Twenty minutes inside, and I had learned one important thing about vampires. They do not blink enough.

Leonard led me through the front doors into a throne room the size of a cathedral, and every single head turned. Dozens of them. Pale faces in the candlelight, all watching me walk that red carpet like I was the dessert cart.

"Don't mind them," Lavinia said beside me. "They're just hungry. You smell like a warm bakery to us. It's honestly rude of you."

"I'll apologize to each of them personally."

"Please don't. Some of them would take it as flirting."

A teen vampire in a lace dress leaned toward her friend and whispered, loudly, "That's her. The flower girl." Her friend sniffed the air and made a sad face, like someone had described a cake and then said it was sold out.

I kept my chin up and my hand on the vials in my pocket. Two little tubes of blood. Jake's whole future, rattling around next to an old receipt and a mint.

"The high table," Leonard announced, sweeping his arm at a long table on a raised platform. Elders sat along it like a very glamorous jury. One ancient woman was checking her reflection in a hand mirror and did not look up. Respect, honestly.

And at the end, hurrying toward me with his glasses slipping down his nose, came Dr. Acula.

"You must be Marion!" He took both my hands like we were old friends. His were cold, but the smile was real, and after twenty minutes in that room, real was worth its weight in gold coins. "Magnus has told me so much. Well, he told me three sentences, but for Magnus that is a memoir."

"Where is he? Magnus. He said he'd meet me at the gate."

"Resting," Leonard said again, smooth as poured concrete.

Here is the thing. I did not believe him. Not for one second. But Jake had a white streak in his hair and a girlfriend he almost forgot the name of, and pride is not a currency the curse accepted. So I pulled out the vials and put them in the doctor's hands.

"Jake's blood. And mine. A full vial each, like Magnus said. Please. He's getting worse fast."

"Then we shall be faster." Dr. Acula patted my arm and turned toward the candles.

While he did that, one floor up, Magnus was performing home renovation with his bare hands. He told me all of this later, in the tone of a man confessing to losing a fight with carpentry.

He had ripped the gothic curtains down. He had torn the bars loose from the window frame, or tried to, and snatched his hands back burning. He had pried at the doorframe until his fingers found a seam of fine gray powder packed into the wood like mortar.

Silver dust. In the frame. In the bars. In the lock. He licked one fingertip, tasted it, and spat, which he assured me was very dignified.

Silver dust does not appear overnight. Someone had opened those walls, packed them, sealed them, and repainted. Weeks of work. Which meant somebody had been planning his warm welcome home since before he ever knocked on that door.

He sat down on his medieval bed with the flat screen TV he never asked for, and he thought one word. He would not tell me the word. I have guesses.

Downstairs, I watched Dr. Acula uncork the first vial, Jake's, and wave it under his nose like a fancy sommelier. He nodded slowly. "Yes. Yes, the decay is here. Faint, but rotten, like fruit forgotten in a coat pocket. I can work with this."

"That's good, right? Tell me that's good."

"It is a beginning, child." He set Jake's vial in a little wooden stand and picked up the second one. Mine. He raised it toward the nearest candle to look at the color.

Then he stopped.

The whole doctor stopped, mid gesture, glasses glinting, the vial glowing red between his fingers. Around us, the murmuring room seemed to lean in.

Dr. Acula held my blood to the candlelight, went very still, and said, "My dear, whose blood did you say this was?"