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“Vampires do not sparkle.”

“You’re about to if we don’t move.”

His mouth twitched. I saw it. And in that half-second, standing in a musty equipment room holding a stolen camera, with my whole future tilting sideways, I was so happy I couldn’t stand it.

We found two more in ten minutes. One was behind a stack of towels, and the other was tucked up into the ventilation grate so cleverly that I would have walked right past it. Maksim found it by sound: he stood in the middle of the room with his head tilted and his eyes half-closed, like a man listening to music in another room, and said, “There,” pointing without looking.

He crushed them both in his hand. The plastic went off like dry twigs.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“I do not know. There may be others. There may be—”

The door at the other end of the room opened.

I heard heavy, unhurried footsteps, the particular tread of a man who has just eaten a dinner he did not enjoy.

Derek.

I didn’t have time to swear. Maksim’s hand closed on my arm, hard and cold, and I felt the room tilt as he moved. I don’t know how to describe it. I was against the wall and then I was somewhere else, behind a long row of tall metal equipment lockers, wedged into a gap between the last one and the cinderblock. The space was maybe a foot and a half wide, dark as a well, smelling of old rubber and mildew.

He pulled me in front of him. His chest was against my back. His hand was still on my arm, and his other came around my waist, quick and light, holding me flat against him so neither of us would move.

I stopped breathing.

Derek’s footsteps came across the room, and he went straight to the corner where I’d found the first camera. He crouched, and I heard him grunt.

“What the—” A beat. “Where the fuck is it?”

He knew.

I felt Maksim go tense behind me, not with fear but with attention, like a wire drawn tight. Derek pulled out his phone, and the screen lit up his heavy face, and I watched him swipe and tap and swipe again, his frown deepening.

“Someone took them,” he muttered. “Someone fucking took them.”

I could feel Maksim’s heartbeat, if that’s what it was. A slow, deep pulse, in his chest, against my spine. He wasn’t supposed to have one. I did not say so. I stood absolutely still in the dark with my heart trying to punch through my ribs, and behind me, around me, holding me, a two-hundred-pound vampire held his breath, and I thought, in a strange sharp flash: He would let me go in a second. All I’d have to do is say the word.

I didn’t say the word.

What I felt instead was warmth. His hand was warm. It had been cold for days, his whole life, and now it lay on my stomach and I could feel it warming through the fabric, drawing heat from me like a lamp. His breath stirred my hair. I felt his mouth, very close, just above my ear, not touching, not quite.

Don’t, I told myself. Do not get hard in a locker. Do not get hard in front of Derek Mathis. Do not, do not, do not.

I got hard.

I would like the record to show that I kept perfectly still. That I stared straight ahead. That I counted backward from a hundred in French, which I do not speak.

Behind me, Maksim exhaled through his nose, very slowly, and I felt his mouth curve against my temple.

He knows. Of course he did. He could hear it, smell it, taste it in the air. I closed my eyes and wished for death.

Derek stood there for what felt like a year. Then, muttering, he turned on his heel. “I’m gonna find out who did this,” he said, to no one, “and when I do—” The door slammed behind him so hard the lockers rang.

Silence.

We stood there for a long time. I couldn’t tell you how long. Neither of us moved.

“He is gone,” Maksim said quietly.