www.mirabooks.co.uk

      This book is dedicated to Jill, Warnament,

      The Wallses, Katy and Scott. Because without you all, my head might no longer fit through standard-sized doors.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      These people had something to do with this book getting finished:

      My critique group, Chel, Chris, Cheryl, Marti, Mary and Martha by proxy.

      My husband and son, who whine, complain, beg for attention and generally harass me. Until a cheque comes.

      My agent, Kelly, and my editor, Linda.

      Everyone who bought books one and two.

      And, oddly enough, Dr Carrie Ames. She might not be real, but she does the hard part of this job.

       Prologue

      “Hey, Baker! You give her the seven o’clock meds yet?”

      Don swung his legs from where they’d been propped on his desk, knocking the tower of empty soda cans from the corner. “Yes. I did. At seven o’clock. Check the sheet.”

      Leave it to Sanjay to ask a stupid question. Don shook his head and watched the new guy retrieve the clipboard from the hook beside the door and frown at the words. How he’d managed to live a hundred years was a mystery. Hell, Don had had close scrapes in his own twenty years as a vampire, more in his thirty years previous. How someone with double the lifespan could wander around in a state of constant confusion—

      “Then this doesn’t make any sense.” Sanjay flipped the pages on the clipboard, but it was clear from the rapidity of his movements that he couldn’t possibly be reading the charts. “It doesn’t make any sense!”

      “What doesn’t make sense?” Always with the drama, these Movement scientists. “I gave her the meds.”

      Sanjay’s worried brown eyes flicked up to meet Don’s gaze. “I know you did. I see it on the chart. But her brain activity is…too active. It’s like she hasn’t been sedated at all.”

      “Chill out, chill out. There’s a reasonable explanation for this.” The newly assigned guys tended to flip out over every little thing, but he’d seen what had happened the last time the Oracle had shrugged her meds. “I’ll feed her another tranquilizer, keep her as down as I can until morning report. Dr. Jacobson will take it from there.”

      The meds for the Oracle were fed to her hourly, through a tube that first dissolved the sedative in warm blood, then injected the whole solution through intravenous lines. It was so simple. And Don hated it.

      It wasn’t as if he wanted glory, like the big guys got. Or danger, like the assassins. He just wanted a job that a trained ape couldn’t pull off.

      Hell, at least he could watch TV between doses. And the faster he got things under control, the faster he could get back to Will and Grace reruns.

      Slipping the key to the tank room from his pocket, he slid it through the card reader. The door popped open with a hiss, and he stepped inside. It was ten degrees colder than the rest of the facility—the monitoring equipment and various pumps and containment machinery would overheat if it wasn’t—and the rest of the facility was damn cold. Don rubbed his hands together and blew into them. It smelled like blood in this room, but it always did.

      “Honey, I’m home,” he called to the slumped figure of the lab assistant asleep at his workstation. Couldn’t handle the day shift.

      The blinding white of the room was interrupted on one side by the huge, dark wall of glass. Inside, floating suspended in gallons and gallons of blood, was the Oracle. Sleeping, if the tranquillizer had worked. He popped two tablets out of the meds cabinet and strolled to the access tube, whistling while he did so, hoping to annoy the lab tech enough that he’d wake up. “I hope they check the security tape in the morning. Because you will be so busted.”

      The meds pump was attached to the wall just below where the glass ended. He knelt down and pulled the drawer open. The tablets would be inserted into a clear, glass chamber inside and dissolved. The whole process was a pain in the ass, but she’d built up a resistance to nearly all the sedatives that came in liquid form. Don didn’t know why it worked, but he was glad it did. The bitch could get downright nasty when she woke up.

      He blinked in disbelief at what he saw in the drawer. The glass chamber, which should have been empty to receive the next dose, was still filled with blood. Hands trembling, he followed the intravenous line to where it disappeared into the wall. A chunk of a pill that hadn’t dissolved was stuck in the thin plastic tube, forcing the flow of the blood to a trickle.

      The Oracle had never gotten her sedative.

      The rest happened too fast. He looked up, saw the face of the Oracle, pale and inquisitive, touching the glass. Her eyes were open. He staggered back, screaming, tripped over his own feet and landed at those of the sleeping lab assistant. Blood pooled around the guy’s sneakers. He wasn’t just sleeping.

      Don opened his mouth to scream, but the sound never made it out.

       One: Inevitability

      “Carrie, I think it’s time you call Nathan.”

      I knew that statement would come, sooner or later. I’d just been hoping it would be much, much later.

      We were lounging in Max’s bedroom, the only room in his spacious, opulently furnished condo that had a television. For the past three weeks, all we’d done was lie around during the days and prowl various blues clubs at night. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t had time to talk to Nathan. I just hadn’t wanted to.

      When I didn’t answer, Max sighed heavily. He folded his arms and leaned against the carved headboard of his antique bed, the only piece of furniture in the room that wasn’t modern. He seemed strange and anachronistic on it. Having been turned in the late seventies, Max was the youngest vampire I knew. Besides myself, of course. He’d adapted to the changing times much more easily than some vampires did. Max kept his sandy-blond hair cut short and spiky, and his uniform of T-shirts and jeans helped him blend so perfectly with the twenty-something population of Chicago, I forgot at times that he was really old enough to be my biological father.

      Clearly, he was about to pull chronological rank. “It’s been almost a month now. I don’t mind you crashing here. Hell, most nights you’ve been one mojito away from a rebound fling, and being the only male here, I’m