Wherever she was now, she was no doubt reveling in the fact that she’d broken my heart, and that she’d thrust Lucas into the very last place he would ever want to be.

I’d rather be dead, Lucas had always said. When I was alive and so much more innocent, I had dreamed of him becoming a vampire with me. But he had been raised by the hunters of Black Cross, who loathed the undead and pursued them with the passion of a cult. Turning into a vampire had always been his ultimate nightmare.

Now that nightmare had come true. “How long?” I said.

“Minutes.” Balthazar took one step forward, saw the expression on my face, and came no closer. “Vic should go.”

“What’s happening?” Vic’s voice was scratchy with sleep. He pushed himself upright, and his expression shifted from confusion to horror as he looked at Lucas’s body, bloody and pale on the floor. “Oh! — for a sec, I thought I’d just had a nightmare or something. But this — it’s real.”

Balthazar shook his head. “I’m sorry, Vic, but you need to leave.”

I realized what Balthazar meant. My parents, who had always wanted me to follow in their footsteps, had told me about the first hours of the transition. When Lucas rose as a vampire, he would want fresh blood — want it desperately, as much as he could get. In the first frenzy of awakening, his hunger could push every other thought out of his mind.

He’d be hungry enough to kill.

Vic didn’t know any of that.

“Come on, Balthazar. I’ve gone this far with you guys. I don’t want to leave Lucas now.”

“Balthazar is correct,” Ranulf said. “It is safer that you leave.”

“What do you mean, safer?”

“Vic, go,” I said. I hated to push him away, but if he didn’t understand what was going on here, he needed a dose of harsh reality. “If you want to survive, go.”