You'll change your mind," Thierry said.
An instant later everything was chaos. Thierry had one hand in her hair, twisting her head to the side,
exposing her neck. His other arm was keeping both her arms trapped against her body. Hannah was
twisting, struggling-and it wasn't doing any good. He was unbelievably strong.
She felt the warmth of breath on her neck . .. and then the sharpness of teeth.
"Don't fight." Thierry's muffled voice came to her. "You'll only make it hurt worse."
Hannah fought. And it did hurt. The pain of having blood drawn out against her will was like nothing
she'd ever felt. It was as if her soul was being pulled out of her body, a pain that radiated down her neck
and through her left shoulder and arm. It turned her vision gray and made her feel lightheaded.
"I-hate-you," she got out. She tried to reach for him with her mind, to see if she could hurt him that way .
. . but it was like running up against an obsidian wall. She could feel nothing of Thierry in the contact, just
smooth black hardness.
Forget about that, the cool wind voice said. And don't faint; you've got to stay conscious. Think about
your room. You need wood; you need a weapon. Where...
The desk.
Even as she thought it, Thierry's grip on her was shifting. He was forcing her to turn so she faced away
from him, still holding her in an iron grip with one arm. She had no idea what he was doing with the other
arm until he spoke again.
"I have to give you back something for what I took."
And then the other arm was in front of Hannah, wrist pressing to her mouth. She still didn't really
understand-she was dazed with pain and loss of blood-until she felt warm liquid trickling into her mouth
and tasted a strange exotic taste.
Oh, God-no. It's his blood. You're drinking vampire blood.
She tried not to swallow, but the liquid kept flowing in, choking her. It didn't taste at all like blood. It
was rich and wild and burned slightly-and she could almost feel it changing her.
You've got to stop this, the cool wind voice told her. New.
With a violent wrench that almost dislocated her shoulder, Hannah got one arm free. Then she started to
fight hard, not because she wanted to get away, but because she wanted to keep Thierry occupied in
holding her. While they were struggling, she surreptitiously reached out with her free hand.
I can't feel it. She threw her body back and forth, trying to get Thierry to move closer to the desk. Just a
little farther... there. There!
Her fingers were on her desk. She stomped on Thierry's foot to keep him distracted. She heard a snarl
of pain and Thierry shook her, but her fingers kept groping across the desk until they found something
smooth and long, with a pointed graphite end.
A pencil.
Hannah curled her fingers, gathering the pencil into her fist. She was gasping with effort, which meant
more of the strange blood was flowing into her mouth.
Now think. Visualize his hand. Picture the pencil going right in, all the way through. And now strike.
Hannah brought the pencil up with all her strength, driving it into the back of Thierry's hand.
She heard a yelp of pain and outrage-and at the same instant she felt a stab of pain herself. She'd driven
the pencil all the way through his hand and jabbed her own cheek.
She didn't spend time worrying about it. The iron grip on her had loosened. She slammed a foot into
Thierry's shin and spun away as he jerked back.
The desk! You need another weapon!
Even as the voice was telling her, Hannah was teaching for her desk, gathering a random handful of pens
and pencils. Thank God for her habit of losing pencils, which was the reason she had to keep so many.
As soon as she had them, she twisted to dart across the room, getting her back to a wall. She faced
Thierry, panting.
"This next one goes right into your heart," she told him, pulling one pencil out of the handful and holding it
in her fist. Her voice was soft and ragged, but absolutely deadly in its conviction.
"You hurt me!" Thierry had pulled the pencil out and was staring at the wound. His face was contorted,
his eyes blazing with animal pain and fury. He looked like a stranger.
"Right," Hannah said, panting. "And if you come close to me again, I'll kill you. That's a promise. Now
get the hell out of my house and out of my life!"
Thierry stared back and forth from her to his hand. Then he snarled-really snarled, his upper lip lifting,
his teeth bared. Hannah had never seen a human face look so bestial.
"You'll be sorry," he said, like a child in a temper tantrum. "And if you tell anybody about this, I'll kill
them. I will. It's Night World law."
Then he did the fade-out thing. Hannah blinked and he wasn't there. He must have backed up down the
hall, but she didn't hear a door open or close.
It was several minutes before she could loosen her grip on her pencil or step away from the wall. When
she could, it was to stumble toward the phone. She pressed the speed dial for Chess's number. Busy.
Hannah dropped the phone. She was swaying on her feet, feeling sick and giddy, but she headed for the
dining room. There, keeping one of the windows shut, was a wooden dowel, the remnant of some
long-past safety craze of her mother's. Hannah broke it over her knee and carried one splinter-ended
piece with her to the garage.
The dusty old Ford was parked there, the one her
father had driven before he died. Hannah found the keys and started for Chess's house. She could think
of only one thing: she didn't want to be alone.
Gray spots danced in front of her eyes as she drove. She kept imagining things rushing at her from the
prairie.
Stay awake. Just stay awake, she told herself, biting her lip hard enough to draw blood.
There! There's the house up ahead. You can see the light. All you have to do is get there.
She stepped on the accelerator. And then everything went gray.
Thierry looked around the resort lobby, then glanced at his watch. He'd been doing that every five
minutes for about the last twelve hours, and his nerves were starting to fray.
He didn't like leaving Hannah alone. Of course, the ring would protect her when she was away from the
house, and the amulet he'd buried in her backyard would protect the house itself. It was a strong amulet,
made for him by Grandma Harman, the oldest and most powerful witch in the world, the Crone of the
Inner Circle. It set wards around the house, so that no Night Person could enter without a direct
invitation from somebody who lived inside.
He still didn't like leaving Hannah alone.
Only a little while longer, he told himself. It had 'taken him most of last night and all of today to call in
enough of his own people to set up a plan for watching over Hannah.
She'd told him to go away, and he had. Her word was law to him. But that didn't mean he couldn't have
her guarded. She need never realize that there
were Night People around her, watching and waiting in the shadows-and ready to fight to the death if
any danger appeared.
Lupe had been right. He couldn't deal with this alone. And now he was going to have to rely on other
people to keep Hannah safe.
Thierry looked at his watch again. It was nine o'clock at night, and he was almost tempted to give up on
Circe. But only a witch of her power could set up the kind of heavy-duty wards that would protect
Hannah wherever she went in Amador County.
He kept waiting. As he did, he stared at a gun rack on the wall and tried to keep his brain turned off. It
didn't work.
Ever since he'd awoken Hannah from her hypnotic trance, he'd been trying very hard not to think about
the old days. But now, he found himself being irresistibly drawn back-not only thinking about them, but
reliving them. Traveling back in his mind to the stupid young man he had been....
He hadn't been the first vampire. He didn't have that distinction.
He had only been the second.
He'd grown up in the tribe of Maya and Hellewise. The Maya and Hellewise, the twin daughters of
Hecate Witch Queen. The Maya and Hellewise who would go down as the two greatest figures in Night
World history; Hellewise Hearth-Woman as the ancestress of the Harman family, the most famous of the
living witches, and Maya as the ancestress of both the lamia and the made vampires.
But of course he knew nothing about that at the time.
All he knew was that they were both pretty girls. Beautiful. Hellewise had long yellow hair and deep
brown eyes. Maya had long black hair and eyes that glittered in different colors like the changing lights in
a glacier. He liked both sisters very much.
Maybe that was his downfall.
He'd been a very ordinary fellow, with a good throwing arm, a delicate touch in carving ivory, and a
vague longing to see the world. He'd taken it for granted that his tribe was special, that they could
influence the weather and summon animals from the forest. They were the witch people, they'd been
granted special powers, and that was all. It wasn't anything to worry about.
And, like everyone else, he knew that Maya was doing experiments in the forest, using her powers to try
and become immortal. But that didn't worry him particularly either....
I was very young and very, very stupid, Thierry thought.
That had been the real downfall of the tribe. Maya's desire to become immortal. Because she'd been
willing to pay any price for it, even to the point of becoming a monster and leaving a curse on all her
descendants. Maybe if Thierry and the other witch people had realized that, they could have stopped her
before it happened.
Because Maya had finally found the right spell to achieve immortality. The problem was that to do it, she
had to steal the babies of the tribe. All four of them. She took them out to the forest, did the spell, and
drank their blood. Thierry and the rest of the tribe found the four little bled-out bodies later.