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I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was such a strange, warm, ordinary thing: eggs and coffee and a woman teasing my vampire in a bar full of red light. I’d braced for a lot of things. I hadn’t braced for a family.

Then I saw Marcus lock the front door.

The mood changed. Tamsin’s smile faded. Maksim had sat up straight beside me. He hadn’t touched his glass of wine, and I saw his hand go flat on the table.

“Right,” said Tamsin. “Tell me about the roof.”

We told her.

It took ten minutes. The click, the whir, the smell of silver. The lens across the street, the footsteps in the snow. She listened without interrupting, hands folded, face going still and careful and older. When we finished, she got up, went behind the bar, and came back with a laptop and a thin manila folder.

“Marcus and I have been busy,” she said.

She opened the folder. Inside were four photographs, printed on cheap paper, showing a gray coat, a tall thin man, a rental sedan, and a face, half turned, in the light of a streetlamp, gaunt and lined and handsome in a way that looked carved out of grief.

“Gideon Roake,” said Maksim, quietly.

“That’s him?” I said. “That’s the guy?”

“That’s him.”

“He looks like a professor.”

“He was a surgeon. Boston General, twenty years.” Tamsin tapped the photo. “This was taken two nights ago outside my bar. Marcus followed him for six blocks and lost him in a parking garage.”

“He is careful,” said Maksim.

“He’s methodical. “ Tamsin pulled a second sheet from the folder. “I’ve been calling around. There’s a network. Nothing organized, mostly old grudges and long memories. But three of my contacts, in Montreal, in Prague, in Chicago, say the same thing. Roake has a handler. A younger guy, ex-military, goes by Brandt. Brandt does the legwork. Roake does the paying.”

“So the man on the roof,” I said.

“Was probably Brandt.”

I pushed my plate away. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

“What does he have?” I asked. “What did he see?”

Tamsin looked at Maksim. Maksim looked at me.

“Very little,” said Maksim, slowly. “That is the mercy of it. The curtain was almost closed. A lens across a street, at night, through a gap. He may have a photograph of two men in a bed. He will not have a photograph of anything a court, or a newspaper, would call proof.”

“So he can’t hurt you.”

“He cannot prove what I am.” A pause. “But he now knows who I am to someone.”

The words landed in my stomach.

“He has spent six years looking for one of us,” said Tamsin gently. “One clear enough to follow. Now he’s found a vampire who’s got a weakness, Lex. Someone who’ll take him by the throat and not the collar. It doesn’t matter if he can’t prove it. He doesn’t need to prove it. He just needs to know where you sleep.”

“Where I sleep.”

“Where your family lives.” She said it very softly. “Your sister. Your mom.”

I stood up.

I didn’t mean to. I was on my feet, hands flat on the table, and the room had gone very bright and very loud. Something in my chest that I’d been holding down for twenty-six years, the thing with teeth, the thing that was only quiet when I was hurting someone, was awake and pacing.

“Nobody touches my family.”