We sat at her desk, silently taking stock of each other. The goons stood by the door.

In the brighter light of her office, I could see that Domine looked about forty, lean and sharp as a blade. The hair was pure white, but thick and healthy, the skin, pale. Her eyes were gray, cool and depthless, like mountain mist. They missed little and the face was hard.

Her dress was exquisite. It had the look of something handmade. The office was spa.r.s.e and minimalist, all designer angles, muted metal and frosted gla.s.s. This club business paid well.

Another handsome highwayman entered with an ice bucket on a stand, which he placed beside Domine. He brought two tall fluted gla.s.ses from a cabinet, took a bottle of champagne from the ice and eased the cork out with a pop.

The champagne sparkled in the gla.s.ses. I wondered about the wisdom of accepting drinks from strangers in bars, but I was distracted by Domine.

I'd expected her to not bother to acknowledge the presence of her employee. Or, if she were polite, to thank him. Domine had him bend down and kiss her, very fully. Tongues were involved, or I wasn't a judge. He gave every indication that he enjoyed it and she caressed his cheek fondly before sending him away.

She watched him leave and then turned back to me and toasted me with her gla.s.s. We sipped, looking at each other over the rims.

"Do you like the champagne?" she said.

"I'm no expert, but it tastes good to me."

"You drank rum at the bar. Straight rum. An unusual choice."

I shrugged. I liked rum.

Domine didn't smell of vampire. Not for the first time, I wondered at my ability and how reliable it might be. I had sensed the vampires that had stalked my team in the jungle. I'd caught the barest echoes of that scent at times in Denver, without being able to identify anyone. This evening I'd had my first absolute certainty with the woman on the door, but she wasn't a vampire, she just smelled as if she'd been with one.

But what if different vampires had completely different scents? What if the spidey-sense didn't always work?

What if Domine was a vampire and I couldn't tell?

She enjoyed trying to shock with her behavior, but that didn't mean anything. I couldn't quite get a handle on her, or her interest in me. I wasn't a member; she could have had me refused entry. Or, if she'd become suspicious I was snooping around, she could have ordered me escorted off the premises. Taking me into her office had sent some kind of a signal and I couldn't figure out whether it was threatening or not.

"Your name?"

"Amber." We could both do the one name bit.

"Hmmm." She tilted her head to one side and regarded me. "Something with more pa.s.sion, you said, Amber. Like Valerie, perhaps?"

She said it in the French way, with the tone going up at the end.

"Who's Valerie?"

"She's the one on the door tonight. You made quite an impression on her, yet you didn't even exchange names." She clicked her tongue in disapproval.

"Not really my scene either."

"Well." She pouted. "Not interested in this, not interested in that. You've come for the Blood Orchid and you don't trade, as you put it. Club Agonia is for like-minded people, Amber." She leaned forward and rested her chin on one hand. "Tell me, why are you here? What has attracted you to my little club?"

She didn't appear to be some hard-bitten crime lord. On the other hand, she had two big men standing behind me. If I was wrong and she was a vampire, maybe the two men were as well. I wasn't armed and the odds were against me, from what I knew of vampire fighting skills.

But if she was a human and they were just a couple of bouncers, I'd back myself even without weapons. I'm stronger than I look, much quicker and better at fighting than almost anyone expects.

Club Agonia wasn't about drugs or gambling. I'd lay good odds that some of those delicious bodies out there hadn't been born in America and might not have had much in the way of a right to stay, but I hadn't gotten the feeling of anyone being trafficked, or forced, or underage. Yes, Domine wouldn't want the law looking too closely at what went on. I'm sure the DA could make a case for closing the place, just as I was sure Domine had a lawyer who could fight it. The police weren't interested in Club Agonia unless something happened or someone made a complaint.

In any event, saying I was a policewoman wouldn't serve any purpose. And Domine might have more to tell me if I played along. All I had to do was to work out the rules to the game.

"What I was looking for, I haven't found," I said.

"And what was that?"

"I'm looking for the real thing, Domine. You don't seem to have it. I'm disappointed."

Her face went closed and she made a signal with her hand. I tensed, but all she'd done was order her goons out.

She sat back and stared at me for a long while.

"I thought you looked..." she paused, "predatory, when I saw you on the security camera." She took a deep breath and her gray eyes narrowed with calculation. "And here, before me, you are and you are not, somehow. The image is not the truth, but neither is the myth."

She seemed to be having the mirror image of my problem evaluating her. Finally, she came to a decision and spoke again. "My Valerie seems to have an attraction to people like you."

I didn't enjoy the implication of what I was like, but I ignored it. "People who are members of your little club? Like-minded people, Domine?"

She tried to hide it, but a shiver went through her. "No. Not members. People who visited, but are not welcome again."

We drank champagne and stared at each other some more. No one likes to move first in these situations, to be the first to say the unbelievable. I didn't, and yet I knew it wasn't unbelievable at all.

"Club Agonia is much safer, Amber," she said at last. "I sense you are different. These people out there, the ones you seek, you are not like them, exactly. What you want might not be the same. They will not give you a safeword."

She stood and poured more champagne into our gla.s.ses. I could see her hand trembled slightly.

"I'm not looking for them to make friends," I said quietly.

Her eyes snapped back to me.

"You are alone." It was almost an accusation.

"Tonight, yes."

She sat back down and frowned in thought for a long time. Then, reaching below, she opened a drawer and took out two simple business cards and a pen. The cards had her singular name, and a telephone number. She handed them to me.

"Please, write a number where I can contact you."

I wrote my cell phone number on one and handed it back.

"What's this for?" I indicated the other card.

"That's for you to keep," she said.

"Why?"

"When you want to come back-" she raised her hand as I started to speak. "When you want to come back, call me. You belong here, Amber. You don't know it yet, but your body does."

I shook my head. "I'm not into pain, or the-"

She interrupted me. "It's not really about pain. It's about pa.s.sion. And I sense you need pa.s.sion like a woman in the desert needs water. Trust me...as I find I trust you." She stood up and drained her gla.s.s. "As to your task. What I can, I will do. I would take it as a personal favor if you escorted Valerie home tonight. I think she may be too scared to go home on her own. She will meet you in the lobby. There may be something she can say which will help you in your search."

I stood and drained my gla.s.s too. Time to go, and I couldn't waste it.

She escorted me as far as the door to her office. She held it open and I walked through.

"Au revoir, Amber," she said.

My French just about extended to knowing that meant until we met again.

I wasn't as sure about a lot of what else she'd said, but I wanted to talk to Valerie anyway and she was waiting in the lobby, as Domine had told me she would be.

"Domine says I can trust you. She said I can leave now and you'll drive me home." The strange European accent had disappeared, replaced with mid-western. She could barely look me in the eye. She kept her chin down, her face turned to one side.

I nodded.

"You're..." she hesitated, unwilling to say it. "Can I really trust you?"

"I'm not like them, Valerie. I can't prove it, but I won't hurt you. And I'll try to make sure no one else does either. I just need to ask you a few questions."

She looked up tentatively. Face on, her eyes looked bruised with worry. Slowly, the tension in her shoulders eased.

"Let me change first. It won't take me a minute."

Before she could move away, I took hold of her chin and gently lifted her jaw up. Her breath caught, but she held still. I slipped a finger into the ruff around her neck and eased the material away from her skin. About halfway down her neck, there were fang marks on both sides.

"We really do need to talk, don't we?" I said. "I'll get the car and pick you up outside."

Chapter 8.

We didn't talk in the car. For my part, I was letting it sink in. She was the only other person I'd met who'd been bitten and survived. It gave me a peculiar sense of kinship with her.

I was also taking time trying to work out my strategy. I needed to rea.s.sure her, so I had to appear to know exactly what I was talking about while getting every sc.r.a.p of information out of her. And my thoughts were constantly being shocked back to realizing that I had the first evidence the colonel had sent me to find.

There were vampires in America. Right here in Denver.

And very good at remaining hidden.

To be that, it was surely unthinkable that they'd casually bite someone and then let her go. So what was the deal here? Were they trying to turn her? Or had they been panicked into making a mistake? If it was a mistake, were they going to come back and fix the problem?

And what would that mean-being taken away or being killed?

I had to work this out for Valerie as well as for the colonel.

She lived on Colorado Boulevard, up near City Park.

We pulled up outside an apartment building that made me think Club Agonia paid better than the Denver PD.

She sat, looking intently at the building, making no move to get out.

"Hey," I said, startling her.

"Oh. Sorry. I'm kinda scared."

"It's okay, I'm coming in with you anyway."

"Thanks." She flashed a tight smile and we got out of the car. We must have been an odd sight walking across to the door, Valerie in her jeans and puffy jacket and me in my floaty vampire cloak. It was a shame there was no mist.

Inside, she offered me coffee. I accepted and she walked into a small kitchen area, turning lights on.

"Can I use your bathroom?" I asked. "I want to take the face off."

That got a nervous laugh and a wave down the corridor.

Valerie's apartment was a surprise. I'd expected somewhere scruffy, gloomy and full of angst. Instead, she'd decorated in light pastels and put up real paintings on all the walls, mainly of penguins in funny poses. Everything was spotlessly clean and tidy.

I scrubbed my vampire face away.

A cat greeted me as I came back out, demanding attention loudly.

"I can hear you're meeting Mr. Leo Pardner, the owner of the apartment," Valerie said from the kitchen. "Leo for short. He normally doesn't talk to strangers."

I scratched his ears and he shed hairs on my cloak, buzzing with pleasure.

"Are the penguins your work?" I called out as the coffee machine spluttered to a halt.

"Yeah. I've never seen one really. We watch a lot of wildlife on TV where I come from."

"They're good paintings."

She smiled as she came into the living room with two mugs.

We sat on the sofa and Leo claimed the s.p.a.ce between us, which was fine by me.

"Valerie-"

"It's not really Valerie. It's just boring, odd, plain old Valery Hawks from nowhere North Platte, Nebraska." Her name lost the tone at the end when she said it.

I smiled. "Everyone has to come from somewhere. Can't be that bad."