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fridge, microwave, pictures of her and Lark stuck to the fridge door, an empty can from the wet food she’d fed Pywacket last night as a treat. Poor cat . . . he wasn’t too keen on having a houseguest.
    The sense of normalcy vanished.
    Miranda had cried until she lost consciousness, utterly wrung out. By the time she was too tired to go on, it was morning, and Stella and Lark were both frayed to the nerves from trying in vain to comfort her.
    There was nothing they could do but be there. Still, it seemed to be enough; Miranda’s shields held except for that one tense moment when things started falling over, and even once she had fallen asleep she maintained control. She was suffering, yes, more than Stella could imagine—but that was the amazing thing. Stella could only imagine it. Miranda wasn’t projecting it onto her. The amount of strength it must have taken to hold that much together was almost inconceivable.
    She dumped sugar into her cup and mindlessly drank the entire thing in a couple of swallows, then filled it back up.
    By the time she returned to the living room Lark had put her joint away and looked, if not better, at least less like she was going to have a nervous breakdown.
    “Thanks for your help,” Stella said, sitting down. “I mean it . . . thank you for staying with me through all that.”
    Lark shook her head. At first she didn’t speak, but then she said, “I always used to be so jealous of you.”
    “Why?”
    “You’re psychic,” Lark replied with a shrug. “You have a bona fide gift. Most people can do magic if they get the training—it’s natural energy. We’re part of nature. You just have to learn how to tap into it. But you . . . you have the Sight, and that’s different. It always seemed so . . . special. Kind of romantic, you know? But if that’s what happens . . . if being that powerful means you fall apart like that and take half the world down with you . . . no thanks. I’ll stick to being a regular old Witch.”
    “It’s not always like that. When I was younger, before I got training, I had some . . . bad things happen. I couldn’t control what I Saw, and sometimes I found out stuff I didn’t want to know. But what she has . . . it’s not the same.”
    “Well, I know that—it’s empathy, not Sight. Feeling, not Seeing. But still—”
    “No, I mean it’s different . She’s not human. She’s got the gift, yeah, but there’s way more going on than just empathy. She was pulling power from something . . . I don’t even know what to call it. She’s hooked up to some kind of battery bigger than any one person should be able to control. I don’t think she even realizes it yet. Whatever happened to her out there . . . I don’t know how she’s even coherent.”
    “She’s not, at the moment.”
    “But she will be. She’s freaked, understandably so, but she’s got the power under control. Nobody can do that, Lark.”
    “Like you said . . . she’s not human.”
    Stella’s eyes fell on the bedroom door. “To tell you the truth I’m not really sure what she is.”
    * * *
    The hunger saved her.
    She barely moved until Friday; it wasn’t so much that she was too mired in mourning to go on as that she simply didn’t know what else to do. She had fought her way back to her body, chosen to live . . . but she didn’t know how to live. She didn’t know how to take that first step into a life alone.
    Miranda had never thought of herself as the kind of woman who would fall apart without her man, but then, she had never expected to be a vampire with a mystical bond to her soul mate, either. For three years David had been her partner, her friend, her lover—but more than that, he had been her balance, and now she was tilted precariously off axis, staring down into that endless darkness and trying to regain some sort of equilibrium.
    In the end she didn’t have to decide . . . she had to feed.
    Vaguely, she heard Stella say