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Saber felt a horrible tingly feeling.
“I’m going to go to his house,” she said, pushing back her chair and standing up.
Mia and Elijah looked at each other.
“We’ll follow you,” he said, picking up his keys.
“Ride with me?” Saber asked Lozen, who nodded and pushed back her own chair as she stood.
Doug’s house was quiet. Saber knocked on the door for three minutes and listened, hearing nothing. When she looked inside through a corner of a window, she saw a chair tipped over, and felt sick.
“Oh my god,” she said, and tried the door.
It swung open, unlocked.
The inside was a mess, furniture knocked over, the kitchen ransacked, books and papers scattered on the floor.
“What the fuck,” Lozen said, looking around. “We have to find him.”
“Someone might still be here,” Elijah said, and Mia and Lozen replied in unison.
“They’re not.”
Saber shuddered. Lozen had changed. She could sense things, just like Mia. Maybe they could talk to each other telepathically.
Saber looked in the bedrooms and found more evidence of destruction, but no blood, which was some kind of a relief. The bedroom was simply, tastefully decorated, with a handmade quilt on the queen-sized bed, now rumpled, with clean white sheets torn from the mattress.
“He’s outside!” Mia called, and Saber, her heart in her throat, ran from the bedroom to follow them all as they left through the back door.
Doug was outside, sitting a ways from the house on a stump near the stream that snaked through his back yard. His hands were in his pockets, and he was gazing into the water with an expression of serious, thoughtful, ambivalence. When he heard them he looked up, and tried to force a smile.
“I didn’t hear you,” he said. “Sorry, I was thinking.”
“Doug, what happened?” Saber cried, running to hug him.
He hugged her back, and shrugged when she stood back and looked at him. He looked older and more tired than ever before.
“A vampire came to me this morning, before sunrise,” he said. “I think she would have killed me if I hadn’t ordered her out of my house in time.”
“What did she look like?”
“A woman,” he said, and the word sounded almost silky, like the memory of her was somehow pleasant.
“A woman?” Lozen asked and glanced at Saber.
“The single mostbeautifulwoman I’ve ever seen,” he said with a strange, dreamy regret.
“Seriously?” Lozen asked, not bothering to hide her disgust. “A vampire comes to kill you and the first thing you have to say is that she’s beautiful?”
Doug laughed at that, a sincere laugh, and looked at Lozen.
“I’m an old man,” he said, “and I’ve never felt the way I did last night, looking at her through my window. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”
“She was putting a spell on you,” Mia said, but Doug shook his head.
“I think she was trying to, at first, but I put on the little crown you gave me. I don’t think it was magic. She really was just that beautiful, that captivating.”
Saber thought of the first time she saw Ansel, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Something about being a vampire elevated the beauty of the mortal he’d been before. Even Derek, now dead and gone, had been more alluring as a vampire than the average-looking man in the old Polaroids they’d found of him.
