He whispered, “Bianca?”

“It’s me. Oh, Lucas, it’s me.”

Lucas clutched me to him in an impossibly tight embrace, and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. I felt hot tears against my shoulder; I wished I could cry, too. Our legs gave out at the same time, and we sank to the floor together.

I glanced over my shoulder to tell Balthazar and Ranulf to leave us, but they were already halfway out the door.

Once we were alone, I ran my hands through Lucas’s hair, stroked his back, and kissed his cheek. “You made it back,” I said. “We’re together. We’ll be okay.”

“I never thought I’d see you again. I thought you were dead.”

“I am. We both are.”

“Then how — how is this real?”

“I’ve become a wraith. Only, wraiths like me who were born to it, born to two vampires — we have powers the others don’t. I can have a body if I want, at least for a while. If I’d realized before … if I could have told you… this would never have had to happen.”

“Don’t say it.” His voice was strangled.

We rested our foreheads against each other, and the contact should have been comforting, but we were both so cold.

“My body feels heavy. Wrong. Dead.” Lucas’s hands tightened on my shoulders. “And yet there’s this hunger making me wild. Driving me insane. You’re back in my arms — I’d lost you forever, and here you are — but the only thing I can think about, the only thing I want — ” He couldn’t finish; he didn’t have to. I knew all he wanted was blood.

“It will get better.” My parents had always told me so, and weren’t most of the vampires of Evernight proof of that?

Lucas didn’t seem to believe me, but he said, dutifully, “Gotta hang on.”

“Right.”

For a few moments, we simply held each other. The faded film-star faces on the tattered movie posters around us seemed to be watching us, an audience of dark, soulless eyes. When I leaned against Lucas’s shoulder, I tried to breathe in the familiar scent of his skin, but that was gone. Either his scent had been lost when he died, or I no longer had a sense of smell like I had before, or both. So many things had been taken from us.