My stomach lurched and bile tickled the back of my throat. “That’s nothing,” I whispered hoarsely, the smile on my face painted on. “So it’s settled. You’ll stay here.”
I looked around my apartment, feeling suddenly hopeful. “Yeah. Yeah, you could stay here. They wouldn’t come looking for you here, no one would. And Nina wouldn’t mind—you could probably even stay in her room. And Vlad—Vlad and Nina could probably track the trackers before they tracked you. You know,” I patted my nose with my index finger, “vampires and their sense of smell.”
Sampson shook his head, a smile that held no joy on his lips. “It doesn’t work like that, Sophie. They won’t stop. If they can’t come after me directly, they’ll go after the things that are closest to me. That would be you, Nina, the whole Underworld. They’ll try and smoke me out by destroying the things that I care about.”
“Like the townspeople.” The weight of what Sampson was saying, the actual meaning set over me, crushing my heart, squeezing what little hope I had managed to summon. “You came back to warn us.” I hugged my shoulders. “Because they’re already coming here. After us.”
“They’re coming after the Underworld Detection Agency.” Sampson’s eyes were fixed on mine. “They’re going to come after you.”
I crossed my living room in two short strides and had my hand on the phone. “We’ve got to call Dixon. He’s running the UDA now. We need to put him on high alert, tell him you’re back. He’ll know what to do. He’ll know how to protect you. That’s what we do,” I told Sampson, uselessly, as he knew exactly what the Underworld Detection Agency was about. “We protect our own.”
Sampson put his hand on my arm and I held the receiver, limp.
“No one can know I’m here, Sophie. No one can know I’m alive. Especially not anyone at the Underworld Detection Agency.”
I hung up the phone, the click of the receiver like the ominous cock of a gun. “So what do we do? How do we outrun them?”
“We don’t outrun them, Sophie. We have to fight them.”