“SHE’S HEAVY, FOR BEING SO OLD,” LIAM COMPLAINS, his fingers and palms rubbing raw from where they struggle to support the bottom of the cement burial vault. “She can’t be that big, right?”

The vault: roughly seven foot by three, cement-reinforced with steel rebar, wrapped in heavy chains. A vault of utility, not vanity, the cement dull gray and not polished to gleaming, the coarseness of medium-grit sandpaper. The weight not beyond what Liam alone could carry, such the blessing of their Blood, but Victor instructed them to be careful, that though Ismae Slumbers in a coffin within the vault, she’s, as he put it, “precious cargo.”

“Come now, brother, surely it’s not all bad,” Mina teases from the other end of the vault, smiling as they both shuffle underneath the weight and importance of what they carry. “You’ve turned the head of nearly every woman we’ve passed, and most of the men.”

Liam laughs, glancing down at his own shirtless chest, the fine sheen of sweat broken out over his skin and the runes there, carved into his flesh post-mortem as he hovered between the worlds of the Living and the Dead, in the tradition of their family Bloodline. The muscles of his chest and arms bulge, no longer the lean muscle of a predator giving chase, but transformed into the savage beauty of the predator tearing into his kill. His sister’s strength nearly matching his own, he notices her silhouette likewise transformed but to lesser degree, another trick of their Blood.

He doesn’t bother obscuring his strength the way she does, but then he’s not burdened with the double standard of beauty that women are: be strong but not too strong. He’s lost count of how many idiots have fallen to his sister’s fang, too distracted by the threat they perceive in him that they underestimate her. Her Keeper-kills probably out-tally his own, but it’s a good tactic for them, tried and true.

Why take another packmate when they have each other?