These vampires don’t know what to do. I’m biting off pieces of their president and CEO. He’s very strong. But I’m also very strong, and very angry, and very determined to tear him into pieces, even if he can grow them back like a starfish.

  Let’s tear each other into pieces and see what grows back. I won’t miss this suit.

  Lamb is trying to restrain me. Go away, Lamb. Brutus. Betrayer. Vampire.

  “Baz!” he shouts. “We can still save ourselves!”

  Ha! There’s no saving me. Everything I am is already gone. My teeth are like knives. I use them.

  “Baz! Listen to me!”

  One of the vampires jumps on my shoulders. Lamb sighs and pulls him off. “I guess we’re doing this.…”

  Lamb fights like someone who’s stayed alive for three hundred years.

  Lamb isn’t afraid of machine guns.

  “Baz!”

  That wasn’t Lamb.…

  I let go of Braden (some of him still sticks to me) and spin around—

  Simon Snow is getting up on his knees.

  Simon Snow is alive.…

  Somewhat.

  “Simon!” I scream. “Stay down!”

  Of course he doesn’t listen.

  SIMON

  Baz is fighting twenty-six vampires, and I’m getting up to help.

  I’m probably going to get shot again.

  Before I get the opportunity, one of those expensive Land Rovers catches on fire. The vampires scramble away from it. One of them has a metal cane. The telescoping kind. I snatch it and drive it through his heart. It’s not a wooden stake, so maybe it won’t do the trick. I’m prepared to keep trying.

  Penelope was in that car. I try my wings. They work. Ish.

  I spear another vampire.

  And Agatha.

  I bring the cane down on someone’s back. It feels like hitting a brick wall with a lead pipe.

  I’m just warming up to avenging their deaths when Penelope and Agatha themselves walk out of the flames, holding hands, both of their mouths bleeding—looking like their own bloody ghosts.

  Penelope raises one hand and screams, “Swords into ploughshares!”

  The machine guns fall into the sand. She’s turned them into … ploughshares, I reckon. My cane changes, too. Which seems fair given the circumstances.

  “Penelope Bunce,” Baz says, his eyes lit up with wonder.

  The vampires seem confused, on both sides.

  I look down.…

  A ploughshare is basically just a really wide axe head. It takes two hands to swing it.

  BAZ

  Penelope Bunce is a fierce magician, I’ve never minded saying it.

  She’s just escaped from handcuffs and a flaming car. She’s casting spells without her wand in a dead spot. Harry Houdini himself couldn’t top it.

  And she’s got Agatha—alive.

  “Basil!” Bunce shouts. “There’s magic!”

  She’s pointing at something in the distance. A line of trees? No, it’s moving. Are those people?

  The vampires have turned on each other again. One of Braden’s friends is charging at me. I whip out my wand and point it at him. “Off with your head!”

  Nothing happens.

  But I feel it. The magic. I feel it stuttering in my wrist and on my tongue. Like an engine trying to catch in my belly. “Off with your head!” I try again.

  That does it. I can’t help but grin.

  When I turn away, I see that Lamb is watching me, his blue eyes wide. The vampire at his throat is staring at me, too. “You’ve done it,” the man says to me, awestruck. “You’ve levelled up.” Lamb rams his forehead into the man’s nose.

  The magic here is a capricious thing. Half my spells fail. So I cast twice as many. And the tide—it wasn’t a tide so much as a melee—turns:

  The vampires don’t have guns anymore. But Simon has some sort of scythe. He looks like the grim reaper. Drenched in blood, his T-shirt as red as his wings. One of his wings is drooping, I don’t think he can fly. He doesn’t really need to. Unarmed, untrained vampires aren’t much of a match for Simon with a blade—any blade will do.

  Penelope and Agatha are fighting together, holding hands and using their free hands as flamethrowers. The vampires go up like tinder, any of them who get too close; the girls and the fire aren’t discerning. Lamb’s vampires are leaving the fight, running up the sand dune or already running down the other side.

  I spin around, my wand out, looking for my next bout. There’s more fire than foes now.

  Lamb is still at my back. (The better to stab me, I suppose.) “Baz!” he hisses. “Come on, let’s go!”

  “You must be kidding.”

  He heaves me around by the arm, so I’m facing him. His suit is stained. His hair is disordered. “I’m glad your friends made it,” he says, “but that doesn’t change reality—nothing can change what you are.”

  “You saw what I am,” I say.

  He nods grimly. “Yes. You’re one of them. I see that. But Baz, you’re one of us, too. Blood will out.”

  “Could I live as a mage in your tower, Lamb?”

  “Can you live as you are with them?”

  I don’t answer him. He’s still holding my arm. “Come with me.”

  I shake myself free. “No.”

  He runs away then. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him.

  When I turn back to the fight, there’s one last member of the Next Blood running towards me. He’s already alight. I hold out my wand. “Fuck off and die!”

  The spell doesn’t catch.

  I try again.

  Nothing happens.

  Then something happens: Simon Snow sweeps me out of the way and into the air.

  He’s got me by the waist. His wings are pumping hard. I hold on to dear life.

  64

  SHEPARD

  I take shelter in the unburnt Mercedes for the rest of the fight. I’m foolhardy, but I’m not a fool.

  The vampires flare up and ash out quickly. Only their clothes keep burning. All that’s left in the end are little puddles of fire in the sand.

  Agatha took out the last one. She and Penelope are still holding hands. Their mouths are smeared with blood, and sparks are sputtering from Agatha’s palm.

  Simon hasn’t landed yet. His wings are beating unevenly, and he keeps lurching down, then flapping back up, still holding Baz by the waist.

  I climb out of the car and kick some sand over a pile of burning clothes. “So,” I say, “the keys are still in this Mercedes. Anybody feel like blowing this Popsicle stand?”

  Penelope and Agatha just stare at me. They’re like something out of a Stephen King movie.

  I get in front of them and clap my hands. “Guys!” I clap again. “Friends! Let’s go. Get out while the getting’s good, right? Penelope?” I touch her shoulder.

  She blinks at me. “Right,” she whispers.

  She starts pulling Agatha toward the car—“Come on, Agatha.…”—and looks up at Simon and Baz. “Simon! We’re leaving, Simon!”

  Simon keeps flapping.

  I open the car door and help Agatha in. “I’m Shepard,” I say, taking her hand.

  Penelope has run back for Simon, getting under him and catching his ankle. “Simon! Come on! Come down. It’s over.… Simon!” The boys fall more than land. “Merlin,” Penelope says. “Watch out for the fire, Simon—he’s still flammable. Can you walk, Baz?”

  The three of them are holding each other up.

  “Yeah,” Baz says. “Not to worry.”

  One of Simon’s wings is hanging and mottled a darker red. I weave my way through the fires to them. Up close, it’s clear that both of the guys are bleeding badly. Baz looks like he was wearing squibs under his shirt. “Come on,” I say, getting my arm around Simon. He leans hard on me.

  Penelope pulls Baz’s arm over her shoulder, but Simon won’t let go of him. He’s got his hand fisted in Baz’s bloody shirt.

  “It’s all right,” I say, “we’re all going to the same place.” Simon still won’t let go. Penelope and I half drag the two of them to the car. We get Baz in first, in the middle seat, and he hauls Simon in by the waist. Simon loses consciousness as soon as he’s off his feet. “We can go straight to the hospital,” I say.

  Baz sneers at me. “Are you kidding? We’ll fix him with magic. We’ll fix it all with magic. Just get us out of here if you can.”

  I can. The key fob is sitting in the console. And the car’s equipped with satellite navigation. I run around and get in the front seat. “How were you guys casting spells at all? In a Quiet Zone?”

  “There were Normals in the desert,” Penelope says. “Not close—but close enough.”

  Their magic comes back full force almost immediately. That Quiet Zone was small. The vampires knew exactly what they were doing when they brought us there.

  Penelope heals Simon first, leaning over the seat and clutching his wing.

  “Where’s your gem?” Baz asks.

  “I’ve got it.” She closes her eyes. “Good as new!”

  Simon groans, stretching the wing, inadvertently knocking Penelope back into her seat.

  She casts the spell three more times—on his head, his heart, his stomach.

  I watch them in the rearview mirror. I know I should focus on the road, but this is spectacular.

  Penelope reaches for Baz next, but he shrugs her off. “I’m full of lead,” he says. “I don’t know what will happen. I just need a drink.”

  “We’ll be in cattle country soon,” I call back.

  Baz nods. “I’ll wait.” He snags her hand. “Come here, Bunce.”

  “I’m right as rain, Baz.”

  “Don’t make me climb over Simon.”

  Penelope sighs, leaning over the seat, and Baz holds his wand to her mouth. “Kiss it better!”

  “Basil, that’s a family spell!”

  “Hush,” he says, kissing her cheek. He wipes the blood from her mouth with his sleeve. His arm is shaking. “You okay?”

  She’s tearful. She nods.

  “Do you have anything left for Agatha?”

  “Of course.”

  Penelope sits back in the seat and gently touches Agatha’s face. I can’t hear the spell.

  * * *

  Baz drinks a cow.

  Simon’s still asleep.

  Agatha hasn’t said a word.

  * * *

  It’s a ten-hour drive to San Diego. Baz moves up front with me, casting spells on the car, I think. He looks like he took a bloodbath. I run into a Target in Reno to buy him fresh clothes. He cleans up in a gas station bathroom and comes out looking pale and affordable.

  I’m nervous about being pulled over, even with his spells. “Will we dump the car? I’m sure we’ve been clocked somewhere.”

  “We’re going to destroy this car,” Agatha says, speaking up for the first time. “And anyone who asks about it.”

  Baz sighs. “Two thousand and eighteen. G-Class. Jade Green Metallic.”

  I keep waiting for them to dump me, too. (I hope they wouldn’t destroy me at this point, after everything we’ve been through together. Then again, that’s probably why they’d destroy me.)

  But when we finally get to Agatha’s apartment, and I’m standing down on the sidewalk wondering how I’m going to get back to Vegas, Baz holds the door open for me.

  PROLOGUE

  BAZ

  We’re leaving for the airport in an hour—I should probably get out of the shower. I stretch, and what I hope is the last of the bullets breaks through the skin on my shoulder and clanks against the bottom of the bath.

  I never, ever want to feel this way again. I don’t want to test the limits of this body, even if it might give me a better understanding of what I am.

  We’ve spent the last day sleeping and eating and casting spells on each other. Agatha’s stuck to Penny like a little girl clinging to her mother on the tube. She’s coming back with us. Agatha. “Just to get my wand,” she says. “It doesn’t mean I’m staying.”

  When I get out of the bathroom, Agatha’s friend Ginger is here to pick up her dog, that ridiculous little spaniel I stole back in London. Apparently Ginger is the one who introduced Wellbelove to the NowNext vampires, and she’s in a full pout that she hasn’t heard from them.

  “Josh isn’t even replying to my texts,” Ginger says.

  “Would you want him to? He abandoned you in Rancho Santa Fe.”

  “So did you, Agatha!”

  Bunce is standing behind Ginger, holding up her purple stone and silently offering to magickally befuddle her.

  Agatha is shaking her head at both of them. “Ginger, I told you it was a drag! And I left as soon as I realized you weren’t there.”

  Ginger looks tearful. She’s got a ring of red above her top lip, and it takes me a second to realize she’s drinking beetroot juice. “I thought they were going to let me level up,” she moans. “And they didn’t even invite me to their after-party!”

  “They couldn’t have invited you,” Agatha says, rubbing the girl’s arm. “You’re too good. You would have seen what they’re really about, and made them all feel like hypocrites.”

  Ginger hangs her head. “I guess.…”

  “Don’t talk to Josh anymore,” Agatha says, “even if he calls.”

  I’m fairly certain he won’t.

  Ginger sniffs. “I’ll think about it.”

  I look around the living room. “Where’s Snow?”

  “He walked down to the beach a while ago,” Bunce says.

  “I’ll go get him,” I say. “We need to go.”

  “Freshen up his…” She flaps her elbows. “If he needs it.”

  I nod, touching my wand. It’s under my shirt, tucked inside the waistband of my (cheap, horrible) jeans. I’m lucky to still have it. And my mobile. Everything else is gone.

  None of us have called home yet. But we’ll have to talk to our parents eventually about what happened—about the Next Blood, at least. Lamb said there were more of them. And Agatha thinks they really do have a lab in the desert.

  It’s telling that not one of us suggested we go and find it. Not even Simon.

  He slept all the way to San Diego. I think he had internal injuries after the battle. Bunce thinks she’s fixed him, but we’re taking him to see Dr. Wellbelove as soon as we get home, just in case.

  PENELOPE

  Agatha’s friend Ginger is crying because she missed her chance to become a douchebag vampire, and Agatha’s being nicer than I’ve ever seen her be to anyone. Is this why she doesn’t reply to my texts? Because they’re not idiotic enough?

  I find Shepard on the balcony. You can see the ocean from out here. He’s looking down at his phone.

  “Writing this up for your blog?”

  “Nah,” he says. “I’ll do that when I get home. I can’t type on my phone.”

  “Ha-bloody-ha,” I say, glancing down at his screen. He’s looking up bus tickets. To Las Vegas. “Shepard, no! By no means!”

  “I’ve got to get my truck, Penelope.”

  “The vampires have your truck!”

  “It’s in short-term parking,” he says. “I’m paying forty-three dollars a night.”

  “There are other trucks, Shepard.”

  “Yes.” He shrugs. “But none that I’m entitled to drive.”

  I see them when he shrugs—two fang marks under the collar of his jacket. Just as Baz said.

  “Hey,” I say, fishing my amethyst out of my bra. (Very happy to have it back outside my digestive tract. Sweet Circe, that was an unpleasant task.) “Let me see that bite.”

  “I’m all right,” he says. “Save your magic.”

  “You can’t save magic,” I say. “It’s not like spare change.”

  “It’s not?” There’s that infuriating light in his eyes.

  “No. Come on. We should have done this yesterday.”

  He scoots his chair closer to mine, and I pull back his collar. There are two scabbed-over puncture wounds and bruises from the vampire’s non-fang teeth. I can’t help but shudder. “Are you worried that they might have…”

  “Turned me?” He finishes my question. “No. I haven’t felt especially bloodthirsty. And … and anyway, no, I’m not worried.”

  I hold my gem over his wound and say, “Good as new!”

  When I pull my hand away, the scabs are still there. I frown. “Shepard … are you immune to magic?”

  “No,” he says, running his fingers over the wound like he’s curious. “Not immune.”

  I sit back. “Baz said that a vampire bit you, and it made the vampire sick.”

  He looks out towards the water. “Maybe the vampire was allergic.”

  “Shepard. I thought you believed in straight answers.”

  He looks over at me like he’s hurting somewhere, and it has nothing to do with a vampire bite. “I do.”

  I sit back a little farther. “What are you?”

  He turns himself completely towards me. “Penelope, I’m exactly what I look like. I’m a Talker, a Bleeder, a Normal.”

  “And…”

  “And I am also slightly … a little bit…” He swallows. “Cursed.”

  I wasn’t expecting him to say that. I don’t even know what that means. “You’re cursed?”

  He rubs his eyes under his glasses. “Yeah, I … Josh the tech-bro vampire couldn’t claim my soul because, technically speaking, it belongs to someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody you’d know. I hope. A demon. Demon-type. I’d tell you his name, but then he might show up. I…” He looks embarrassed. Caught out. He slowly takes off his jean jacket.…

  His arms are covered with twisting black tattoos. Runes and numbers. Thorns.

  “Shepard.”

  “Pretty goth, right? Not the ink I’d choose for myself. I thought about getting a Vonnegut quote, but everybody has those.…”

  “How did this happen?”

  He looks down. “Oh, you know—your classic wrong place, wrong time scenario. A summoning circle. Midnight. And then … a series of miscommunications and cultural differences.”