9

A wave of exhaustion hits you as the sun rises fully. The Kindred were not meant to remain awake during daylight hours, and you look around for anywhere safe you might rest.

There's an old metal-topped freezer beside a counter here, just big enough to hold you, and sealed against sunlight. Inching around the shafts of daylight that filter through the open window and the gaps in the boards, you wrench the old freezer open. It smells like expired milk, but you can't worry about that now.

You drop into the old freezer and pull the lid shut.

Then you mentally inventory all the things you do need to worry about: your ruined car, the ache of Hunger in your gums, the smell of fresh blood somewhere in this building, the strange eagle.

You may not survive another night. But you survived this one. You survived the desperate ambition of your sire, Elin Olivecrona. Then you survived out here in the desert for years, one night at a time. You permit yourself a tight little smile. You can still make it. You can still find a way out of this.

And then the blackness of the day-sleep swallows you.