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"I'm not sleeping with her."
"That's not--" Cassandra shot a glare around the cabin. "Where is that girl? What, she serves coffee and disappears until the flight's over? Paige's cup is almost empty."
"Uh, that's okay, Cassandra," I said. "But thanks for thinking of me."
"If you need anything, just press the buzzer by your elbow," Lucas said. "Otherwise, I've asked Annette to stay up front so we can speak freely. Now, about these two addresses. The rural one is under an older alias, but we should check out both. It won't take long."
"It'd be even faster if we split up," Aaron said. "Lucas and I take one, you ladies take the other. That way, we each have a spell-caster for breaking in and a vampire for sneaking around."
"Good idea," I said. "We'll take the rural address, and leave the city one for Lucas, in case he needs to do more than peer in the windows. He's the breakin pro, not me."
Cassandra's brows arched. "And you admit it? That's a first. You really are growing up, aren't you?"
"Cassandra?" Aaron said. "Shut up."
"What? I was praising her--"
"Don't. Please." Aaron looked at me. "I wish I could say she hasn't always been like this, but she has. After a few decades, you get used to it."
"Get used to what?" Cassandra said.
"So," Aaron said. "How do you guys like living in Portland?"
Cassandra and I stood on the side of a country road, our rental car parked behind us. Through the thick brush and gnarled skeletons of dead trees, we could make out a tiny cabin that looked like it predated indoor plumbing.
"Uh, rustic getaway cottage?" I said, double-checking the address Aaron had scribbled into my notepad. "Maybe they preferred life before electricity."
"This is ridiculous," Cassandra said. "I warned you, Paige. Aaron is far too trusting. He hates to believe anything negative about anyone, but that Josie is, bar none, the stupidest vampire ever to walk the earth. Probably gave him the names of her ex-boyfriends instead of Edward's aliases. She--"
My cell phone rang. Thankfully.
"It's Aaron," he said when I answered. "We have the house here. Lucas is scouting it out now, but I talked to the lady next door and she gave me a spot-on description of Edward and Natasha. Says they've been away a lot lately, and she hasn't seen Natasha in a few months, but Edward stops by now and then."
"Want us to come and help search?"
"If you could. Four pairs of eyes are better than two. If Cassandra squawks, tell her she can wait at a coffee shop instead. That'll make her pipe down. She hates to miss anything."
I signed off and relayed Aaron's message to Cassandra.
"So this isn't the right house?" she said. "What a surprise."
She headed for the car. I stayed where I was, peering through the trees at the cabin.
"Wait there," I called back to Cassandra. "I want to check this out first."
I headed for the cabin. Cassandra's sigh was loud enough to be heard from the roadway but, a moment later, without so much as a whisper of long grass, she was beside me.
"The only thing you're going to find here is Lyme disease," she said. "That's not a vampire's house, Paige. It never has been. It's too small, too far from the city--"
"Maybe that's the point," I said. "Immortality questers are notoriously paranoid about security. They need a place to conduct their experiments. Why not here?"
"Because it's a dump. And it's certainly not secure."
"Does it hurt to look?" I said. "It's probably five hundred square feet tops."
Cassandra sighed, then swung in front of me and marched to the cabin.
Ask people what they fear most in life and, if they
