My father, evidently unimpressed by my forensic analysis, rose from the couch and approached me. “I’ve worked hard to bring this family up from nothing. I will not see it torn down again.” His cheeks were flushed crimson. My mother, who’d moved to stand at his side, touched his arm and quietly said his name.

I bristled at the “again,” but resisted the urge to argue with my father’s assessment of our family history, reminding him, “Becoming a vampire wasn’t my choice.”

“You’ve always had your head in the clouds. Always dreaming about romantic gibberish.” I assumed that was a knock against my dissertation. “And now this.” He walked away, strode to a floor-to-ceiling window, and stared out of it. “Just—stay on your side of town. And stay out of trouble.”

I thought he was done, that the admonishment was the end of it, but then he turned, and gazed at me through narrowed eyes. “And if you do anything to tarnish our name, I’ll disinherit you fast enough to make your head spin.”

My father, ladies and gentlemen.

By the time I made it back to Wicker Park, I was red-eyed and splotchy again, having cried my way east. I didn’t know why my father’s behavior surprised me; it was completely in keeping with his principal goal in life: improving his social standing. My near-death experience and the fact that I’d become a bloodsucker weren’t as important in his tidy little world as the threat I posed to their status.

It was late when I pulled the car into the narrow garage beside the house—nearly one a.m. The brownstone was dark, the neighborhood quiet, and I guessed Mallory was asleep in her upstairs bedroom. Unlike me, she still had a job at her Michigan Avenue ad firm, and she was usually in the Loop by seven a.m. But when I unlocked the front door, I found her on the couch, staring blankly at the television.

“You need to see this,” she said, without looking up. I kicked off the heels, walked around the sofa to the television, and stared. The headline at the bottom of the screen read, ominously, Chicagoland vamps deny role in murder.