There's blood on her neck.

As I stare at it my vision narrows, focusing solely on its dark stain.

I forget about Gabe, about the club, about the patron being killed.

Pulsing sounds in my ears, strong, blotting out everything else. Spit fills my mouth. I can smell the blood. It floods my senses. My head spins at the thought of reaching out and touching it, feeling its dark slick against my skin, of tasting it. That feeling of a hollowing-out inside me again, of surging within. Of power. Something related to the blood . . .

I imagine Lisa before me.

I tear my gaze away to look at the hunched-over figure, but the shifting light edging past Gabe's head and shoulders and underneath his arms warps everything and it seems the figure's face is somehow stretched and lupine.

"Thought you were a patron," Gabe says, breaking through my concentration. "Just as well." He points at the blackening egg on my temple. "You got hit before."

Disarmed, I raise my hand to my head slowly and feel the lump. My refined senses dissipate, leaving me feeling washed out and empty. I must be going insane. I look at the other security-it is Raph, his brother-but his face is normal. For a moment I'd thought . . .

"You can't let that happen again," Gabe's saying. "They must fear us."

I stare at him then look at the girl.

"She overstayed her welcome," Gabe explains.

Raph hauls the black-shorts girl up underneath her arms and drags her to the back door. But there is blood on the wall behind, splattered like the blood on Raph's cheek. He waits for Gabe to go down the stairwell and open the door and, as I stand watching, the girl's head lolls to one side on a too-pliable neck and her mouth, split at the corners as if punctured by something, gapes open, drooling a line of spittle onto her top. Raph sees me looking at her face and stares back openly. He reads something in my eyes that satisfies him and dismisses me, dragging the girl outside.

"You should get back to your post," Gabe says.

I hesitate, looking towards the back door. Instead I nod and head back into the club.

When I return upstairs Lucs is still on the stairs. I don't ask how he knew I'd return. He doesn't say anything for a while, then: "You okay?" I nod. He stares at me for a moment, then nods also. "I'll check back soon." He leaves.

I try to watch the crowd but I'm too fucked up, the scene in the corridor still whirling through my mind. In need of air I head up to the top bar to stand beneath the air-conditioning vent jutting from the roof, savoring its cool whisper over my sweating, fevered face.

I open my eyes and see Kelly standing at the bar, the one bargirl I actually liked and would speak to on occasion. But looking now at her tanned shoulders and the tight lycra top hugging her breasts only makes me think of Lisa, remembering the jut of her breasts above the bedclothes when I came home from work, the feel of her skin against me.

We'd met while I was still at the Terminal trying to work as many hours as I could to cover the rent. Some guy had been hassling Lisa in the nearby street as I was heading home for the night and for a moment I'd seen my father looming over my mom and I'd intervened without thinking. The guy-some crazy ex-had trash-talked to save face but when I advanced on him he soon disappeared. Lisa and I started going out soon afterwards. She used to call me her "protector." Things went well for a while and she even moved in, but then it all began to change. She started complaining about my temper affecting the relationship. Or how I was spending too much time in the gym, only concerned with putting on size. How I talked about the scumbag patrons I had to put up with every night, the contempt in my voice never far. How I had no plans for the future, as if working my ass off night after night meant nothing. She started spending more time at the dance studio for what I thought was an upcoming show: her first. I tried giving her space to prepare. But after she found out I beat that guy and was now working at one of the big clubs in the Meatpacking District without telling her, I returned home one night to find all her stuff gone. She hadn't even left a note. And then I found out about Paul. The other lead. Some lean-limbed, shaggy-haired dancer she must've been fucking for months-she'd mentioned him once or twice but I didn't read anything into it, didn't want to seem jealous. I didn't know the bitch was about to leave me. I eventually found her new apartment and I'd pass by on the way home from work, sometimes sitting outside for a while. I felt stupid, jealous. But I couldn't stop myself. Then one morning, about a week ago, I watched this Paul guy walk out of her apartment with her, intimate hands brushing her face as he left. The shock was quickly overtaken with anger, burning rage. I couldn't believe the fury I was feeling. I wanted to rip them apart. It scared me. I didn't know how far I would go. So I drove away. I chickened out. And now I can't stop imagining what I could have done. Should have done.

I stare at Kelly and feel a rising anger and hatred. She smiles over at me but I turn away and descend past the vomit and beer-stained couches and stand at the balcony looking out over the huge gothic expanse with its sudden three-story drop to the Pit, crisscrossed and bisected by lasers and spotlights like prison-camp searchlights that pierce the hanging smoke. The dancers are a sea of sweaty, jerking bodies, a blind mass of conformity. I feel like jumping, smashing into them from above, shocking them out of their trances. Destroying their oblivion.

It would be so easy.

But I had the chance to run. And I couldn't.

Something distracts me. A frenzy of movement in the far-right corner couch, a couple in oblivious ecstasy, the girl with goth-black hair and raised skirt, her face slackened as she straddles a greasy guy, some mafioso scumbag. As I approach I see the slimy length of his penis jamming up inside her with every raise of her fleshy white cheeks.

I should tell them to zip up, walk them outside.

I wonder if Paul's cock looks like that.

I grab the girl's shoulder and roughly pull her off him, baring her seeping cunt. She tries to break away and stumbles backwards, hitting the brick wall. I let her fall and she lies spread-eagled, blood trickling down her face. I stare at its darkness. Everything shuts down.

Then I'm grabbing her by the throat, leaning in. She smells like metal, copper. Life.

Something on the edge of vision: the guy fumbling for something in his jacket. I swivel as he lunges at me and something wet slices my face, like a spray of cum, like he has opened my face with his cock. I touch the blood on my cheek and the guy stares at me in shock, as if surprised he has cut me, virgin knife held before him like a talisman. I tense and spring and he instinctively arcs the knife back to defend himself. But he is too slow. I grab his wrist then slam the heel of my other hand into the crook of his elbow. His arm jackknifes into his skull and he falls back onto the couch. There's a moment of silence before the girl slumped at my feet wakes up and starts screaming. The guy sits completely still, arms hanging by his side; dripping, alien cock pointing up from his open zipper. The knife is buried to the hilt in his right eye. The socket leaks blood and a clear viscous fluid.

I stare at him, shaking my head in disbelief, in horror.

A figure by my side. Lucs, taking my arm. My muscles burn at his touch and I try to pull away but his grip is iron. Behind him, Raph and Gabe close the area, moving in on the witnesses, silencing the girl. One of the patrons tries to run and Gabe chases him up the stairs, slamming him into the ground.

"You are ready now," Lucs says.

He leads me with his steel grip past the upstairs bar and downstairs. Patrons jump out of the way when they see the blood dripping down my face, staring after us dumbfounded. We head for the stage doors. The club sinks away as the doors close behind. Down the barely-lit corridor and towards the back door.

The outside air is cool on my face. But I don't get a chance to savor it because there's movement in the darkness of the alley. Figures emerging from an alcove: Mikhaels holding a blond-haired girl by the throat, one hand over her mouth. She is dressed in blue silk pyjamas and shivers in the night air.

I look at her face.

Oh God. It's Lisa. She stares at me with terror-filled eyes.

I try to pull away, to run for the street beyond, but Lucs' fingers dig into me like claws. "You know what to do," he says, something wrong with his voice. "Become one of us. Finish the Change." I turn and his eyes have become black holes in his face, dilating with darkness. His teeth fill his mouth.

I thrash against him in horror, feeling his fingers sink into my skin like needles of fire, but I have to get away from him, have to escape what he's- And then the other figures appear: hunched shadows in the darkness of the alley. Gabe, Raph, Danteis, Pteris, all grinning. Waiting.

I can't look at Lisa, forcing my eyes away from her, searching for a gap in their numbers, some way to escape this. Lucs senses my resistance still in the face of the inevitable. His voice like gravel in my ear: "Then if you will not kill her, if you can still resist . . . "

Pteris reaches back into the alcove, drinking in my despair, and pulls out a struggling man dressed only in tracksuit pants-dragged out of bed also; thin but muscular, like a skinned rabbit, impossibly-defined abs a downward-V.

So this is what she wanted. This is who she chose instead of me.

I feel the hatred hit.

"You are a god now," Lucs says. "Take what is yours."

My anger surges beyond control. As I stare at Paul the darkness kept deep inside me opens out like spreading wings and a searing pain suddenly runs in rivulets down my arms and across my neck and up my face. Agony floods my throat and I throw my head back to cry out and my jaw dislocates with a wet clicking sound and I can only manage a strangled guttural croak. I feel my nerve-endings fry as my hands and arms and chest ripple and bubble like melting plastic, my back pop and break and fill out impossibly, my fingers lengthen into claws and brow form over and become stretched and lupine and teeth distend my mouth. Then my vision goes black and suddenly all-encompassing as my eyes dilate, the weak moonlight from above sending shards into my brain.

I see the shallows of blood pumping beneath Paul's skin. Can smell its hot, sweet scent. Can smell my girlfriend beyond.

I look at Lisa in Mikhaels' arms and inexplicably a part of me senses I have started crying. Burning tears that score my face. I wish I could tell her I'm sorry, that part of me will be forever destroyed by this. That I loved her.

But when I see her weak, pleading eyes, like an animal at the slaughter, the realization eclipses everything.

She deserves this. They all do. They are only prey.

The growl sounds deep in my throat and is joined by the growls of my Brothers. The man before me pisses himself in fear, the acrid stain blossoming across his track pants. Once I have tasted his flesh, once I have drunk my fill of his life I will kill the woman behind him also.

This is the way it should begin for me. Ending the life I once had. Embracing my rightful place in this world.

Her blood takes me.

AND NEITHER HAVE I WINGS TO FLY.

CARRIE LABEN.

"I'm sorry," Faith says. A lie, but the satellite phone connection is too expensive to argue across. "The only safe thing to do is to stay put. We're well supplied, we're on the sheltered side of the island."

Vivian sighs. It's one with the wind against the porthole. "I wish you hadn't gone. Dad is worried to death."

I hope so. "This is my job. If I only went out when there couldn't possibly be a storm, I wouldn't go out at all."

"Yeah, but . . . "

"I have to go, Viv. Don't call again unless it's a real emergency, okay? I'll let you know as soon as we get back, promise."

"Okay." Faith has the phone halfway back to the cradle when she hears her sister's voice add, "One more thing!" She doesn't hang up.

"What?"

"You'll never guess who I ran into the other day."

"No, I won't." The satellite phone is also too expensive to gossip across, but if she lets Viv have this one moment maybe she'll save in the long run.

"Marika Mendel! Can you believe that? She came into the store, we had a nice chat." Viv pretends to catch herself. Or maybe it's honest, Faith can't know for sure. "But I know you can't talk long. I'll tell you all about it when you come home. Bye!"

Outside, the rain is just getting started, and most of the passengers-five grad students, one professor, two amateur filmmakers, and three die-hard birdwatchers-are still on deck, sucking up as much fresh air as they can, as though it'll last them. One of the filmmakers and one of the grad students have been seasick since they set out from San Diego, and the chop they're likely to get riding this out will be hard on everyone, even the crew. Even Faith.

At night she writes blog posts, even though they can't actually be uploaded until she reaches shore. The blog is her best free advertising, and lots of good you-are-there material is the key to its appeal.

But tonight, even though she should be thinking of adjectives to make the storm sound like a glorious adventure that people would pay for, she's writing about gannets.

The Northern Gannet, Morus bassanaus, is one of the largest seabirds of the north Atlantic. The adult bird is all white and ivory, except its wing-tips and feet which have been dipped in ink. Its beak is a spear . . . no, backspace . . . When it dives, it is a spear, its beak foremost. Flocks of gannets gather over schools of fish and plunge into the water from great heights, like bombs.

She does not write, My mother is a gannet. She doesn't put personal stuff on the blog.

Eventually she is done with the gannets, and with the little glass of Laphroig that helps her write. She walks back up on deck, where the rain is now lashing and the waves are sending spray well over the deck. If she had a skin of gannet feathers, it would slide off of her and leave her unaffected. Her Marmot windbreaker is good enough, but the cuffs of her jeans get wet, and then dampen her socks.

But Vivian won't even come out on the boat. She says she's not scared, but Dad won't come-Dad won't even get in sight of the sea, a beach scene in a movie makes him walk out-and she won't leave Dad alone.

Faith suspects she is scared.

At the height of the storm a small yellow-and-black landbird tries to perch in the rigging, then falls to the deck exhausted. The birdwatchers hover over it and identify it as a Hermit Warbler. It would break their rules to touch it, since nature must take its course, but they manage to half-crowd, half-shepherd it into the galley. The cook, Chaz, has been complaining about an infestation of fruit flies since they set out.

Chaz sets out a dish of water and some of the offending peaches. Out of the wind and the wet, the bird soon sheds its sickly, puffed-up look and begins to take an interest in these offerings.

Over dinner, everyone watches their new companion, who seems to have more of an appetite than any human aboard. The sailors and the birders swap stories of other warblers, sparrows, falcons, even a sand grouse that once washed on board an oil rig. The phalarope that flew into a lighted bathroom and swam in circles in the sink. The heron that crossed the Atlantic on a yacht.

When everyone has drifted away and Chaz is washing up, Faith takes a closer look at the bird. It's almost certainly just a bird; still, on the off chance, she waits.

The bird ignores her, hovers to pluck a spider out of the corner, then drops back to the table and drinks. The yellow of its face shines in the slanting evening light. She can understand wanting to touch it, but she can't-can no longer?-understand not knowing that touching it would be wrong.

Maybe she's been hanging out with birdwatchers too much.

The bird stays until the storm has blown itself out and they've started back for San Diego. Then one morning it is gone.

If it headed east, the birdwatchers say, it will probably make it. Or maybe not, but at least it has a chance.

Once they're back in cell phone range of port, Faith calls Vivian. She tries to run through the usual reassuring niceties, but Vivian cuts her off immediately.

"You're back?"

"Less than a day out of port."

"Thank god. We need your help on Wednesday; not tomorrow but this coming Wednesday, I mean."

"That's not going to work, I'm sailing out again as soon as we clean up and take on more supplies."

"I thought that you didn't have another trip scheduled for a month!"

"I didn't. But the director we took out this time got an inspiration bug and is paying us to go out ASAP and get more footage. He wants to do a short feature on birds who get blown off-course and end up . . . "

"We need your help. An apartment in my building opened up and Dad's moving into it. I can't keep driving back and forth across the city twice a day to check on him."

"That's great," Faith says. The idea made her choke, but she'd gotten it through her thick skull at least that other people were other people and had other feelings. "You deserve more free time."

"And this way I can make sure he's actually eating real meals. You know how he is about cooking for himself."

"Well, it serves him right. He's had years to learn." Wrong, wrong wrong time for that argument, but it was too late to back up. "I'm sorry. I think it's a great idea if it makes things easier on you, but I'm heading out again by Monday at the latest."

"Tell the guy you have to wait."

"If I make him wait now, it'll be next year before he get another shot at what he's looking for. And he'll probably go look for it with a different captain."

"We need you."

"No you don't. You'll be fine."

"With just my little car, it'll take two days."

"I didn't even known this would be happening."

"I didn't know that the apartment would be available."

"I'm sorry." Faith would like to think of herself as an honest person, but it's getting harder and harder to do that. Still, she only lies in self-defense and a lot of things are justifiable in self-defense.