She bit down hard on her lower lip, drawing her own blood and banishing the memory of his. At least until the hour of nightmares. “You going to tell me the truth?” she asked Sara.

“Slater was normal when he went in as a Candidate,” Sara said. “You know how fanatical the angels are about checking the short-listed applicants. He was scanned, analyzed, damn near split open with all the tests they did. The man was squeaky clean and healthy, in body and in mind.”

“The rumors,” Elena whispered, eyes wide, “we always thought they were urban legends but if what you’re saying is true—”

“—it means there’s one very bad side effect to being Made. A tiny, tiny, tiny minority of the Candidates have their brains scrambled beyond recovery. What comes out of the mess isn’t always human.”

It should’ve felt odd to call vampires human in any sense but Elena knew what Sara was talking about. Humanity, as a whole, included vampires. As Elena knew from her own family, vampires could mate with, and even reproduce with, humans. Conception was very difficult but not impossible, and though the children—all mortal—sometimes suffered from anemia and related disorders, they were otherwise normal. First rule of biology—if it can mate, it’s probably the same species.

That rule couldn’t be applied to those of Raphael’s kind. Angels attracted groupies by the truckload—mostly vampires, though the occasional stunning human was allowed into the mix. But debauchery aside, Elena had never heard of a child coming from a mating between human and angel, or even vampire and angel. Perhaps, she thought, angels simply didn’t sire children. Maybe they considered the vampires their children.

Blood instead of milk, immortality instead of love.

A mockery of a childhood. But then again, what did Elena know of childhood? “Sara—I’m going to need full access to the Guild’s computers and files.”