Falling from the Light (The Night Runner Series Book 3) by Regan Summers

address and we’ll cab it and meet you later?”
    Petr dropped a long silver key attached to a short black key chain into my hand. “There will be no cabbing it. Your car has arrived, as specified.” He slid a single sheet of paper out of his folio and handed it to me. “You cannot take this, so memorize the location. Share it with no one.”
    “Will it self-destruct after I read it?”
    His mouth drew down and one of his eye’s twitched. Zero sense of humor. The hand-drawn map showed an area east-northeast of Scottsdale. The streets around it weren’t named, only the exit off the 101, and it appeared to lie against a rise that wanted to be a mountain. Not the best directions I’d ever received but not the worst, either. I spent a few minutes reviewing the layout of Phoenix and the surrounding towns before we left, and it was easy to incorporate the turns into my mental navigation system. Exit. Right. Right, left, long curve but don’t take the fork, two rights, and then straight into a dead end. I handed the map back to him.
    “Thanks. For all this stuff. The car, setting this up.” Even if I hadn’t wanted long hair and skin that smelled like lavender and old-lady lotion.
    “Be in before sunset,” he replied. “Watch your profile and where you go. There is a small hive in town, petitioning for sanctuary with one of the other tribes. This is a human city so they will remain in the shadows, but there is a reason they are no longer allowed in the territories.”
    Bad bloodsuckers. How unusual. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
    He nodded dismissively, and I pulled Mickey through the door before she tried to go back and get something else waxed.
    “I thought vampires did not roam your southern states,” she said as we stepped out of the cool salon into a blistering wall of heat. My mouth fell open and all of my freshly scoured pores dropped dead at the same time.
    “If they’re asking humans for sanctuary, they’ve worn out their welcome elsewhere. Churches and developing nations do that sometimes, accept vampires, but usually only the ones they can benefit from.” And usually only in places where the vampires got a season of advanced darkness. I shucked my jacket and raised the key. It was bare. No chip. No fob. I squinted as I glanced around the parking lot, trying to match it to a car. My eyes went wide.
    “It’s a Buick Skylark,” Petr said as he came outside. Mickey’s hands clasped together in front of her chest.
    “Nineteen sixty-six,” she whispered. “That might be original chrome. Should be a 340-bhp.” When she raised her coffee-colored eyes, they were misty. “How fast do you think you can get her to sixty?”
    “Fast.” I’d have to buy sunscreen with SPF 90 if I wanted to leave the top down, but it would be worth it. I took two steps toward the pale blue beauty, then rocked to a stop when I noticed the heat waves shimmering around the limo. “Where’s Thurston?”
    Petr fixed the brim of his hat, then nodded in the direction I was looking.
    “You left him in the car? It’s a thousand degrees out here!”
    “If I’d taken him in—even if they allowed it—I wouldn’t have been able to bring him out.”
    “That’s inhumane,” Mickey muttered.
    “He’s not human , Miss Fuente.”
    I stared at the reflective black glass of the window, inwardly kicking myself. The loner vampire was my responsibility, and while I was bitching about having my hair done, he was trapped in a sweltering box as twilight turned into burning daylight. Nice fucking work, Syd.
    “Are you going straight to the hotel?” I asked.
    “I will get him under cover as soon as I am able, Miss Franklin,” Petr said. His put-upon tone made me want to slap him. After I slapped myself for being thoughtless.
    At least Thurston could cool off soon, presuming that AC worked in the back of the vampire-insulated car. I stomped toward the Skylark, my joy at the new toy quashed. I reminded myself that I hadn’t gotten