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I still remember the feel of it against my cheek as he attempted to get me in a chokehold and fly me out of the nearest window. Soft as animal fur, and such a rich burgundy I almost stole it after I had finished boiling both his legs off. I’ll say one thing for him: he has great taste. In the 1800s his handkerchiefs were always silk, his suits immaculately tailored, his top hats extremely memorable. In the twenties, he had the most amazing waistcoats I’ve ever seen on someone’s body.

And those leather boots he always wore in the eighties.

Halfway up his leg, laces never fully tied, custom made by some designer most people have never heard of. Anna Wintour would have sighed to see them. Honestly, sometimes I sighed to see them. They were so gorgeous some homophobic member of his gang trotted out the old canard that they must have meant he was queer.

He was very amused, a minute before he tossed him onto a bonfire.

After all, what kind of vampire thinks being straight is the standard? Or that clothes could really mean anything about sexual orientation? Most supernatural creatures don’t even understand what any of that is—and Halsten is no exception. He once scolded me for joking that he had a wife. If I was capable of love, surely you know it wouldn’t have to be with a woman, he had said.

And yet, despite all this, all his love of clothes and comfort, I find no trace of him at the Mervina, next to the Parkside Mall. He isn’t at the inn by the brace of boutique shops on the outskirts of town. Or at the Airbnb that’s basically a mansion, by the farmers market. I break in through an attic window, and just get screamed at by the people I didn’t realize were staying there.

The whole thing is a complete bust. I’m honestly starting to doubt my instincts—and then suddenly it comes to me in a flash of inspiration, as I’m midway through enjoying the delights of Main Street. January brings the Winter Festival, and the whole place is already festooned in fake flurries and strings of icicles and glittering swathes of gauzy material. Not that it needs it, though, really—the dark sky is so thick with pregnant clouds that you can practically smell the snow coming.

I jog across the street to the still-open diner, the glow of it incredibly warm against the fabulously frosty air and the road that’s just a little damp, and I swear my cheeks get kissed by flakes. And then I turn my face up to the sky, just to get a little more of it. To feel something other than dread and confusion.

Wintertime in Hollow Brook can always do that for me.

It restores me, it feeds my bashed-around soul—as does the grilled cheese I snag from Iris at the Top. She gives me a wink as she passes it over the counter to me, and I can see why. It’s as fat as a three-tier cake and so full of mozzarella I end up with strings of it wrapped around my fingers. Not to mention greasy enough that it turns the paper bag it’s wrapped in see-through.

Some guy gives me a side-eye when he sees me emerging from the place with a mouthful of it. But I’m fine with that, because he’s the reason I suddenly know just what to do. I watch him stroll in the direction of the alley between the diner and the Donut Hole, all fucking full of it, arms held out from his body like his body is bigger than it is, hair like something Patrick Bateman would have rejected for being too Chad-like. And I remember.

He is exactly the kind of man Halsten just loves to eat.

In the eighties he used to regularly leave our seaside town to dine out on Wall Street. By the end of his reign of terror there wasn’t a single broseph left in Sunset City. So chances are, he’s going to be looking for guys like this. All full of piss and vinegar (thank you, Mathilde, for that particular phrase), ready to stroll down some dark alley oblivious to any danger.

I follow him before I’ve even finished the thought.

Ten steps behind, and cloaked in a stealth spell.

All my focus on capturing Halsten—which is probably why I’m just not paying attention to other things like I usually would be. I’m expecting a six-foot-five vampire with a bag full of tricks I can predict. And instead I get sideswiped by a devil dog that had apparently been lurking in some trashcans behind the Donut Hole. One second I’m cursing because the easy target I was following has exited the alleyway. The next I’m on my back, on the filth-slicked floor, gripping both ends of an enormous mouth to stop it snapping closed around my head.

And I am already losing that fight.

I just don’t have a good enough grip, is the thing. It doesn’t have any lips—just two slimy, sharp ends to its giant maw. They dig into the soft meat of my hands so hard it makes my eyes sting. It makes me want to yank away. And doubly so when I start feeling the other sharp thing in close proximity.

It has teeth like razor blades, and my fingers are getting nearer and nearer to them. That viselike jaw works; its clawed feet scrabble on the floor on either side of my extremely vulnerable body. Then suddenly I get this searing heat all down the outer edge of my hand. Like a paper cut times a thousand.

And of course now it can smell blood.

Now it can sense my extra panic.

Hell, it doesn’t have to sense it. My breath is coming loud and fast and grating, and I’ve just drummed my heels so hard against the dirt floor that one of my boots has come off. I’m going to die with one boot on, I think, but that just makes it worse. I can’t think. I can’t breathe. My heart is slamming so hard against the insides of my body that it’s making me shake.

Or maybe I’m just shaking anyway.

I’m way closer to getting my clock punched here than I should be, without so much as a hint of a plan. In order to use my magic hands I’ve got to let go; if I let go I’m getting chomped, and oh fuck, this thing just realized it can use its claws against my soft body as easily as it can use its teeth. It lifts one great foot up, high enough that I see the strange underside of it all splayed out.

And then I’m not really sure what happens.

I hear a thud, and suddenly my hands are empty, and my face is wet. Drool, I tell myself. But I suspect it’s something worse. It feels thick, and hot, and it smells like death. Like somehow this demonic thing just lost its head, and the contents of its neck emptied out all over me.

It’s down my front, too.

I think some of it is in my hair.

Yet somehow it still shocks me when I swipe at my eyes enough to see what the fuck is going on and find a headless stump looming over me. Teetering, quivering, like it’s about two seconds away from slumping into my already filth-covered body. So of course I gasp. I scrabble back, so hard and fast I don’t even think about what I might scrabble back into. My brain just isn’t putting together that something did this, and that the something must be to the left of me. And even when I thud into that thing, my brain still doesn’t fully process it.

I think I’ve just hit a mysteriously meaty wall.