I hissed to Philip.

It sounds cliché to compare Philip to an animal, but that’s what he reminded me of. I mean it. He couldn’t even talk. Culker seemed to know running was a waste of time and backed up against the wall.

Please don’t let him start begging.

Philip was on him in a flash, tearing at his neck, but this time I heard sucking sounds. Often frightened by my own kind, sometimes confused, that was the first time I ever felt ashamed.

“We gotta go,” I whispered. There was no way we could clean this mess up. Better just to leave it.

Philip dropped Culker’s body and stared at me as if he didn’t know who I was. His eyes made me step back.

“No,” he said, finding his voice, red liquid dripping down onto his black shirt and vanishing against the darker color. “Not yet.”

I’d thought the worst was over, but it wasn’t. Putting his own wrist to his teeth, he tore it down to open veins and held it out. “Here, like with Edward.”

For a minute I didn’t get it. Then what he wanted came crashing down, followed by revulsion. “Stay away from me.”

“Like Edward.”

“Philip, don’t.”

Jet’s dead body lay between me and the door. But in the time it took me to glance down at her, Philip had his hand around the back of my head, gripping my hair.

“You know nothing,” he breathed in my ear. “You need me.”

Survival instincts told me to do whatever he wanted and get away as soon as possible—please him and run. But I didn’t. Something snapped. Grabbing his shoulder for support, I rammed my knee into his stomach hard enough to make him spit out a mouthful of Culker’s blood.

“I don’t need your arm.” My own voice sounded unfamiliar. “I don’t want you touching me. You’re sick. You weren’t even hungry, were you?”

He gasped once, eyes glazing over. He didn’t hit me. “But I thought . . .” He looked confused. “You hunt with me now, like with Maggie or Edward.”

“This isn’t how we hunted! Any of us. Maggie left bodies sometimes, but at least she made sure they were drifters or dealers. She always took their ID, and she never killed anybody for any reason but to drain life force. Is this what you do in France?”

“We do as we want,” he whispered. “We are not sheep, Julian and I. And how many have you killed in just this past hundred years? How many?”

“I’m not like you.”

“You are. This moral piety will not comfort the dead.”

His words hurt and left me wanting cool air. I ran into the hall and down to the street, not caring who saw me. The dirt and garbage still sat in large, ugly piles. The baby upstairs still cried.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Philip said into my ear. He must have followed me down, swift and quiet.

“What do you want?”

“For you to be happy, like with Maggie or Edward.”

Was that really his game? He’d been taught by someone that we have to live out our existence alone. Now was he questioning that? He and Julian had once thought me insane or weak for living close to other members of our kind. Did Philip want an instant family? He knew nothing of humans, and even less of vampires.

“You can’t have everything you want,” I said.

“Yes, I can.” He smiled and threw his arms in the air. “We live forever. This is our heaven.”

Before I could respond, he glanced around and spotted an old Firebird among the Volkswagens. “This way.”

Not wanting to follow him, I looked down at my watch. Four o’clock. We’d been inside that apartment for over two hours? Felt like minutes. “All right, but we need to find a hotel. It’ll be dawn soon.”

He didn’t answer but scowled at finding the car locked. Using his right elbow, he smashed the driver’s window and opened the door, then unlocked my side. “Get in.”

“Promise to take me to a hotel?”

“Wherever you want.”

While he worked on starting the engine, I climbed in and watched him. “Why do you always take old muscle cars?”

“These are fast, solid, and they almost never have alarms.”

“I thought you didn’t care about police or getting caught.”

He flashed me a dirty look and whipped out onto the street. My manner with him in the past half hour had been leaning toward foolish. If I wanted any control at all, I’d need to turn the manipulation beacon back on. He just made my skin crawl.

I was normally asleep