The whole scene reminded me of this T-shirt Edward once gave me, depicting a hawk swooping down on a cartoon mouse with its tiny middle finger up. The caption read, “Last Great Act of Defiance.”

Dominick wasn’t a mouse—far from it. But he was already dead, and I’m sure he knew it.

Philip moved so fast nobody even got cut. He slapped the machete out of Dominick’s hand and then grabbed him, lifting him into the air. Stepping forward, Philip threw his heavy burden over the banister.

“Just kill him,” I whispered. “You promised you wouldn’t do this.”

A dull thud sounded from below as Dominick hit the floor. Philip hopped over the banister himself, and I moved up to see him land in a comfortable crouch. Dominick tried crawling on one elbow toward the front door.

Something in my voice must have gotten through to Philip. He could have kept this horror show going another hour, but he didn’t. After breaking a leg off one of the living room chairs, he walked over and rammed it through Dominick’s broad back, into his heart, as a peasant would stake a wounded vampire. The broken, crawling form on the floor didn’t even cry out. It just stopped moving.

I turned away from the railing and went downstairs, feeling no relief now, no sense of triumph, only a dim ache that hadn’t quite registered yet. My handsome, blood-covered friend stumbled about the room, staring at his mangled victim. Maybe no mortal had ever fought back like that before.

“I did try to warn you, Philip, to tell you.”

He looked up at me with liquid eyes—no pleasure, no triumph either. For some reason that pleased me. Perhaps Philip might have wept over Thorne’s grave, too. Perhaps he was beginning to understand the sorrow of needless waste.

Instead of answering me, he just kept weaving back and forth like a jack-in-the-box.

“What’s wrong?”

Then I noticed patches of flesh peeking through the blood on his chest. It wasn’t just pale anymore, but nearly white. Reaching out, I caught him before he fell.

“Try to get your arm around my neck,” I said.

The basement bedroom wasn’t far, but I couldn’t carry him. He shouldn’t have jumped off the banister. It was a waste of energy. It seemed to take hours to drag him downstairs through the cellar, his head bobbing up and down with weakness. Would this ever be over? Would we ever get on a plane and just leave this nightmare behind? Was he dying?

No, I pushed that thought away while finally laying him on the mattress in Maggie’s basement. He couldn’t die. We weren’t destroyed by mere wounds.

“Can you talk? Tell me what to do?”

“Blood,” he mumbled.

Long ago Edward told me that vampires who refused or were unable to hunt fell into agonized paralysis, forever immortal, forever starving. Half of Philip’s throat had been blown away. That he could speak at all amazed me. Maybe he’d simply lost too much life force.

“What do I do?”

“Like Edward.”

My own shoulder wound had sealed itself and was regenerating slowly. But I’d been bleeding, too. “Don’t go to sleep. Keep your eyes open.”

I ran up the stairs and down the hall. Dominick’s body was in the same broken position as before—like a filthy G. I. Joe. After pulling the stake from his back, I turned him over. Dead eyes stared up into nothing.

Would this even work? I’d never fed on a corpse, but he’d only been dead a few moments. Maybe I could still draw residual life force.

I drove my teeth into his neck. No pictures or visions or scenes from his life touched me. Nothing. But I felt something, some strength flowing from his blood . . . though it was fading fast.

After a few minutes I couldn’t take any more and left him lying there.

His empty gun was still upstairs, and his ID was in his pocket. I didn’t bother taking either one. Maggie was missing, and he’d recently gone rogue. It could be a while before anyone even found him, and then the police would be lost attempting to unravel what happened. Philip and I would be long gone by then.

Even in death, Dominic had lost. And who would mourn him? Would Wade?

Hurrying back to the cellar took only seconds this time. Philip’s eyelids fluttered. He looked so pale lying there. I moved to the mattress and crawled over beside him. Opening my wrist savagely, I put it in his mouth.

“Bite down.”

Having long since put aside the feeling of Julian’s lips burning and crisping my