and the gate locked shut with an automatic buzzer, trapping me inside. Well, that wasn't good.

I hit a contact on my phone and held it up to my ear, waiting. 

"Sibbie Sabrador speaking." 

"Sib," I said, keeping my voice low as I peeked around the corner to where the van had been moments before. From what I could sense, there was no one else nearby, but I wanted to be certain. The loading dock door hung wide open. 

"Grae! What have you been up to? I called your apartment and a guy answered the phone yesterday?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose, wondering what Telavar had told her. "Listen, Sib, I'd love to gossip, but I need your help. Now."

"What's up?" She didn't seem to sense the urgency in my words, worrying me greatly.

"Listen, Sibbie. I'm out looking for Havik's daughter and I found her. I just saw some thugs load her into a van and drive off. I think they're working for Ishcer Emial."

"What the shit? I thought Emial was the one who had you looking for her in the first place?!" Her voice crackled through the receiver, and I realized my best friend was severely out of the loop. What would she do when I told her about the demon and the Fae? "Grae, what are you doing?! Tell Havik to go to the police and get out of there, now!"

"He obviously can't, nor do I think he wants to. He can't prove anything, has nothing to hold against the Baron. Hell, I can't prove anything." I hesitated, glancing around the corner again to where the shadows clinging to the loading dock seemed to beckon me forth. "Or...maybe I can. Sib, I'm going to text you a picture of the van's license plate. Do you think you can find out who owns it?"

"Of course. But, Grae—." 

"Call me when you get it." I hung up on her. I knew Sibbie was going to call me an idiot, tell me to get my bony, book-learned butt home—but I was so close. Maybe I could find some indication of where they'd taken Theda. "Both," the thin man had said. Load them both, meaning there was someone else inside. Was it another victim? Another vamp Ishcer had seized and held captive?

The gravel snapped under my sneakers as I dashed across the driveway and lifted myself atop the concrete foundation, standing beneath the loading dock's metal door. I slipped inside the warehouse and peered into the darkness, listening and waiting.

No alarms sounded. Nobody came running, yelling at me to stop or to get out.

I crept forward, one foot in front of the other, my eyes wide so I could see what little there was to be seen. The warehouse was barren and almost fully dark but for some sunlight coming through the broken windows high above. Huge sheets of semi-opaque plastic hung in twisted curtains from the black rafters three stories above my head. The concrete floors were pitted, the columns holding up the structure busted to reveal the rebar inside. The metal looked like a spine, the concrete the flesh that had been torn aside to display bones.

I shivered at the imagery.

A system of tipsy balconies and scaffolding hung above one side of the warehouse, and below that a blue light—faint and flickering—signaled beyond a wall of that thick, dirty plastic.

I approached it, ears perked for any sound, breathing in the plumes of dust and decay. I didn't need my extra ability to be able to taste the harsh sting of something abrasive like bleach or antiseptic alcohol on the back of my tongue.

What am I doing? I needed to get out of there, and quickly.

My fingers were shaking as they brushed the plastic's face, the material too thick and heavy to sway at my touch. I watched the electronic light flickering on the other side of the makeshift wall and waited for a shadow to cross it, or for the sound of footsteps scraping over the chunks of concrete to reach my ears.

Silenced reigned. The plastic creaked on its rusty moorings.

I stepped around the sheet and shoved myself through a slit cut into the material. I blinked for a moment, trying to get my bearings as I studied the small space separated from the rest of the warehouse. Here, black and yellow extension cords stretched in every conceivable direction, plugged into surge protectors, coiled in large mounds, while there were several scuffed, dented freezers whirring quietly, all neatly lined up, interspersed by racks of sharp instruments. The second pine coffin sat open and bare at the foot of a large metal surgical table.

On the table was a man—a vampire. His emaciated arms and legs were trussed and restrained by leather cuffs and chains thick enough to hold a rampaging bull. A metal bar encircled his ribcage, pinning his bare body to the table's reflective surface. Given that it was daytime, he was either asleep or dead, I couldn't tell which.

A large lamp with several unlit bulbs hung above the table, unused medical tubing and apparatuses dangling from a bar encircling it. The lamp reminded me of the lighting fixtures used in a dentist's office, the ones with handles on the side where the dentist could reach up and pivot it around to see into a patient's mouth as he or she drilled into their teeth.

I approached the table cautiously, eyeing the length of the vampire's untrimmed nails and matted hair. How long had he been here? Was he even alive?

I spilled an ounce of my talent into my hand, holding it above the vampire so it could drip down onto him. Immediately, this creature's fear was a heady, tremulous force that grabbed onto my senses and tried to drag me down with it. My heart started racing, but I pushed the fear away and concentrated on the vampire, trying to find a scrap of his soul's magic. When asleep, even the old ones couldn't completely absorb their magic into themselves like they could when they're awake. If this guy was still alive, I'd be able to sense it.

As slender fingers of my ability dipped through the vampire, I tasted nothing. Not an iota of his magic. He was dead. I studied his sunken face, spotted the marbling of his veins around his orbital sockets and the corners of his white lips. Yeah, there was nothing here. I began to withdraw.

A thought occurred to me, and I froze, sucking in a breath.

Nothing.

I shut my physical eyes and poured more of my soul out my body, covering the inert creature before me, sinking through his papery skin and hardened bones. I sensed nothing from him—nothing at all. The fear and hunger which hung around him were old emotions slowly dissipating into the atmosphere around him. Theda's rage spoke to me from an empty surgical table at the other end of the enclosure. That emotion was fresh, livid, and trailed in the direction of the loading dock like bloody footprints.

The creature I hovered over wasn't dead. He was filled with that existential nothingness, that twisted magic from the lounge, that unliving energy which bubbled around his heart like plush black velvet. The vampire held no emotion. No hunger. No fear. No anger. Nothing but the energy which animated Lorro Di Stefano and came out of those odd amulets.

If the other vampires dumped across Roccia Nera had been experimental failures, then this creature surely was a success. His soul had been scooped out and his body refilled with that artificial magic.

I looked again at the marbling about his temples, recalling the same discoloration on Dominick, the cemetery and Amondale vampires—and on Lorro Di Stefano. Lorro, who fed upon his children and was becoming something else entirely.

This wasn't a vampire. This was a revenant.

I was leaning over a goddamn revenant.

White, milky eyes snapped open, sensing my proximity. I looked at it and it looked at me. Lips pulled back over yellowed fangs, and an unearthly scream rose from its rotting mouth.