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where Zack sat, looking far too sick.
    Micah stood. “It’s time to go. I’ll get the Jeep.”
    Arturo tossed Micah the keys, and her onetime neighbor left the apartment, vampire-fast. Zack rose slowly and Quinn joined him as they started for the door, Arturo close behind. Quinn stepped into the hallway, eyeing her closed apartment door, and wondered if she’d ever come back here.
    It would take a miracle to get them all out of Vamp City alive.
    But she’d never been one to give up. And she wasn’t about to start now.

Chapter Four
    Q uinn sat rigid in her seat in the back of the Jeep Wrangler as she prepared for yet another return to Hell. Zack sat beside her, asleep against the window. Arturo drove with the top up to hide his passengers as much as possible while Micah rode shotgun as the vehicle sped through the D.C. streets toward the Kennedy Center and the Boundary Circle that separated the real D.C. from Vamp City.
    The scientist in her began to frown as she tried to understand how the two cities occupied the same physical space. Magic, she knew. But still . . .
    She glanced at Arturo. “If you’re outside the Boundary Circle, say crossing into the District from Virginia, how do you choose whether to drive into Vamp City or remain in D.C.? Clearly, the magic doesn’t automatically pull you into V.C., or you couldn’t have reached my apartment.” Or anyplace within the space occupied by both.
    Micah was the one who answered. “At the moment that we hit the Boundary Circle, the magic tries to embrace us. We can either push it away and remain in D.C. or allow it to pull us into Vamp City. There are some vamps who can’t push it away, they haven’t the ability, and are therefore always pulled in. They can only travel the parts of D.C. where the two worlds don’t overlap. Humans and weres can’t embrace the magic, so can never enter V.C. without an escort, except for those handful of humans who’ve been slipping in by accident through the sunbeams, and we have no idea why that’s happening. Traders can come and go as vampires can. Or as vampires could before the magic began to fail. They alone are not trapped by the failing magic.”
    Quinn’s mind still struggled to wrap itself around the concept. “So how does that work for a car?”
    Micah smiled. “You ask difficult questions, Quinn.”
    “I’m a scientist.”
    “Perhaps you need to think more like a sorceress. Magic is a far more potent force in Vamp City than science.”
    As they reached the Kennedy Center, Quinn could see the Shimmers like a faint wall of water vapor sparkling in the moonlight across the grounds. She’d seen them all her life, nearly invisible walls in various parts of D.C. that were always in the same spots, never moving, never wavering. It wasn’t until recently that she’d realized what they were—the boundary of Vamp City. A boundary no other human, to her knowledge, could see.
    The sight of it now made her pulse kick, sending a shiver of cold skating over her skin even as a flush of heat dampened the back of her neck. Because they were going in.
    Arturo pulled into the Kennedy Center drive as if he were heading for the parking garage, a drive cut straight across by the Shimmer. As they neared it, she tensed. As they passed through it, the hair rose on her arms, the air prickling her skin in a cool, ticklish dance. But they were still in the real world, the Kennedy Center looming large beside her.
    “What happened?” she asked.
    Beside her, Zack moaned as he had every time he’d passed through a Shimmer since their escape a week and a half ago, which was another reason she suspected the magic of Vamp City was at least partially at fault for his illness.
    “Nothing,” Arturo said, making a tight U-turn in the middle of the drive, and suddenly she understood. Her apartment was within the V.C. boundary. To enter Vamp City, they first had to leave it. Which they’d just done.
    Now, they were going in.
    Turning off