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“You okay?” Jane said, sitting up. Her sister was standing by the bed in her flannel nightie, an odd expression on her face.

“I gotta go.” Hannah’s voice was sad.

“To the bathroom? You gonna be sick?” Jane pushed the covers away. “I’ll go with y—”

“You can’t.” Hannah sighed. “I gotta go.”

“Well, when you’re finished doing whatever, you can come back here and sleep if you wanna.”

Hannah looked to the door. “I’m scared.”

“Being sick is scary. But I’ll always be here for you.”

“I gotta go.” When Hannah glanced back, she looked…all grown-up somehow. Nothing like the ten-year-old she was. “I’ll try and come back. I’ll do my best.”

“Um…okay.” Maybe her sister had a fever or something? “You want to go wake up Mother?”

Hannah shook her head. “I only want to see you. Go back to sleep.”

As Hannah left, Jane sank back against her pillows. She thought about going and checking on her sister in the bathroom, but sleep claimed her before she could follow through on the impulse.

The following morning Jane woke up to the sound of heavy footfalls running outside in the hall. At first she assumed someone had dropped something that was leaving a stain on a carpet or a chair or a bedspread. But then the ambulance sirens came up the driveway.

Jane got out of bed, checked the front windows, then poked her head into the hall. Her father was speaking to someone downstairs, and the door to Hannah’s room was open.

On tiptoe, Jane went down the Oriental runner, thinking that her sister wasn’t usually up this early on a Saturday. She must really be sick.

She stopped in the doorway. Hannah was lying still on her bed, her eyes open toward the ceiling, her skin white as the pristine snowy sheets she was on.

She wasn’t blinking.

In the opposite corner of the room, as far away from Hannah as possible, their mother was sitting in the window seat, her ivory silk dressing robe pooling on the floor. “Go back to bed. Now.”

Jane raced for her room. Just as she shut her door, she saw her father coming up the stairs with two men in navy blue uniforms. He was talking with authority and she heard the words congenital heart something.

Jane jumped into her bed and pulled the sheets up over her head. As she trembled in the darkness, she felt very small and very scared.

The board had been right. Hannah got no Christmas presents and married no one.

But Jane’s little sister kept her promise. She did come back.

Chapter One

“I am so not feeling all this cowhide.”

Vishous looked up from his bank of computers. Butch O’Neal was standing in the Pit’s living room with a pair of leathers on his thighs and a whole lot of you’ve got-to-be-kidding-me on his puss.

“They don’t fit you?” V asked his roommate.

“Not the point. No offense, but these are wicked Village People.” Butch held his heavy arms out and turned in a circle, his bare chest catching the light. “I mean, come on.”

“They’re for fighting, not fashion.”

“So are kilts, but you don’t see me rocking the tartan.”

“And thank God for that. You’re too bowlegged to pull that shit off.”

Butch assumed a bored expression. “You can bite me.”

I wish, V thought.

With a wince, he went for his pouch of Turkish tobacco. As he took out some rolling paper, laid down a line, and twisted himself a cig, he did what he spent a lot of time doing: He reminded himself that Butch was happily mated to the love of his life, and that even if he weren’t, the guy didn’t play like that.

As V lit up and inhaled, he tried not to look at the cop and failed. Fucking peripheral vision. Always did him in.

Man, he was a perverted freak. Especially given how tight the two of them were.

In the last nine months, V had grown closer to Butch than anyone he’d ever met in his over three hundred years of living and breathing. He’d roomed with the male, gotten drunk with him, worked out with him. Been through death and life and prophesies and doom with him. Helped bend the laws of nature to turn the guy from human to vampire, then healed him when he did his special business with the race’s enemies. He’d also proposed