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you’re fine, and you’re going home soon.”
    Her voice was deep. A little gravelly. A Stevie Nicks voice. Lucy loved Stevie Nicks, mainly because her mom had.
    “Now, tell me your name,” Stevie Nicks said.
    Lucy smiled, remembering the soundtrack of her childhood, before it had all gone so dark. “Lucy. Dad used to call me Lucille. But I hated it. I wouldn’t hate it now, though. I’d love to hear him call me Lucille again.”
    She tried opening her eyes again, but the room was still all out of sorts. She saw the man with the scar leaning close to Stevie—no, that wasn’t Stevie. She wasn’t wearing a scrap of lace or fringe, or a single trailing shawl. No, she was wearing mannish blue trousers with a white shirt tucked in, a thin belt, and a white lab coat, like a doctor.
    “Can you get her to focus?” the scarred man said.
    “If you get what you need, does it matter if it’s couched in her life story?”
    “Time is of the essence here, Lillian. All hell’s breaking loose out there, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
    “Maybe your containment team should have considered not having their work televised, then. Back off and let me do my job.”
    The scar-faced man huffed, but he moved away from the bed.
    Oh, Lucy thought. She was in a bed. And that white lab coat—yeah. Okay, this must be a hospital, then.
    “Lucy, what’s your full name, dear?”
    Lucy tried to focus, because for some reason she was afraid of making that man angry, and he already seemed awfully impatient. “Lucille Annabelle Lanfair.”
    “Very good. And what do you do, Lucy?”
    “I work in the Ancient Near Eastern Studies Department at Binghamton University,” she said, wondering why her tongue felt too big and her esses were lispy.
    “And what does that work entail?”
    “I teach classes about ancient Sumerian culture and the Sumerians’ written language. It was the earliest form of writing, you know.”
    “No, I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating. Why don’t you tell me about this most recent translation of yours? The one that got you noticed by Will Waters.”
    At the mention of the talk show host’s name, she cringed, squeezing her eyes tightly shut once more, and hearing again the gunshots, seeing the chaos, feeling the horror. “He’s dead, isn’t he? And that crazy old man, Folsom, too? I saw it.”
    “Yes. Yes, they’re both dead. Some crazed fan. Did you meet Mr. Folsom?”
    Keeping her eyes closed, she said, “In the greenroom.”
    “And did you talk to him?”
    She nodded. “He was…a little crazy, I think. Said vampires were real.”
    “That is crazy. Did he say anything else to you?”
    “Said this involves me, too. Said my translation wasn’t about humans, that it was about vampires, and about…them.”
    “Who?”
    She shook her head. “Twins, he said. Mongrel twins. Crazy.”
    “I see. And did he say who or where these twins are?”
    “No. He had to go.” Lucy felt her heartbeat quicken, and her breath came a little faster. “And then someone shot him—” Her voice broke as her throat went too tight for words to fit through, and hot tears surfaced in her eyes.
    “It’s all right, Lucy. It’s all right. You’re safe here,” the woman who sounded like Stevie said softly. Lucy wished she would sing. “Now I want you to think about what happened right after that terrible shooting. What did you do?”
    Lucy kept her eyes closed, but the scalding tears slipped through anyway. “I ran.”
    “And why did you run?”
    “It’s what I always do.”
    The woman was silent for a moment. “When have you had to run before, Lucy?”
    But before Lucy could answer, the man spoke, his voice deep and low and rough, like sandpaper. “When she was a kid. Eleven, I think. On a dig with her archaeologist parents in the Northern Iraqi desert, by special arrangement with the government. Bandits raided the campsite by night, shot the entire team and took everything that wasn’t nailed down. She was