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area priestesses were gone. Only family membersremained in Aunt Cate’s living room. Ivy had found herself seated opposite Aunt Cate when she came to. Cate Bailey looked as burned-out as Ivy felt. The candles were snuffed out on the table, the cards neatly stacked between them.
    Their gazes met, now that they’d stopped snarling at each other.
    Ivy glanced at a clock across the room. Another late night. What had happened to her own life recently? And what was she doing there in the first place?
    “I think it’s time I went home,” Ivy said.
    “I think it is,” Cate said.
    Lawrence drew Aunt Cate to her feet. He smiled when she made a snarling sound. “Come on, hon. It’s time you got to bed.”
    Paloma insisted on cleaning up the cut before she’d let Ivy leave.
    Something niggled at Ivy as she went downstairs. Something about the room had been wrong after the ceremony, hadn’t it? It wasn’t just that the others were gone and that she and Aunt Cate weren’t themselves. She didn’t think any of the furniture had been moved, but something was missing. Why did she think it was important?
    Ivy reached the shop entrance and traced a sign in the air that would let her out without any magical alarms going off, then repeated the sign to rebuild the warding spell. She didn’t immediately walk away from the magic shop. Somehow she knew that the itch in her head telling her something significant was wrong was important.
    Her mental cataloging of the room circled back to the table. Candles, cards…
    “Knife.”
    Well, of course Aunt Cate put that awful, ugly, dangerous thing away as soon as she could. Ivy pulled up her coat sleeve and touched the cut on her arm. It had a Band-Aidon it, but it still ached. She hated that her blood had touched the thing. It made her feel like she was still connected to the obsidian athame. Like it was with her…
    “Oh, crap.”
    Ivy plunged a hand into the depths of her big black leather purse. And her hand closed on a narrow, solid object she knew shouldn’t be there. She wrapped her fingers around the smooth hilt and slowly pulled the thing out of her purse, hoping it was something other than an ancient, obsidian, sacrificial knife.
    No such luck.
    At least the obsidian athame was safely resting in its heavy deer-hide sheath. She so did not like the way it felt in her grip.
    Natural.
    Ivy shook her head. She glared at the shop door, hoping to stab her anger all the way through the magical barrier, and told her aunt, “Oh, no. I don’t know what you want of me, but I’m a vampire hunter, not a—”
    “Ah, there you are,” the English vampire said, his lips very close to her ear. His warm breath brushed intimately across her cheek.
    She gasped, would have screamed.
    His hand covered her mouth as he grabbed her from behind.
    A t least it wasn’t raining. Christopher turned the collar of his leather coat up against the cold night air as he followed a faint scent of energy. Not that he was used to any other kind of air; night was all he had. He took in deep breaths of American November. With the better weather that night, there were more pedestrians on the street.
    He glanced at window displays as he walked along andcame to the conclusion that the people around him were Christmas shopping. It surprised him, because he didn’t think their Thanksgiving holiday had been celebrated yet.
    He shrugged. Oh, well.
    The longer one lived as a strigoi, the less mortal holidays meant. It helped to check a calendar regularly, so as not to make any stupid mistakes about dates important to the mortals strigoi needed to hide among. Protective coloration was a very powerful survival device.
    There was one holiday his kind celebrated, Blessing Day, Blessing of the Knives to be formal about it. But since Christopher didn’t live within the cultural context of a nest, he sometimes forgot about Blessing Day as well.
    “It’s a moveable feast. Especially if you’re a mortal running from the