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room, pick up the remote, and turn the damn thing off.
    Good thing our neighbors are vampires, too,
I thought, opening the door and wincing against the assault of sound. Once a vampire resumes the shroud for the day, nothing disturbs him until sundown. At least I didn’t have to deal with angry neighbors pounding on—or more likely through—the walls.
    To my surprise, Juliet was still up. She sat in the dark room, blackout shades drawn, her face tinged by the flickering bluish light from the screen. She didn’t notice me come in; she was absorbed in some nature program, absentmindedly eating popcorn from a bowl in her lap.
    I switched on the overhead light, and she turned toward me, blinking.
    “Can you turn that down?” I shouted.
    She leaned forward and picked up the remote. Several clicks later, I could actually hear myself think.
    “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you over the television.”
    Before I could think of a suitably sarcastic reply, a large white bird hopped onto Juliet’s shoulder. “It was a little loud, I guess,” the falcon said. “But those surround-sound speakers are brilliant.” He cocked his head and fixed his sharp gaze on the bowl in Juliet’s lap. “May I have some more popcorn?”
    “Hi, Dad,” I said, as Juliet offered a kernel to the hooked beak.
    Yes, my father is a white falcon. A
talking
white falcon with rainbow-colored eyes.
    He hadn’t always been a bird, of course. Although I come from a race of shapeshifters, Dad’s condition was unheard of, even among our kind. For one thing, only Cerddorion females have the ability to shift (it arrives with all the other joys of puberty). For another, when I change shape, the animal brain takes over. If I shifted into a falcon, I wouldn’t be sitting in anyone’s living room, watching TV, eating popcorn, and making conversation. I’d be out hunting mice or whatever it is falcons do. Real falcons, I mean.
    But my father had done something that no one among the Cerddorion—hell, no one of
any
species—had ever managed to do. He’d hijacked the body of a falcon to come back from the dead.
    After my father, Evan Vaughn, was killed by the Destroyer, whom I’d foolishly summoned in my eighteen-year-old know-it-all mode, Dad spent ten years in the Darklands, first serving in Arawn’s court and then, when his shade had been marked for reincarnation, hiding out in a cave. More than anything, Dad wanted to keep his spirit from being cleansed of its memories and recycled into the body of a newborn infant. When I followed Pryce into the Darklands, Dad helped me track him down. But the closer we got to Tywyll, Arawn’s capital, the stronger the pull of reincarnation became. The magic that gave Dad a body in the Darklands drained away from him, and his spirit was in danger of dispersing into nothing. In fact, I thought I’d lost him forever.
    But no Vaughn has ever quit without a fight. Dad knew that the Night Hag required three items as my price of passage out of the Darklands. One of these was the white falcon of Hellsmoor, a magical bird that could enter places from which others were barred. The hag demanded I bring her the falcon, along with a magic arrow and Lord Arawn’s hunting horn, to make her nightly hunts more amusing. To Dad, the falcon looked like an escape plan. He bound his spirit to the bird’s body and hitched a ride back to the world of the living.
    A brilliant idea, with one big downside. That downside was currently sitting on my living room sofa pecking popcorn from my roommate’s hand.
    Juliet scattered some popcorn across the coffee table, and Dad hopped over to peck at it. Juliet stretched and stood. “My coffin calls,” she said. “What time is it, anyway?”
    “Nearly eight.”
    “No wonder I’m tired. I should have reinterred myself hours ago. But the program your father and I were watching was just so . . . fascinating.” Uh-oh. It sounded like Juliet was starting a new television obsession. Well,