LUCAS COLLAPSED UPON THE FLOOR, A STAKE jutting out from his heart.

I fell to my knees by his side. “Balthazar, no! What are you doing?” Just as I grasped the stake to pull it out, Balthazar roughly towed me up to my feet, away from Lucas. I went vapory again, slipping out of his arms easily. “You can’t stop me from taking care of him.”

“Think,” Balthazar said. “We need him to remain quiet while the police are here, and make sure he doesn’t go after Vic. I can’t come up with any other way to make that happen. Can you?”

“There has to be some way better than staking him,” I insisted.

“He is essentially unharmed,” Ranulf said, shaking off the impact of Lucas’s last blows. “The stake through the heart only paralyzes; it does not kill. When the stake is removed, Lucas will be as he was, except for a scar.”

“I know — but — ” The sight of him lying at my feet, crumpled and dead as he had been just a few hours ago, was too raw for me to bear. Balthazar stepped closer. In the relative darkness of the wine cellar, his shadowy form seemed more imposing than usual, which made the contrast with his quiet voice especially striking. “Lucas staked me once to save me. I’m returning the favor.”

“You probably enjoyed it.” I turned away from him then, but already I’d realized we couldn’t unstake Lucas yet. As he was, he was uncontrollable.

“Until we have fresh blood for him to drink, leaving him unconscious is a kindness,” Balthazar said. just when I might have softened toward him, he had to add, “When you calm down enough to act like an adult, you’ll see that.”

“Please do not force me to listen to romantic bickering,” Ranulf said.

Ranulf’s request was simple enough, but it was an uncomfortable reminder of everything that had happened between Balthazar and me — how much more he had wanted, and what I had been unable to give. Although I didn’t think jealousy drove Balthazar’s actions, I wondered if it allowed him to gain some satisfaction by staking Lucas.