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what he’d done or what he’d become in the long time since they had been together.
     
“Andre,” Claire whispered, her voice breaking the closer she got to him and saw the severity of his burns. “Oh, God, Andreas …can you hear me?”
     
He groaned something inaudible, but unpleasant. When she crouched down and put her hand out to touch his shoulder, he bared his fangs and snarled like an animal caught in a trap.
     
“You have to get up.” Claire took off the oversize trench coat and held it up for him to see. “I’m going to cover you with this to shield you from the sun. But you can’t stay out here or you’re going to die. You have to get up and come with me. Will you do that?”
     
He didn’t answer, but he also didn’t lash out at her when she gently placed the coat over his exposed skin.
     
“Can you stand up?”
     
He glared, his lip still curled back off his teeth. Something was very wrong with him, despite the fact that he was no longer livid with fire. His elliptical pupils hadn’t dilated back to normal yet, and his irises were still bright amber instead of the absorbing hazel color she knew them to be.
     
All of the Breed transformed in this manner when they hungered or in times of elevated emotional responses, but this seemed different somehow. More severe. Clairecouldn’t see many of his dermaglyphs —the intricate skin markings present on every member of the Breed—but the ones that were visible on his arms and through the torn patches of his clothing didn’t look right. Their colors were pulsing rapidly changing and mutating, as though some part of him were short-circuiting from the inside.
     
“Stand up,” she said, more forcefully this time. “I need you to walk, Andreas.”
     
To her surprise, he began to obey her. Slowly he dragged himself up off the ground. Claire offered him her hand when his knees buckled at first, but then he was on his feet, towering over her even though his spine was bent and his head was dropped low on his chest. Claire tugged the collar of the trench coat up over the back of his neck and skull to protect his head from any more UV damage.
     
“This way,” she told him. “You can hold on to me if you need to.”
     
She noticed he didn’t even try to take her up on that. With a pained grunt, he lurched into motion beside her. They progressed at a snail’s pace, trudging in silence out of the woods and back across the lawn to the manor house. By the time they reached the front entrance, Andreas’s feet were dragging beneath him like lead weights.
     
Claire tried to assist him up the few steps to the door, but he brushed her off as though her touch would burn him even worse than the sun’s rays beating down through the dissipating haze. Instead she went ahead and opened the door, holding it for him as he climbed the steps and all but collapsed in the foyer. He went down on one knee, then staggered back up with a groan.
     
“Goddamn it,” he snarled, his breath sawing between his parched lips. He looked up at her, his face sweat-soaked and raw with UV burns. “Where to now?”
     
Claire pointed to the other end of the foyer. “You might be most comfortable downstairs in the cellar. Wilhelm had a private room installed down there when the house was originally built, but it’s never used …”
     
He started moving even before she finished speaking. Claire followed him, sticking close in case he had trouble on the old stone staircase that led beneath the main floor. She heard his relieved sigh as the cool darkness enveloped him. He didn’t need artificial light to see, but Claire’s eyes took longer to adjust to the pitch-black surroundings. She flicked the switch and watched as Andreas staggered off the last step and sank down onto the cold stone floor.
     
He didn’t move to Wilhelm’s plush personal suite, just peeled off the trench coat and flung it aside, then let himself crumple in a broken sprawl. Claire said nothing as she eased down to sit on the third step from the