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into a highball glass. “I can’t wait. I love Alexandria.”
    “Yes,” Val said, reaching out to run his finger over the intricate designs etched into the bracelet she’d stolen from the vampire the night before. “I know. But there’s no time for sightseeing. You’ll get in and get out as fast as you can.”
    She froze as she tipped the bottle of bourbon toward her glass. “Alone? You aren’t coming with me?”
    “Unfortunately, no. The Sigil has called all Elders together. David and I will leave for Berlin tomorrow night.”
    David, a handsome, thirty-four-year-old version of Val, with his dark hair and eyes, finally looked up from the map he was studying. “No one to hold your hand on this one.”
    He was teasing—he often gave her a hard time about Val’s constant hovering, but he was right; this was highly unusual. Val rarely let her go on trips longer than a night without him. Her safety wasn’t an issue; he was more concerned about the possibility that some man would sweep her off her feet, and she’d finally give in to her desire for a relationship that included all the normal things, like sex. Lots of sex, if she had anything to say about it. God, her body was a powder keg ready to blow, and Val knew it.
    He was like an overprotective father with a shotgun.
    In many ways, she was glad for that. She’d grown up without a father, without a male influence at all.
    After her mother died, she’d been raised in a convent, educated by nuns who had hoped she’d become a nun as well. But Serena had been too adventurous, had desired travel and excitement, and she’d left the good sisters to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a female Indiana Jones.
    She smiled at that, because she’d done the Indiana Jones thing, all right, but not in the way she’d expected.
    Eighteen years old and hungry for life, she’d gone to college, her days filled with archaeology and anthropology courses. Which were bo-ring with a capital B. It had taken only a year of working part-time in the archaeology department and falling asleep in class to realize that becoming an archaeologist might not be the right career for her. Too much research, too few ancient curses and speeding bullets.
    And that was when Val had stepped in.
    He’d been an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University, and had, in fact, been the reason she’d chosen the college. She’d remembered him as the Guardian who had watched over her mother until she died, and who had visited Serena occasionally as she was growing up.
    He’d encouraged her love of archaeology, from the moment she demonstrated an uncanny ability to find pretty much anything anyone lost, and then later during college, when he took a few select students on a field trip to a historical Revolutionary War battlefield.
    A gut feeling had led her away from the group, to a forested area just beyond the battleground. There near the remnants of a stone fence and three feet under the soil, she’d discovered a shoebox-sized chest containing a few coins, a pipe, and a letter detailing a heinous betrayal by the leader of the Americans. A leader who had gone down in history as a hero, but if the letter could be authenticated, history would be turned on its ear.
    That very day, Val had offered her a position with his private archaeological contracting company, a place to live in one of the two guest houses adjoining his mansion-slash-museum, and pretty much squat for pay. Not that the pay truly mattered—she wanted for nothing, in part because Val paid for the essentials, and in part because he kept her so busy traveling that she didn’t have a lot of spare time.
    He’d left the university right after that—solely so he could keep an eye on her, which he still did with annoying frequency.
    So yes, she had everything—a great life and the career of her dreams. She had almost everything she wanted and no fears save two: years of illness and time spent in hospitals had given her