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you’re messed up.”
    At the time, Elizabeth had jeered at the term “messed up,” for Saloman’s arrival had filled her with the complete happiness only he had ever brought her. But now, in his absence, she acknowledged her friend’s perception. She was messed up, had been since she’d first met him. But if Joanne knew the truth—that Elizabeth’s handsome and charming lover wasn’t merely mysterious, but also the most powerful vampire who’d ever existed—she wouldn’t put the cause down to his looks.
    Joanne said, “So you’re hesitating over whether to apply for the job? Apply now and worry later.”
    Elizabeth shifted in her seat. “Actually, I already applied. They’ve offered me the post. I just have to decide whether to take it.”
    Joanne finished her coffee and set down her mug before rising to her feet. “Bite their hands off,” she advised, swinging her bag off the floor and onto her shoulder, to the imminent danger of the mugs that would undoubtedly have been knocked to the floor if Elizabeth hadn’t seized them out of harm’s way. Behind Joanne, a passing waiter stared at Elizabeth, wide-eyed. She must have moved too fast.
    “I’ll miss you, of course,” Joanne added, oblivious to the entire incident.
    “No, you won’t; you’ll come and visit me or I’ll never speak to you again.” Which was another point against accepting. In Budapest, Saloman’s own city, there would be untold distractions from the world of academia—leaving love out of it, there were vampires and hunters and an inevitable conflict waiting to erupt, which would place her squarely in the middle. Could she really hope to keep Joanne out of that?
    But traipsing downstairs in her friend’s wake, Elizabeth couldn’t help feeling a secret leap of excitement at the prospect of moving to Hungary. Outside the Victoria Café, it was raining, a fine, misty drizzle that seemed to exemplify the Scottish summer. Dull.
    “Well, back to the grindstone,” Joanne said happily enough. “What are you up to for the rest of the day?”
    “I said I’d do a favor for a friend—visit this wounded soldier in Glasgow.”
    “Badly wounded?” Joanne asked in quick sympathy.
    “Badly enough, but he’s pretty well recovered physically. Apparently he’s still traumatized.”
    “Sounds like a worthy but fraught day for you, then,” Joanne observed, lifting her hand in farewell. She was clearly anxious to get back to her books. Elizabeth watched her scuttle across Market Street with a feeling that came close to envy. Once, being lost in academia had been enough for Elizabeth too. And visiting an injured soldier would have aroused a much simpler compassion in her, without this guilty, nagging hope that because the British vampire hunters had asked her to go, he’d have something paranormally intriguing to say.
    She was bored, she realized with some surprise. Achieving her doctorate had been satisfying; writing the book had been fun; research and teaching at some academic institution were still a necessary part of her ambitions, to say nothing about putting food on the table. Six months ago, desperately trying to keep her life stable and normal in the midst of unasked-for and unwanted new responsibilities and dangers, she wouldn’t have believed this was possible; yet now, perhaps influenced by her earlier shiver of anxiety, she actually missed the menacing world of darkness and vampires: a world in which her mind and body could both stretch without hindrance, and succeed.
    She missed Saloman.
     
    With the sound of the vampire’s preternatural scream splitting his ears, Senator Grayson Dante knew it had all gone horribly wrong. Dante thought back to the accounts he’d read of Saloman’s awakening, taken from Elizabeth Silk’s testimony. She too had found an empty underground chamber, except it had turned out not to be so empty. She’d been bleeding from a thorn prick and surmised that it was the drops of her blood that had