Bloodlines (Bloodlines #1)(118)

Spirit users could sense each other when they were close enough, even behind closed doors. And sure enough, when the door opened, Sonya Karp strode in like a queen, tall and elegant. With her red hair swept into a bun, the Moroi woman could have been Angeline's older sister. Sonya smiled at us all, though I couldn't help a shiver as I thought back to the first time I'd met her. She hadn't been nearly so pretty or charming then. She'd been red-eyed and trying to kill us.

Sonya was a Strigoi who'd been restored back to a Moroi, which really made her the ideal choice to work with Adrian on figuring out how to use spirit to prevent people from being turned.

Sonya hugged Adrian and was walking over to me when someone else appeared in the doorway. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised at who it was. After all, if we wanted to figure out what special spirit magic in Lee had stopped him from being turned again, then we needed all the data possible. And if one restored Strigoi was good, then two were better.

Adrian paled and went perfectly still as he stared at the newcomer, and in that moment, all my high hopes for him came crashing down. Earlier, I'd been certain that if Adrian could just stay away from his past and any traumatic events, he'd be able to find a purpose and steady himself. Well, it looked like his past had found him, and if this didn't qualify as a traumatic event, I didn't know what did.

Adrian's new research partner stepped through the door, and I knew the uneasy peace we'd just established in Palm Springs was about to shatter. Dimitri Belikov had arrived.