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The sliding glass door opens behind me, and I know without turning who it is. The smell of sandalwood and tobacco wafts past, calling to something primal within me. A scent that makes me register Callahan as mine, even though he’s not.

“Mind some company?” Callahan asks, his voice rough with fatigue.

I turn to face him. “Please. I was hoping they’d release you soon.”

He steps out, a glass of red wine in his hand. In the dim light from the house, I can see the exhaustion etched on his face, the weight of revelations pressing down on his broad shoulders. Despite that though, his aura is still powerful, more so than ever before. With his striking blue eyes and black hair, with the fog and the night wrapping around us, he really does seem like a predator of the dark. And while Callahan has always had me running hot, the idea that this man is actually a vampire like myself has me drawn to him like never before.

“Abe offered me blood,” he says, lifting the wine glass. “I couldn’t bring myself to drink it. Not consciously, anyway.”

“More of a wine guy,” I comment. “Your vampire side has different tastes.”

“My vampire side.” He says the words like they’re in a foreign language, testing how they feel on his tongue. “Like I’m two people, Jekyll and Hyde.”

I lean against the railing, watching him. “It’ll integrate eventually. I’m sure it will. That’s essentially what transition is—the merging of both aspects of yourself into something whole.”

“And what if I don’t want to merge?” The question comes out quietly, almost too low to hear over the surf below. “What if I just want to go back to being human?”

“You were never human, Callahan. Just like I wasn’t. We were born this way.” He takes a long swallow of wine as I add, “It’s not shameful. It’s who we are. We’re a product of nature, like everything else.”

“Lena, youfeedon people. We’re like…cannibals. We kill humans.”

“We’re not cannibals, because we aren’t the same species. You have to make peace with that fact. And we don’t have to kill to feed. Most of us don’t. We learn the different ways to feed without harm.”

“But I did.” His knuckles whiten around the stem of the wine glass.

“You didn’t know what was happening to you. You had no control. What you wanted was blood without knowing how you should get it.”

“And what about Elizabeth Short?” He finally looks at me, his blue eyes haunted. “What if I killed her too and just don’t remember? She was drained of blood…why would any human do such a thing?”

I shake my head firmly, refusing to even entertain his inane musings. Victor Callahan, the Black Dahlia killer? “You need to stop with this. The timelines don’t match. The Winters murder, the first ritual killing, happened before your thirty-fifth birthday. Before your transition began. You couldn’t have done that.”

“But Elizabeth?—”

“Betty was killed the same way. By the same people. Possibly vampires.”

“The Ivanovs,” he says under his breath.

“Perhaps.”

He falls silent, considering this. The wind shifts, bringing a stronger surge of mist that momentarily obscures the space between us.

“How was it for you?” he asks, changing the subject. “Your transition.”

I look away, the memories still vivid despite the years. “I was twenty-one. My parents knew what was coming—they’d been preparing me my whole life for theBecoming, as we call it. Sounds rather ominous, doesn’t it?”

The images flood back—my mother’s worried face, my father’s steady hands as they led me into the barn on the outskirts of Salem. The chains they’d prepared, strong enough to hold me when the bloodlust hit.

“They took me to an old barn,” I continue, “far enough from town that no one would hear. They chained me to support beams they’d reinforced specially for this purpose.”

“They chained you?” Callahan sounds horrified. “A twenty-one-year-old girl?”

“They had to. The Becoming is violent. Unpredictable. The hunger that sweeps through you is unlike anything you can imagine. It’s all-consuming. You’d do anything to satisfy it.” I pause, remembering the burning need, the animal rage. “There’s also a sexual component. An overwhelming desire that mirrors the thirst for blood. This is the real bloodlust.”

His eyes darken at this, and I feel the air between us charge with primal energy.

“It lasted three days,” I tell him. “My father brought animals for me to feed on—deer, mostly. Some human blood they’d procured in an ethical manner. Enough to sustain me until the worst had passed and I could control myself again.”

“And then?”