in the night before. He was still wearing the mirrored sunglasses, but he had on a different suit: steel gray, with a coordinating gray tie. As he saw me walk up, Warton began opening the car door, but I stopped in front of him. “I need to ask you a question,” I said in a low voice.
Warton’s perpetual frown deepened. He hadn’t expected he’d have to actually speak to me. “What?”
“Beau wants me to find out if any of you have been pressed,” I said. “Do you have any chunks of time missing?”
“No.”
He’d barely stopped to consider it. “How about strong feelings that seemed uncharacteristic to the people you know?”
Warton shook his head. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, lady. If the boundary witch was going to press someone, she wouldn’t pick me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m Beau’s bodyguard. Of the four of us, I’m the one who’s with him every single night. If I were missing chunks of time, Beau would know about it.”
That . . . actually made sense. I gave him a little shrug. “Okay. I’ll check with the others.” I climbed into the car.
“You do that.” Warton swung the door shut and circled to the driver’s side. He’d already put up the privacy screen.
I squeezed my eyes shut as soon as the car door closed, and didn’t open them again until the car slowed to a crawl, its tires biting into brick.
We were back at Oakland.
There were plenty of cars in the parking area, but Warton turned through the redbrick entrance gate right onto Old Hunter Street. It looked dark and deserted as he made the turn, but I felt a quiet rush of something, like wind had slipped in through the closed windows and riffled my hair. Then we were through Tallulah Finch’s wards and the entire grounds suddenly glowed with lines of low, romantic light.
I rolled down my window for a better look. Beau’s people had set out rows of old-fashioned kerosene lanterns along either side of Old Hunter Street and the main pathways, giving the evening a kind of Victorian-parlor vibe. Between camping trips and the army, I had messed around with plenty of lanterns, and I knew what this particular style was called: a dead flame. In the cemetery.
Someone in party planning had a sense of humor.
There were only a few people hurrying along Old Hunter Street when we entered, but by the time we reached the center of the cemetery, it had grown so crowded that Warton was pretty much forced to stop the car. He put it in park, but I didn’t bother waiting for him to come open my door. I climbed out, trying to take in the bizarre sight of hundreds of vampires talking and laughing in the lamplight. It felt like we were at the world’s strangest high school dance.
Maya had been right about the dress code, I saw. There really were women in ball gowns, and plenty of people in jeans. Others were dressed in period clothes, which may or may not have been original.
There was one common factor: almost every single vampire present was white. I’d read somewhere that the population of Atlanta was more than 50 percent black, but I saw only a handful of nonwhites, and most of them were probably mixed race. It looked like Atlanta’s Old World didn’t reflect the diverse, trendy city Tallulah Finch had described. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it couldn’t be good.
Warton came skulking around the car, his mirrored shades in place, his hand lifted as though he was determined to take my arm. I took an automatic step backward, but a jovial voice rang out from my left before either of us could speak. “Why, Warton, what do you have for us?”
I turned to see a tall, gaunt vampire swaggering toward the car. He had probably died in his early thirties, and even in a crowd of vampires, his movements looked predatory. As he came closer I saw that he was wearing the exact same gray suit as Warton, minus the reflective shades.
“This is the evocator,” Warton muttered, tilting his head at me. I hadn’t heard that word in a while, but Nellie used it sometimes. Just another term for boundary witch.
The newcomer gave me a slight bow. “Welcome, Miss Luther. I’m Erasmus Milburn.”
I recognized the name: he was another one of the Four Horsemen. “Nice to meet you,” I said.
Milburn looked at Warton. “I can bring her to meet Beau, if you’d like. I happen