I REACHED FOR my bags when the trunk opened, only to be waved off by a man in uniform, a man beaming at me, who clearly recognized me, but one I hadn’t seen in so long, I could only blink back at him in confusion.

Miguel. His name was Miguel.

He was one of the security guys at Black’s main building.

He took the bag I’d grabbed out of the trunk right out of my hand, still smiling at me as he inserted himself between me and the rest of our luggage.

I wasn’t expected to carry my own luggage here.

I’d forgotten.

We were back in Black’s other world, the one that always somehow struck me as more surreal than the one filled with guns and military equipment, or even, increasingly, the one filled with psychics and vampires. In this version of Black’s life, we didn’t do things like carry luggage, or unpack, or do laundry, or even drive.

In this world, Black was a celebrity.

Even as I thought it, I grew aware of eyes on us.

Black’s arm coiled around my waist, pulling me gently to him, but most of my attention remained on the growing crowd between us and the glass doors of his building on California Street in downtown San Francisco.

Somehow they’d gotten wind of us being back in town.

I had no idea how. We’d taken Black’s private plane the whole way, and there’d been no media when we left Rome, none whatsoever.

Someone tipped them off, Black murmured in my mind, his arm wrapping further around me. Someone who was watching.

Charles. Charles was waiting for us.

He was probably the reason for these reporters.

Black squeezed me tighter into his side.

Possibly, he sent cryptically.

I knew of only one other possibility.

Before my mind could go there, Black blew warmth over me from his seer’s living light, wrapping more of himself around me, snuggling me against him.

Miri, don’t worry honey. My people got this. He kissed my temple. Let’s just inside. They’re waiting for us upstairs.

I nodded, but my eyes never left the crowd.

Reporters clustered on either side of two rows of Black Securities and Investigations security staff, who’d already carved a narrow corridor between the limousine doors and the glass doors of Black’s building. I watched muscular men and a handful of women use their bodies and hands expertly to push the two halves of crowd apart further, widening that passage.

I recognized a few of those on the security team, including at least two I knew to be seers. Both had to be wearing contact lenses, since I happened to know their real eye colors, which were neither the dull brown nor the muted hazel I saw on them now.

Every member of the team wore a black T-shirt and black pants, with Black’s company insignia on their backs in white lettering.

Shifting my eyes to the crowd itself, I scanned the reporters on both sides of that cleared aisle, noting the high-def video cameras, microphones, digital recorders, and smartphones they held up as they stared at me and Black.

Sprinkled in with the reporters were excited-looking faces that had to be some combination of tourists who happened to be in this part of downtown, business people who worked in the area, and a smattering of Black’s groupies and fans, which likely had overlap with the other two groups. At least some of them must have realized what the crowd of reporters meant once they put it together with the building address.

As usual, probably eighty percent of the groupies were young women.

Black’s building was relatively famous now, ever since he’d hit the celebrity circuit for real, which more or less started when we went to New York and he was on talk shows and magazine covers for over a year. Black being a fugitive from the law the year before, and chased by the Pentagon, only made him more notorious––and for a lot of women, more hot.

Black told me with a snort that the California Street building even showed up on some tour bus routes through San Francisco now.

In contrast to the groupie-types, female reporters stood to the front of the security lines with coiffed hair and wearing business suits, along with more makeup than most people wore on the street in San Francisco regardless of where they worked. Most of those same women carried microphones that looked overly large and weirdly dated.

Black was already steering me down the aisle bisecting the throng.

I couldn’t help watching the eyes following us, especially him.

People always stared at Black.

Women stared at him, but men did too.

It wasn’t only because he was disconcertingly handsome.

Black flat-out didn’t blend. Something about him just didn’t mesh with the regular crush of humanity.

By then I’d met too many seers to believe it was all about his race.

They didn’t fall silent as they watched him approach, but something about them seemed to grow more attentive, less distracted by the rest of the crowd. Black’s presence both drew them closer to us, and conversely nudged them to keep their distance.

As soon as we moved away from the car, however, the reporters at least, seemed to snap out of that more animal-like reaction to Black’s light. Once they did, they immediately pushed forward on the security guys, and started shouting questions at both of us. I stared around at them with a small frown, watching them jump, raise their hands, and lean around the muscular shoulders and arms of Black’s employees wherever they could.

“Where have you been, Quentin?” a man in a tan sport coat shouted.

“Miriam!” Another shouted at me. “Miriam! Are the rumors true? Are you Quentin’s wife? Are the two of you married? Tell us the truth, Dr. Fox!”

“Did you two just come back from your honeymoon?”

“Where have you been, Mr. Black?”

“What about your legal troubles, Mr. Black? Any comment on how the charges got dismissed? Was that due to your connections in the Pentagon?”

One voice rose above the others, tearing my eyes off the man in the yellow tie who’d asked me about being Black’s wife. My eyes shifted to the other side of the cleared aisle.

“Mr. Black!” A woman that time, one of the coiffed reporters carrying a big microphone. She leaned around the jostling reporters around her, forcing her body forward like a weapon. “Do you have a statement about the terrorist attacks? Or the response by the White House?”

I watched her push her way closer to the line.

“…Are you a supporter of the new policies?” she shouted, louder, as we kept walking. “Are you in favor of the New Purity movement, Mr. Black?”

I swallowed, taking in her words.

The New Purity Movement.

Even just the name made me feel a little sick.

“Mr. Black!” another reporter, male that time, shouted from the same side. “How did you get your name cleared? Are you aware some are calling for a new investigation into the murders in Virginia? How did you stop being their prime suspect?”

“Miriam!” a male voice shouted. “How do you feel about your companion being labeled a terrorist? Did you marry a murderer, Miriam?”

“Mr. Black!” another voice yelled. “How do you respond to the conspiracy theories around you and your organization? You know they’re calling you part of a shadow government? They say you’re the leader of a paid hit squad working for traitors within our military-industrial complex. How do you respond?”

I felt Black tense at that last, but he didn’t turn his head.

Gripping his hand where he had it wrapped around my waist, I pulsed light at him, trying to distract him from the crush of reporters still shouting at him.

I could tell it didn’t really work.

Everything felt different already.

I could feel it all around me, like we’d pierced the bubble somehow, just in entering the United States. I felt it even in the plane, when we entered U.S. air space. Now that we were back on the ground, and outside his car, it hit me like a physical force.

We were in my uncle’s world now.

I wasn’t even sure what that meant yet.

I could feel the difference though. I couldn’t even really comprehend this as my home. It didn’t feel like the San Francisco I remembered at all.

Did he really do this? I asked Black. How could he have changed it all so fast?

Constructs. Black’s mind came through hard, edged, reflecting the emotion he was keeping off his face with an effort. He’s changing the Barrier field over the entire goddamned continental United States. It’s affecting all of them, to greater and lesser degrees.

Glancing at me, he pursed his lips.

Once he’d studied my expression, he hugged me closer to his side.

Hey… it’s okay, doc. We knew this. And we’ll have some protection from the worst of it once we get inside. I’ve had the seers working on shields around this place and a number of other locations since they got back from Thailand.

I could only shake my head, still frowning in disbelief.

The construct wasn’t the only thing that worried me.

It was hard not to hear some of those reporters’ questions as a threat.

It was also hard not to hear that threat as coming straight from Uncle Charles.

Yeah, Black muttered in my mind. It’s a message, anyway.

How is it so much stronger here? I sent, still reacting to the feel of the crowd, the difference in the light all around me. It didn’t feel like this in Europe.

Black gave me a grim look. He’s starting here. It’ll spread.

I felt my jaw harden more.

I considered pressing him again, but only nodded.

We’d spent more than two months in Europe, looking for Brick and his vampire followers. Despite my obsessive news viewing and our near-constant contact with the team here in San Francisco, I still felt pretty out of touch with what was happening in the United States.

In Europe we had other things to focus on.

We spent weeks following ambiguous and contradictory intelligence reports and CCTV sightings of Brick and his vampire clan. Those reports had us zig-zagging all across Europe, with days and even weeks spent in Rome, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Paris, London.

We followed aliases we believed Brick might be using through airports and train stations covering half of Eastern and Western Europe.

As far as I could tell, we never even got close.

We’d just start to case a city, sending out Black’s people to help us follow the various leads––then we’d get a report Brick had just been spotted in a different country or a different city, or we’d find out the original tip or intel was bad.

Most of the video footage we were able to access was blurry, or too far away for us to be able to do a positive ID. We looked primarily for Brick himself, but we also looked for other members of his “coven,” particularly Dorian, the most easily recognizable of his vampires and the one who never seemed to leave Brick’s side for long.

I examined bodies in morgues that definitely looked like vampire kills.

There’d been a spike in unsolved, random-seeming killings on the streets of several of the cities we visited, especially Budapest and Paris, but we never figured out if Brick and his people had anything to do with those, either.

Vampires in general were eerily good at avoiding CCTV cameras. Moreover, given that we had no idea how many vampires existed out in the world, there was no way to tie any of the kills or murder spikes specifically to Brick and his friends.

Of course, I couldn’t have given two fucks about Brick––not really.

I cared about the dead humans.

I cared that vampires killed them.

I wasn’t looking for the vampire king in particular, though, nor did I think he was likely any worse than most vampires when it came to leaving dead bodies lying around.

From what Black told me, Brick played on the cautious side when it came to actually murdering his feeding victims. Black seemed to think he kept them alive when he could, if only to severely reduce the likelihood of his being ID’d for what he was, or having any kind of run-in with human law enforcement.

While that was interesting information to have, and might actually be useful at some point, it didn’t really help me with what I wanted right now––nor did it help me much while we were in Europe. It just made the vampire king a hell of a lot harder to track.

For me, Brick was just a means to an end.

I hadn’t really been looking for Brick at all.

I was looking for Nick Tanaka, one of my oldest friends.

The fact that we hadn’t found any sign of him, any hint of whether he was even alive, much less whether Brick and his vampires had him, made me sick to my stomach every time I let myself think about it for more than a few seconds at a time.

I was so worried about him at this point, I could barely sleep.

While we were in Europe, Black would wake up in the middle of the night to find me pacing our hotel room, staring out dark windows––or, more often, he’d just wake up to a note and an empty bed. After about an hour of staring at the ceiling, I’d usually just give up and go out looking for Nick myself, walking the night streets with a gun concealed under my coat, my psychic sight straining in all directions.

My psychic sight was pretty useless, of course, in terms of finding Brick himself, since seers can’t feel vampires.

I had to hope I might feel Nick, though, if he were nearby.

As for Brick and his cronies, all I could do is look for blank spots in the psychic space that might indicate their presence, or look for signs of emotional distress in humans––anything that might indirectly signal a vampire could be hunting in the area.

If Black woke up before I got back, he chewed me out for not bringing me with him.

Each time, I promised him that next time, I would.

Yet, each next time, I couldn’t seem to make myself wake him up, just like I couldn’t stop myself from going out looking for Nick––at least on those nights I didn’t collapse unconscious from exhaustion.

What I didn’t want to think about, what Black wouldn’t say, at least not to me, was that there was a good chance Nick was dead.

Really, at this point, Nick being dead was the most likely scenario.

If Brick kidnapped Nick from the Thai island of Koh Mangaan, where we’d last seen either of them, the vampire king would have done it for a reason.

He would have done it wanting something.

Whatever that thing was, he would have asked for it by now.

Nick had been missing for almost three months.

Three goddamned months, and we didn’t have so much as a single lead.

Nick had to be dead.

I was fucking kidding myself, telling myself he might still be alive.

Black tightened his arm around me, crushing me into his side.

In front of us, another of Black’s security guards, this one from regular lobby security and wearing an expensive-looking suit, smiled at both of us. Bowing his head, he gripped the handle of the glass door to our right, swinging it open as we approached.

We walked inside, Black speeding his steps as he gave the security guy a nod. As soon as we were all the way through, I heard the snick of the door closing behind us, right as I stepped out onto the black and white granite tiles decorating the floor of the four-story lobby.

Instantly, the space altered around us.

I felt Black take a breath.

Something in his body, light and arm relaxed. I took a breath right after he did, then gradually aligned my breath and heart rate with his. The grief that had risen in me around Nick didn’t lessen. If anything, it grew worse, but it softened in me, somehow.

I also felt stranger about being back.

Black’s building lobby looked and felt exactly the same as I remembered it, making the contrast with the world outside even more stark.

That feeling of unreality worsened as we kept walking, crossing the stone floors and bypassing the main bank of elevators to reach his company’s private one.

I stared as we passed by the front of a copper sculpture waterfall fountain coming out of one wall, decorated with hanging crystals that shimmered with pale, colored lights. Just like I remembered, other real art decorated the rest of the lobby and hung on the walls, making the place look more like a museum than a regular business complex.

We hadn’t made it halfway across the granite tiles before we were approached by two more people on Black’s security team. I’d been looking down, reacquainting myself with the floor designed like an elaborate chess board as I aimed my feet for Black’s private elevator, when the guards stepped right in front of us, forcing us to halt.

I only half-listened as Black discussed a number of security measures with the two of them, including new pass keys for both of us, fingerprint scanners into his penthouse apartment, and a new key code Black and I could change once we got up there.

It was only after he’d been talking to them for a few minutes that I realized they were both seers. I didn’t recognize either of them; apparently Yarli had been busy recruiting from among the refugee population we’d inherited while we were gone.

“We’ve had a few break-in attempts recently,” one of them told Black, the taller, female one with the lighter-colored eyes.

It was difficult to tell what color either of their eyes were for real, since they both appeared to be wearing colored contact lenses.

“…I know Dex wants to talk to you about at least one of those, Mr. Black,” she added politely. “He also has some thoughts about security in general, including personal guards for yourself and your wife.”

She gave me a faintly nervous look, but smiled in a friendly way when I smiled at her.

“…He wanted me to pass that on, sir. He said to tell you that he and Cowboy can give you more details upstairs.”

“Are they still waiting for us in the suite?” Black said, his voice low, and gruff.

She nodded, once, a nod that felt more like a salute.

“They are, sir. And they know you’ve both arrived. But they also wished me to convey to you both that they’re more than happy to wait, if you and your wife would like to grab showers and change first. We can take you up in the elevator now.”

At Black’s raised eyebrow, she added, hastily,

“…Just until you get a chance to encode you and your wife’s retina imprints on there, sir. We can do that whenever you want today.”

Black grunted at that, nodding.

When the two of them turned, leading us the rest of the way to Black’s private elevator, he glanced down at me, quirking an eyebrow.

“They haven’t wasted any time, have they?” I murmured.

He grunted again, in amusement that time.

“They’d be in for an ass-kicking if they had,” he murmured back, kissing my cheek. “I’m the only one around here who gets paid to look pretty.”

When I choked on a half-laugh, earning a faintly puzzled look from the two seers, Black wrapped his arm around me even tighter, sending a jolt of heat through me that I felt down to my feet. It made me shiver, even as I pressed deeper into him. It also made me want to do more than just shower when we got up to the penthouse.

No complaints here, doc, Black murmured, his light coiling around me tighter.

I felt my light flare in reaction…

…which made me feel guilty as hell when I thought about Nick, and about Angel upstairs, waiting for me to reassure her that Nick was okay.

That had been happening a lot lately, too.

Me feeling guilty, that is.

Shoving both things out of my mind as best I could, I let my eyes fall out of focus, aiming them at the art hanging on the walls, at the waterfall sculpture, at the black and white granite tiles, at the backs of the two security guards walking in front of us. I could already feel that a lot more had changed than simply our pass cards and a few security measures in the lobby and elevators.

Now that we’d been inside for a few seconds, the whole building felt weirdly like it was on lockdown. It reminded me of entering embassies in foreign countries during wartime, or even some high-security prisons I’d visited as a forensic psychologist. It definitely felt more like either of those things than a business and residential complex on some of the most expensive real estate in the country.

I kept those thoughts to myself, though.

I even kept the bulk of my thoughts from Black, mostly because I could feel how worried he was about me.

We followed the seer guards into the private elevator that lived inside a small alcove to the left of the main elevator banks. I watched the female seer lean down, activating the retinal scanner once we were inside.

The elevator doors slowly began to close.

Once they had, it felt like we’d already left that other San Francisco behind.