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north behind an 18-wheeler with Utah plates for the last half hour. It shouldn’t be much longer. According to the radio news, the wreck near the Buda exit has been cleared. No serious injuries or fatalities, thank the Big Boss.
    I send a text message to Quincie to let her know I’ll be a few minutes late for work. I spent the afternoon with a real-estate agent, talking about selling Quincie’s compound outside San Antonio. Quincie inherited it from an egomaniacal vamp who most recently went by the name Brad. She decided she’d rather spend the afternoon shopping with Freddy for a catering van than road-tripping with me.
    I suspect part of that decision was about her commitment to all things Sanguini’s and part of it was a desire to avoid memories of Brad himself. Her undeath was his fault.
    As I toss my cell into the front passenger seat, Joshua materializes in time to catch it. “Hello, earth angel! I bring news from your beloved in the great beyond.”
    “Miranda!” I grin. “How is she?”
    Josh tells me that my girl and Harrison have been reunited. Mr. Nesbit is with her, too. It’s awesome news on both counts, especially Harrison. Despite his grand final gesture, I’d honestly doubted he’d make the cut.
    Josh goes on to fill me in on Lucy’s transfer from U.N.T. to the newly established Scholomance Preparatory Academy in New England. “Bottom line,” he concludes, “Miranda wants you to boogie up there ASAP and convince Lucy to skedaddle.”
    I think it over, weighing my duty to Quincie. “Lucy may not trust me.”
    “Dude, are you seriously telling me that you’re not going to try?”
    We’ve met before, Lucy and me, the night Miranda was taken from Chrysanthemum Hills Cemetery in Dallas. After my girl was taken, my powers yanked, I heard Lucy cry for help. I found her in the clutches of a vamp and scared him off.
    I’ll never forget Lucy, in the midst of her living nightmare, saying, “If there are monsters, there must be heroes. You’re the hero, right?”
    She’d nearly lost her life. She’d been confronted with the true demonic for the first time. Most people would’ve been rocking in the fetal position.
    Not Lucy. She immediately started looking for Miranda. She’s the one who called the cops. She’s the one who gave me her trench coat when I found myself an outcast from heaven, shivering in the wind.
    I excused myself, supposedly to look for clues. Then I ditched her once I heard the sirens. Back then, I had no way of explaining who I was, what I was.
    I left Lucy alone on the worst night of her life.
    As traffic picks up, Josh changes the radio station and an old Dixie Chicks song comes on. “Um, Zachary?” he prompts. “You’re not going to send me upstairs to Miranda with a ‘no,’ are you? Don’t get me wrong. You know I’m a fan. But she was undead royalty, and every once in a while, I see a flash of that old temper and —”
    “Tell my girl . . .” I hit my signal to switch lanes. “Tell her I’ll do what I can.”

“I TRIED CALLING this so-called Scholomance Preparatory Academy,” Zach concludes that evening in Quince’s dining room. “The guy who answered said that I wasn’t on Lucy’s list of approved callers. Worse, they don’t allow unapproved visitors on school grounds.”
    I open a leather-bound text on the table. “Sounds like a security measure. If we’re talking about an elite school for children of the rich and famous, that’s not unreasonable.”
    My instincts are telling me Zach’s not overreacting. But he’s got to calm down.
    Earlier, the angel left me an ominous message, asking that I bring whatever I had on the Scholomance. My mom raised me to become a Wolf studies scholar. I’ve got an impressive home library. But I could fit everything I found on the academy into my backpack.
    “Or it might be a cultish isolation strategy,” Zach counters. “Maybe by the time they’re through orientation, the students have broken ties with the