Demon Moon

gadget?”
    “Just something I’ve been playing with—I pulled apart a pair of infrared goggles and a handheld game, made some adjustments to the display function. It’s for newbies, or humans who can’t quickly tell if someone is a human, a demon, or a vampire. I can see the differences after looking for a while, but this would take a temperature reading and tell me right away. And there aren’t any human agents at SI now, but eventually there will be. Without psychic abilities, they’ll need something like this. Only better—not a bunch of junk.”
    “There are humans: Castleford, Lilith…you.”
    “They can’t really be called human—and neither am I, not anymore. I wouldn’t be in this car with you if I were normal, would I?”
    “You weren’t normal before you ingested the venom, sweet; if you had been, I’d not have spent more than five minutes in your company.”
    Wrapped in such flattery, his confirmation shouldn’t have stung as much as it did, but at least he didn’t lie and pretend it was her, and not what he could get from her.
    “Anyway, I wanted to see if it could read through the spell to the vampires behind us.” She frowned down at the screen as she swept the stylus toward Colin, then switched to the IR display. Just a light green blob—no shape at all. “Except it doesn’t seem to be working now.”
    “It probably is. Try the vampires,” Colin said.
    She half-rose and turned to peer through the window behind them, saw the black Navigator as it passed beneath a streetlight. “Why do you still have an accent? You’ve lived in the States for a century.”
    Bright red filled the display: the SUV’s engine. The device was too primitive to separate the vampires’ data from the motor’s, but apparently it could detect heat from outside the spell’s protective shield.
    “Do you think it an affectation?” He sounded amused.
    “Maybe.” She settled back into her seat. “It probably makes it easier for you to hunt. You just say something poetic and they swoon.”
    He gave a heartfelt sigh, and said, “‘I die! I faint! I fail! / Let thy love in kisses rain / On my lips and eyelids pale. / My cheek is cold and white, alas! / My heart beats loud and fast;—/ Oh! Press it to thine own again, / Where it will break at last.’” He lifted his hand from his chest and arched a brow. “‘The Indian Serenade,’ yet you are not swooning.”
    Only because she had something to support her. “Shelley has always struck me as overly dramatic and sentimental,” she managed.
    “My sweet Savitri—do not tell me you are a cynic. I’ll not believe it. A skeptic, but not a cynic.”
    “No, I’ve seen too much evidence to the contrary. Hugh and Lilith. My parents. Selah and Lucas. My best friend just married a man she’d met once before her wedding, and in her last e-mail she declared herself madly in love with him.” She shrugged. “I just think the odds of finding the perfect person are very low, particularly when you’ve got only sixty years to do it in. So most people either settle for security and fond companionship, or divorce when it doesn’t work out and keep on looking. Are you?”
    “I have also seen too much evidence to the contrary.” He smiled slightly. “And the odds have not increased over two hundred years, despite the reams of poetry I’ve recited.”
    “Perhaps your odds would increase if you wrote your own.”
    “I believe it would utterly destroy them. And I’ve no desire to become a starving poet. I’m content placing my failure at Shelley’s feet; I blame the poem for your resistance, not my recitation of it.”
    She met his eyes and bit the inside of her cheek to hold back her laughter when she saw the mirth reflected there. “You knew him, didn’t you? Shelley? Hugh once mentioned that you’d known John Polidori, and that you were near Lake Geneva the same year as he and Byron. So you must have encountered the Shelleys.”
    She didn’t miss the sudden darkening of his gaze before he nodded. “Yes. His wife had some sense, but Shelley was a bloody fool—though I suppose I was no less, at the time.” He paused, and a pleased expression lit his features. “Did you read his work for his connection to me, sweet Savitri?”
    “Hugh was a literature professor for years, and 1816 is a rather famous summer in the literary world. Ghost stories and competitions and all that. I also had a phase when I was a teenager and read tons of Romantic