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“That must be weird.”

“Not really. It’s just part of my materia sensitivity. I’ve always heard it. The only thing that freaks me out is when I’m in a brand-new apartment on the thirty-second floor, and I can’t hear anything.

Just the fridge humming.”

“So the earth is like your background noise.”

“Basically.”

He put down the textbook. “It’s different for me.”

I held the mug in front of my face, so he wouldn’t see my smile of pleasure. “Different how? Because of your senses, you mean?”

He nodded. “It’s crazy. I can smell . . . everything. The neighbor’s dog. Mia’s hairspray. I know that you had a glazed chocolate doughnut today. Or maybe two.”

I lowered my eyes. “You’re right. It was two.”

He grinned. “If I concentrated, I could probably tell you what you ate for the last week. Except for Miles. I think that guy brushes his teeth, like, four times a day.”

“He is superclean.”

Patrick nodded. “And everyone’s smell is like a signature. I can sense when you’re all nearby. I know that Derrick came home for a few minutes today, around three, just to microwave a Sara Lee frozen cupcake.”

“Damn him. There was only one left.”

Privately, I was more than a little unnerved that Patrick could smell each one of us coming a mile away. But I didn’t want to make him feel weird. After all, it was pretty weird that rocks, trees, and crown molding talked to me. Who was I to judge someone for having above-average olfactory senses?

“It must feel overwhelming,” I said. This was one of Dr. Hinzelmann’s favorite evocative statements. It always seemed to work with me.

Patrick just shrugged. “It’s all relative, I guess. I’m really grateful that I have a place like this to come home to. I feel a lot luckier than some people.”

I couldn’t help myself. “You mean other vampires?”

He avoided my gaze. It wasn’t often that I used the “v” word, despite the fact that I was basically raising two of them. But we still considered Mia to be in remission.

“Yeah. It’s weird. I mean—” He finally looked up. “Okay, you and Derrick, you’re demons. I mean, basically, right?”

I nodded. “We’re mixed-race. Part of our DNA is demonic, but the human part is more dominant.

It’s the recessive genetic material that allows us to channel materia.”

“Right. But vampires are different.” He managed to look slightly uncomfortable. “They all seem really . . . hungry. All the time. Like they’ve been forced onto a bad diet, and sharing the world with edible human beings is driving them crazy. You can see it in their eyes. The constant hunger.”

Do you feel like that? The question was stuck on the tip of my tongue. I chose to remain silent instead. Patrick just looked at me for a few seconds. Then he sighed.

“It’s not the same for me. I do get hungry for blood sometimes, but I can control it. I think it’s part of being the magnate. Whatever Caitlin passed along to me, it includes this weird sense of distance.

Like, I know I want blood, but I also know that I don’t need it all the time. I could just have a V8 instead.”

“It is a healthy alternative,” I said stupidly.

He laughed. “Don’t worry, Tess. I’m not trying to freak you out. The way I feel about blood is probably the same way that you feel about materia. The desire is part of you, inside you, but it doesn’t rule you.”

Sometimes it does.

I blinked. “Okay. That makes sense.”

“Besides. There’s this whole subculture of vampires who don’t drink nearly as much blood as the others. They’re writers, and artists, and teachers. For them, being a vampire is like being a diabetic.

They just deal with it, but they don’t get sucked into the bullshit hierarchy.”

“Do the teachers only work at night?”

Patrick grinned. “Mostly. You’d be surprised how many college instructors are actually undead.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t.”

He finished off his coffee, grimacing as he hit the dregs. There was a spot of coffee on his lip, but it looked like blood. I willed myself not to stare at it.

“There are these safe houses,” he continued. “They’re called daegred, and they’re all over the city.

You can just chill out there, watch TV, sleep, whatever. It’s nice. All the blood-heads kind of keep to themselves, so everyone else can socialize.”

“Blood-heads?”

“Those are the vampires who just want to talk about blood. Sort of like jocks who just want to talk about hockey.”

I’d never seen the connection before. But I nodded. “It sounds like you’re learning a bit more about the scene.”

“Yeah. Slowly. They’ve been letting me set my own pace. The monitors, I mean. They were

Caitlin’s council before, and now I guess they’re mine.”

He no longer looked sad at the mention of Caitlin’s name. I wasn’t sure if this was progress or not.

She’d been a compassionate presence in his life, despite the fact that she’d also infected him with the vampiric retrovirus. I knew that he missed her, but he seldom talked about the events of last year, which had led to her death at the hands of the Iblis. In fact, he almost never talked about anything that had happened to him before he was transformed. Lucian had told me that he might not remember. Part of the brain actually died during the siring process, and that could include most of the memories from one’s mortal life.

“So . . . they’re helping you? These monitors?”

He nodded. “Cyrus especially. He’s been showing me a lot of cool stuff, especially how to focus my senses and control my hunger. Modred is a bit more intense. His lessons are more about hunting, and he’s kind of a fundamentalist sometimes. But he’s still cool.”

Hunting. Great.

As if I didn’t have enough to keep me awake at night.

I wanted to ask more, but I could see his attention beginning to wander. This was why you couldn’t interrogate a teenager. I decided to try a different tactic instead.

“Patrick, can I ask you for a favor?”

He gave me a funny look. “Is this about the gas money? Because I promise—”

I shook my head. “Forget about the gas money. I have to go to Stanley Park and meet a demon. At least, I think he’s a demon. I’m a little nervous about going alone. Do you want to come with me?”

He smiled. The pride on his face was unmistakable. “Sure. I mean, if you need protection, or whatever. I can totally come.”

“Great. We can grab dinner on the way.”

He stood up, looking excited. “Cool. Thanks for inviting me.”

“Don’t thank me yet. We may just end up wandering around the park looking for a demon hermit.”

“That sounds better than calculus.”

“Yeah. Most things are.”

We crossed the Lion’s Gate Bridge, which was oddly empty at this time in the evening, and parked in a pay lot near the edge of Lost Lagoon. I let Patrick drive so I could finish my chicken shawarma.

To his credit, he obeyed the speed limit, and only freaked me out once by changing lanes without checking his blind spot.

This side of the park was mostly quiet, save for distant cars and the hum of night bugs. The tall Douglas firs—

still recovering from storm damage—made me feel like I was in a primeval church, dark, powerful, and greenscented.

Patrick seemed slightly nervous as we walked along a gravel path. This sort of place seemed like his element, but maybe he was more accustomed to the urban daegred of Vancouver. I wondered if they had pinball machines and Wi-Fi. Probably.

I reached out briefly with my senses, but I couldn’t detect any vampires nearby. They had a distinctive genetic trace: rust-colored and salty, like blood itself. Brushing up against one was like sucking on a cut and feeling the blood on your tongue, acrid and always slightly surprising.

“Do you feel anything?” I asked him.

Patrick kept his eyes on the path. “A few kin. But they’re pretty far off, and they don’t seem interested in us.”

“Kin? Is that like peeps?”

He grinned. “Sort of. A lot of the older vampires still speak Anglo-Saxon, and it really alienates the younger crowd. They think we’ve fallen out of touch with the old ways, that we’re all uncultured.

But it’s not like learning how to read Beowulf is going to make me a better vampire.”

“Why do they speak Anglo-Saxon?”

He made a disinterested face. “It has something to do with the Norman Conquest. The alderfolc, the really old vampires, came over from Germany and Gaul, and they fought with the English vampires. After all the tribes had massacred each other, the only language they could seem to agree on was what they heard all the English villagers speaking. I guess it sounded pretty to them.”

“Right.” I stared at the formless shadows moving between the trees. “Are there vampire poets as well?”

“Of course. And playwrights. But they’re kind of bitchy.”

The path opened up slightly, and I consulted Duessa’s coordinates. “Okay. I think this is it.”

Patrick scanned the grove slowly. Then he pointed to a patch of darkness a few meters away.

“That’s not supposed to be there.”

I looked where he was pointing. If I concentrated, I could see what looked like a dim, sulfur-colored outline within the shadows. Not quite a materia trace, but more like a paranormal shimmer caused by two realities overlapping. Patrick’s description was apt. The lines of space were stretched, and there was a kind of opening or corridor that wasn’t supposed to be there.

“Ready?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about this Seneschal, except that we’re supposed to bring him a present.”

“What kind of present?”

I reached into my purse and withdrew a folded T-shirt. The front of the shirt had a kitten’s face, made with bedazzled rhinestones.

“Are you serious?”

“Oh, yes. I had to go to three places in Gastown just to find this.”

He shook his head. “Demons are so weird sometimes.”

We walked over to the patch of shadows. There was a tangle of weeds and briars at the base of a large tree, and the wan yellow light was emanating from somewhere within the undergrowth.

I hesitated. Wasn’t this how people got carried off to Tir na nOg? Or did evil fairies eat your face? I could never keep the Celtic legends straight.

“How do we knock?” Patrick asked.

“I’m not sure. Let me try something.” I placed my right hand a few inches away from the briar patch, and channeled a weak pulse of materia. It was the closest thing I could think of to ringing the doorbell.

Nothing happened at first. Then I heard something shuffling within the brambles. I was about to ask Patrick if he knew how to fend off a wild coyote, but then the undergrowth slithered open, and a figure wearing a black raincoat appeared.

He was a little over four feet tall, and hunched over. He carried an oil-burning lantern, which appeared to be the source of the light. The raincoat was so large that it covered most of his body, eclipsing his feet entirely, but I could see that his hands looked more like wrinkled brown talons. He had the face of a dour ostrich, leathery and creased with ancient lines. His eyes were the size of marbles, but they burned blue.

His beak was long and sharp, and when he opened it, I could see a gray tongue moving inside it, like a lump of playdough. Those hard blue eyes fell on me, unblinking, and I was rooted to the spot.

He held the lantern closer, peering at me. “Vlkl k nnv sk?”

“Um—” I tried not to stare at his tongue. “I don’t speak whatever language that is. How’s your English?”

“English,” he mumbled, shaking his small, narrow head. “English. Used to be Anglisch. So changed. Everything changed.”

“Right.” I frowned. “I’m sorry if you’re feeling a bit disoriented. But we were sent here by the Lady Duessa to speak with you.”

The Seneschal made a low, burbling sound deep in his throat, and his gray tongue rippled in the air.

I assumed that he was laughing.

“Duessa. La reina con dos caras. One laughs while the other slits you desde cuello a huevos. She sent you?”

I spoke just enough Spanish to feel slightly queasy. “Yes. We’re working on a case involving a suit of armor that may have been forged during Spain’s Golden Age. She thought you might know something about it.”

The Seneschal looked over my shoulder. “And him?”

Patrick extended his hand. “Hey. I’m Patrick. I’m a vampire. I hope you’re cool with that.”

Instead of shaking Patrick’s hand, the Seneschal grabbed his wrist, holding his hand closer to the light. Patrick looked slightly alarmed, but didn’t say anything. The Seneschal turned Patrick’s hand palm upward and studied it for a few seconds.

“Old blood,” he muttered. “There was a time when yours and mine were nearly the same. Demons of the earth and the air. But nobody remembers.”

He shrugged, then beckoned us to follow him.

I exchanged a look with Patrick. There wasn’t much else to say.

We stepped into the tangled undergrowth, which gave way to a long passage with a dirt floor. The only light came from the Seneschal’s lantern, which cast little warmth, just cloudy vapors that moved across the walls.

Eventually, we came to a heavy wooden door. The Seneschal dug around in the pockets of his raincoat, muttering softly to himself. Then he withdrew a heavy iron key, caked with rust, and slipped it into the lock. The door opened slowly.

Beyond was a surprisingly large chamber, which appeared to have been carved into solid rock. The irregular walls were lined with small alcoves and recesses, holding a perplexity of items. I could see strange baubles, glass figurines, pages ripped out of books, and a pile of what looked suspiciously like Legos.

There was an overstuffed armchair in the middle of the chamber, and the Seneschal collapsed into it, sighing. Then he gestured for me to come closer.

“You have something for my collection?” It wasn’t exactly a question.

I handed him the bedazzled shirt. He inspected it, turning it around and examining the writing on the back, which read JUST HANG IN THERE, KITTY.

Finally, he nodded, folded the shirt, and placed it carefully atop a pile of empty picture frames next to the chair.

“Show me the armor.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a high-quality digital photo, which Becka had printed off for me.