On the dais below, Novak shifts nervously. Kelsey stares down, willing him to hold his wits together until the Old One has been lured all the way inside. Stupid of her to plan a trap that hinges on a human's help, but Novak stills himself and does not flee.

The Old One literally pulls itself together, black tendrils tucking in to form a sphere of darkness, and begins to glide down the central aisle. It pulses slightly, as if breathing, and the hideous eyes and teeth rise to the surface to gape hungrily at Novak.

When the Old One reaches the center of the chapel, Kelsey pushes off from her perch and snaps open her wings to glide down to the floor, landing in front of Novak. The stones of the chapel quail and shriek beneath the Old One, and she feels Novak's fear, too, like a subsonic vibration. But when she serves the city, she has no fear of her own.

Kelsey kneels to place one palm on the smooth stone floor, the other hand still holding the trigger. She reaches out with her mind and draws in glamour from beyond the chapel, making herself seem larger, more ferocious. Fangs and claws to match the Old One's, eyes that glow with citylight, wings growing spurred and enormous to fill the vaulted space. She shows off for the Old One, goading him to match her skill.

When the Old One rises to her challenge, though, it takes glamour from the immediate area of the chapel. She feels the tension as it draws in more power, as if the relays are springs and the Old One stretches them out to their limits. The web of glamour pulls taut, singing like instrument strings, and when the threads are stretched to the breaking point, Kelsey jams her thumb down on the trigger.

The glamour springs back toward the relays, lightning-quick with elastic tension, and the relays suck it down, devouring the power and storing it. Each relay becomes a point of negative pressure, the energy flow from the Old One firmly established. Mindlessly thirsty, the relays will not stop drinking until the Old One is drained.

The Old One screeches and writhes. Its eyes and teeth and limbs disappear first, then wisps of black cloud begin to siphon off and it gradually shrinks. The last few seconds are the worst, when the core being of the Old One rends in a dozen different directions, and the very air wants to shrink away from its ancient rage. Then, with a final rip, the relays devour it.

The walls sigh relief at its passage.

Novak stands shakily from the dais steps and walks over to Kelsey. "You saved my life again. That's twice now. Thank you." His eyes are too deep and grateful, with a puzzling lack of disgust.

"Well. Have a nice life," she says and flees the chapel.

With luck, Duncan will never ask her to take on the horrid human-form again. No frailty, no confusion, no illusions of humanity. That is what she wants, yes, she's certain. Never again.

Kelsey flies her rounds, starting at the lake and meandering westwards. The city has been quiet for days, but something is different in the air tonight. Something waits for her.

She lands on the steps in front of Rockefeller Chapel-next to Novak.

"What are you doing?" she says, dropping her cloak of glamour so he can see her.

He jumps at her sudden appearance. "Waiting for you. Took you long enough to show up."

She blinks. "Our business here is done."

"I got this case, see. I think it's up your alley."

The rush of hope and anxiety and desire catches her off-guard, echoes of human-form emotions nothing like the cool certainty of a grotesque's mission.

Novak takes her silence as an invitation to continue. "Today I had a out behind the River North cineplex that was drained of blood. What do you think? Vampire?"

"There are no vampires in Chicago."

"Well that begs the question-who did take the blood, and why?"

She hesitates. "I don't work for you."

"What about my supernaturally blood-free Jane Doe? You willing to work for her?"

Kelsey scowls, knowing he's probably right. This case sounds as if it involves elements he is ill-equipped to deal with, elements that fall into her realm of experience. Her responsibility, even.

"I brought a coat, for when you're wearing your other face." Novak holds the spare coat out to her. "Come on. We can go someplace warm, review the details. And hey, maybe you could give food a second chance."

Reluctantly, she takes the coat from him and lets her wings melt away before wrapping it around her shoulders. The night air chills her human hands, and she shoves them down into the pockets. It feels strangely good-the cold and the coat, the discomfort and the doubt. Maybe it's okay to want this. Maybe her human-self is not a curse, after all.

As they make their way to Novak's car, the sidewalk sighs approval at the touch of her bare human feet. The streetlights flicker their agreement when she passes beneath them. Startled, Kelsey realizes the city wants this of her.

And she always gives the city what it wants.

BLUE JOE.

STEPHANIE BURGIS.

Josef Anton Miklovic, Blue Joe, was twenty-one years old and playing the sax in a nightclub in Youngstown, Ohio, when he met his father for the first time.

Joe was on stage with his family band: Karl on keyboard, hunched and intense; Niko on drums, grinning his lopsided, dreamer's grin; and Ivan, as smooth and polished as a Croatian Clark Gable, playing his shining trumpet like a peal up to heaven.

Smoke swirled across the tables, obscuring the waitresses in their Betty Boop outfits and the customers in their sharp suits, with dyed blondes on their arms. Ivan had hooked up with the son of a local mob boss to pull this job, and the rest of the brothers knew how lucky they were to get it. Ivan had big plans, and Joe was happy to go along with them.

Joe soared into his lead break, and at the end of it, as he emerged sweating and victorious, he met the fierce gaze of a hawk-nosed man at the back of the room, through all the smoke and the darkness. Time froze around them, and the music stopped.

"You don't look much like your mother," the man said as he crossed the room. He wore a long black coat from a different era, and it flapped around him like the wings of a crow.

Joe squinted through the smoke, watching the man sidestep frozen Betty Boops and customers' arms flung out in mid-gesture. Joe's brothers were as still as statues on the stage around him, and he thought he probably ought to be scared.

"Everyone always said I took after her," he said mildly.

"All they meant was, you don't look like that lump she married." The man reached the stage and jumped up onto it as easily as if it were only an inch high, instead of four feet from the ground. "You take after me."

Joe looked the man up and down and knew it to be true. They shared the same crazy golden eyes, the same jet-black hair, though Joe's was slicked back into fashionable lines, and the same great, hooked nose, about which Joe's brothers had always teased him.

He turned to look at his brothers now, and the man before him shook his head.

"No. They're not mine. Your mother and I had parted ways by then. But I told her I'd come for you to raise you right, when I was ready."

"And you waited till now?" Joe laughed, despite the shock. "You left it a bit late, don't you think?"

"It took time to make my way over. Do you remember the journey you took?"

Joe shook his head. "I was only a baby when we came over to the States."

"Well, I took a longer route. It's harder to leave the old country, for some."

Some. Joe didn't know exactly what the man meant, but he didn't care to ask, not with the rest of the nightclub frozen around them like stills in a newsreel. Whatever power this man had, it was obviously more than the local mob, and that was enough to scare anyone with sense.

"I'm here now," the man said, "and it's more than time. Your mother hid you too well." He fixed Joe in his hawk-like gaze. "Time to go."

"Hey, I'm not going anywhere." Joe stepped backward, crashing into Karl's keyboard. "I've got family."

"I'm your family."

"Uh-uh." Joe drew strength from his brothers' presence around him, even though they couldn't move. "I'm in a band. We're going places together. Might even break into Hollywood, if we're lucky."

His father snorted. "You're as stupid as your stepfather, if you really think that."

"I'm with my brothers," Joe said. "We're a team." He squared his jaw. "We can have a beer sometime and talk, if you like. But it's too late for you to act like a real father now."

"You'll change your mind," his father said. Anger flared deep and raw in his gaze. "I promise you. You'll change your mind."

Black, choking smoke erupted around him, making Joe tear up. He bent over, coughing . . .

And the music started up around him again, as if it had never stopped.

A black feather lay on the stage next to Joe's polished shoes.

Three days later, his draft papers arrived in the mail. Six days later, Joe shipped out to training camp, carrying his saxophone by his side but leaving his brothers behind.

Joe was on patrol in Germany the next time he saw his father. It was the middle of the night and he was alone on his shift when a great black wolf slunk out of the shadows and shifted into the shape of a man in a long black coat.

"Evening, Joe," his father said.

"Evening," Joe said, keeping his voice even. He kept walking as his father fell into step beside him. "Pleased with yourself?" he asked.

"Not really. It meant another long trip, and I don't care for travel."

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you got me drafted."

"You had to learn a lesson."

"If you mean you've got a nasty temper, I've learned that for sure."

"No," Joe's father said. He stopped walking and stared Joe in the eye as he intoned the words with a street preacher's intensity. "In the end, you're alone. You're always alone."

"Not tonight," Joe said. "Unfortunately."

He started walking again, leaving his father behind.

"You don't know what you're giving up," his father called after him. "I can take you away from all this, boy."

"Too late," Joe called back, without turning around.

His brothers had marched down together to the recruiting office the day Joe's draft papers had come through. That was his family, all over. Sure, Ivan had had big plans, but when it came down to it, they were a team.

They couldn't argue the Army into putting them all in the same unit, but they made a bargain. All of them had joined the army bands, and they saw it as good practice. As soon as the war ended, they'd be back on the road to Hollywood.

When Joe came back on his next rotation to the spot where he'd left his father behind, all he saw was a tuft of long black fur. He shook his head and let it lie forgotten on the ground.

Joe didn't see his father for the next three years, and he didn't miss the old man, either. He marched through days and nights of war, playing his sax for the unit, until the endless German rain rusted his beautiful instrument beyond repair. He played a shoddy borrowed replacement, provided by the army, to cheer the troops as they marched into towns filled with thousands of corpses lying piled on the ground, the aftermath of successful air raids. By nighttime, the corpses had been cleared from the streets with grim efficiency, but their faces filled Joe's dreams, to a soundtrack of the jazzy two-steps he played in the army band.

The day the keys of his second saxophone rusted over for good, Joe thought he'd tasted true despair. But he was wrong. That came later, when he got the telegrams.

Karl, who played keyboard with the intensity of a man possessed by angels, who'd dreamed nothing but music notes since he was a four-year-old kid, had had his left hand shot off in an accident in the Pacific. Looked like he wouldn't be playing in any band, in Hollywood or anywhere else.

And Ivan, slick, movie star-handsome Ivan with his great big dreams for the family, was dead, killed by a German sniper as he'd marched with his band.

If Joe's father had appeared to him then, Joe might well have killed him.

But his father didn't come.

Joe played a third saxophone, so harsh and squeaky it would have pained him to hear himself play if he'd ever bothered to listen. He was with the army unit that liberated two concentration camps, and the horrors sank deep into his skin and stayed there, like the hollow-eyed stares of the survivors.

The night his unit found out that the war was over, Joe saw his father for the third time.

There was a party in the camp, everyone celebrating with hectic gaiety. Booze flowed hard and fast, as if it could wash away the memories. Joe left after the first round of toasts.

He sat alone in the darkness, smoking one of the free cigars that had been passed around the party. A small black cat crept through the shadows to sit next to him. Joe eyed it warily and didn't reach out a hand to pet it. A moment later, he knew he'd been right, as the cat shifted into his father's shape.

"Well, Joe," his father said.

"Well," Joe said.

It was hard to tell for sure in the dark, but he thought his father looked older and more haggard since the last time they'd met. The black coat billowed out over a skinnier frame, though the golden eyes were just as fierce in the hollow face.

A year ago, Joe would have killed the man on first sight. Now he just kept on smoking, too numb to move or say any more. Faint light and the sound of voices filtered out from the mess hall nearby.

"My condolences," Joe's father said.

Joe stopped smoking and looked up sharply. He couldn't read an expression on his father's shadowed face.

"They wouldn't have been here if it weren't for you," he said.

"Who?" his father said.

They blinked at each other in mutual surprise. Then his father said, "I was talking about your mother. She passed away two nights ago, in her sleep. I thought that you should know."

Joe took a deep breath. Then he kneaded his fingers over his forehead, closing his eyes against the lance of pain.

He wasn't completely numb yet, after all.

"She was a good woman," his father said, tentatively. "She did her best for you. By her standards."

Joe nodded. He couldn't speak.

"I was thinking," his father said. "I could take you back to see her, if you want."