for themselves. You told me you were a coward, and I guess I should have believed you. But get this. Just because running and covering your own ass are the things you would do in this situation, that doesn’t mean they’re the things I should do, Lucy. I will die for my people, if that’s what it takes.”
She yanked her hand from his and stomped past him, and for one brief instant, as she walked by, he distinctly felt that his words had torn open a deep, deadly wound in her heart, and left it wide and bleeding.
He’d hit a nerve. He didn’t know why. And he regretted it, but he didn’t know how to make it better. There was too much else going on for him to worry about the professor’s hurt feelings at the moment.
She emerged from the tunnel into a cave, the mouth opening to the darkness of the night, and as predicted, a large black Lincoln Continental was parked there waiting for them. Rhiannon and Brigit were already sitting in the backseat, so Lucy yanked open the passenger door and got into the front.
James smelled the smoke and saw the glow coming from the direction of the house, though the woods blocked the mansion itself. He went around and got behind the wheel, then drove out of the cave and across the rough ground. He pulled the car onto the road a half mile from the mansion and headed away from it. A look in the rearview mirror showed him a night sky alight with an angry red-orange halo, and arrow-sharp flames licking at the very stars.
Lucy didn’t speak again that night. Not to anyone. Not even to demand he let her go. He supposed she had figured out that he still couldn’t do that. For one thing, she hadn’t told him where to find the remains of Utanapishtim. And once she did, she would know where he was going next. He couldn’t risk her telling anyone what he was up to until it was done.
And even with all that, all the worry and the remorse and the anguish of having lost friends, relatives, in this war…he still couldn’t quite quell the thrill of challenging his powers to the ultimate extent. Restoring life to a pile of five-thousand-year-old ash.
It was almost dawn when they arrived at a gorgeous—but normal-gorgeous, nothing out of a period fantasy—house on a jutting peninsula that thrust itself into Salem Harbor like a forefinger pointing out to sea.
It looked to Lucy like the kind of place a presidential family would go for a weekend summer break. And yet it was filled with vampires, she was sure of that. She didn’t know how many, but she knew there must be a den of them.
Brigit and Rhiannon hurried inside as soon as the car came to a stop in the curving driveway. Lucy saw Roland in the doorway, as he flung it open to greet them, and she could tell there were others beyond him, though she barely glimpsed them.
“This is Will and Sarafina’s place. They’re friends,” James said softly.
“I don’t care.” She sat in the car, hugging herself, staring at the sea.
“She’s a Gypsy—and a vampire, of course—and he’s mortal. You won’t have to be the only human around anymore.”
“I told you, I don’t care.”
He sighed. “Please come inside, Lucy. I need to find out if there’s any word from my family and—”
“Then go. I’m not setting foot in that house until the sun comes up and the undead freak show closes down for the day, all right?”
He was wounded. She felt it, and she didn’t care about that, either. His words had really hurt her earlier.
“I can’t leave you alone.”
“If you don’t, I’ll never tell you where to find Utanapishtim.”
He blinked at her. She saw, but refused to meet his eyes.
“I want some time to myself. I’m going to go down to that beach, and I’m going to sit there and watch the sunrise, and I don’t want you to bother me. I’m not going to run away. If I did, you’d only find me anyway. But I want this time alone, and if you don’t give it to me, I swear to you, James, I will refuse to help you even if Rhiannon kills me for it.”
And with that she opened the car door, hefted her bag up onto her shoulder, got out and walked away from him. She walked into the darkness, onto the white sand, down toward the water’s