“I did not want to,” Stan grumbled. “Jedrek said I must kill you…or he will kill me. But he is dead now. Everyone who heard the order is dead. So I do not feel that I must kill you now.”

Phineas scoffed. “That’s real sporting of you.”

Stan glanced warily at Robby. “I did not like what Casimir did to you—”

“But ye stood there and watched,” Robby growled. “Ye helped tie me to the chair with silver chains. Did ye enjoy the smell of my burning flesh?”

Stan’s jaw shifted. “Nyet. But I tell you this. If they catch me here, talking to the enemy, they will do things to me that make your torture look like…walk in the park. Instead of thirty pieces of silver, they will take thirty pieces of flesh from me, and the first piece will be my tongue.”

“Then let me kill you now and save you the misery!” Robby lunged toward the stairs, but ran into Angus’s outstretched arm.

“Enough, lad,” Angus hissed softly. He turned toward the Russian. “Are ye thinking of betraying yer master?”

“If you mean Casimir, I never met him till he came here to America and said he was our leader. I am not killer. I never was. I was…farmer. I stayed with Russian vampires because I am Russian, and they helped me learn how to live here.”

“And ye learned how to kill mortals,” Robby grumbled.

“I never killed,” Stan insisted. “I feed from mortals, that is true. But I never kill mortals.”

Zoltan snorted. “He expects us to believe that?”

Stan stiffened. “You are one to talk. You killed my best friend at the Battle at DVN. I lost another friend in South Dakota. You Vamps act like you are…better morally, but when it comes to war, you do the most killing.”

Phineas cocked his head with a grimace. “He has a point there. We’ve been whipping their ass.”

Angus shrugged. “They’re bloody fiends. They deserve to die.”