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settled his flamethrower more comfortably on his shoulders. “Ladies? After you.”
    “Rude,” Claire said.
    “I was being polite!”
    “Not when you have a flamethrower.”

CHAPTER TWO
     

MICHAEL

     
    I
miss my guitar
.
    That sounded stupid in my head, and it probably
was
stupid, but my fingers ached to be holding the weight of it. Music always stilled the noise inside me, made everything seem orderly, logical, not so out of control and terrifying. From the first time I’d picked up an instrument I’d realized that those sounds that other people made,
famous
people … those could be mine, mine to control, mine to use to speak without words. And that had been more than magic.
    It had been survival.
    Now, without my guitar, I felt naked, alone, out of control. But it would be deeply risky to go back to the house to retrieve anything, much less something everybody would see as nonessential. Maybe I could get to the music store where I taught lessons; thatwas farther uptown, away from where the draug were holed up. Didn’t matter if it was closed. A vampire didn’t have to seriously worry about things like locked doors and steel screens over windows, and entry restrictions didn’t apply to stores.
    I still couldn’t quite reconcile that. I was a
vampire.
    I know, it wasn’t a revelation, exactly …. I had been a vampire for a while now, and before that, I’d been half vampire, half ghost, trapped in my house, put on hold between life and death. But until today, I hadn’t felt so … wrong. So alien.
    So not myself.
    Naomi, who had taken more interest in me than the others, had warned me this would happen, that I’d start to feel distance between me and the humanity I’d once had; she’d warned me that living as I did, trying to still
be
what I’d been, would start to hurt me, and hurt the people I cared about.
    And she’d been right. I’d proven that, hadn’t I? I’d lost control. I’d
bitten Eve
.
    I’d almost killed her.
    The shirt they’d given me to wear, to replace the one soaked with foul water and wet with Eve’s blood … the shirt itched. It felt wrong. I ripped it off over my head and threw it on the floor as I paced. When I looked down, my skin was too white, the veins too blue. I looked like living marble, and I felt as cold as that, too.
    And inside, I was shaking. My whole world was shaking. It wasn’t just the draug, though we all were afraid of them …. I was afraid of
me
, of what I was, what I was capable of doing to the people I supposedly loved.
    Love. Did I even really know what that meant now? Had I ever really known? What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking, risking her life every time I was around her? I’d thought I had it allunder control, handled,
fixed
, and then … then all my illusions of being in charge of the monster broke.
    I paced, and tried not to think about how
good
that had felt. I hadn’t realized how on guard, how tense, how desperately tight my control had been until I’d been forced to let go.
    Something went very still inside me, and I paused in my rambling, because Eve was coming.
    I heard her walking toward me in the hall, despite the thick carpets; I could smell Eve’s skin, the individual and soft perfume of her.
    The door opened and closed behind me. Now I could smell the peach-scented shampoo she’d used, and the soap, and the salty hot blood beneath all of that.
    I didn’t turn around.
    “Where’s your shirt?” she asked me.
    “It itches,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not cold.” But I was. Room temperature, except when her skin warmed me up. Cold as the dead. “I’m going to go look for something else.”
    I turned then, but Eve was blocking my path to the door. My heart didn’t beat anymore—not often, anyway—but it still felt like a stab straight into it when I looked at her directly. She was standing there, fearless, chin up, with a white bandage on her neck and a scarf trying to disguise the damage I’d done.