Another thing that had changed: her hair. Thanks to the strange spurts caused by her mutated metabolism it was four inches longer than it had been yesterday. The occasional Rip van Winkle effect also made her fingernails grow overnight. One evening she'd woken up, tried to rub her eyes, and nearly gouged out an eyeball with the six-inch nail that had sprouted from her index finger.

She couldn't do anything with her hair this long, so she took a pair of shears from the bathroom cabinet and went to hunt Phillipe.

The seneschal was in the kitchen, his favorite room in any house, arranging flowers.

"Pretty." Alex came over to admire the large basket of colorful tropical blooms. "If we need some extra money for the jardin, I'm opening you a florist shop."

Phillipe added a twig of vivid red-green-and-yellow crocus leaves to one side and viewed his handiwork critically. "Tropical plants are interesting, but I prefer working with roses. They are more orderly than these wild things."

"Oh, you're always sucking up to the boss." She set the shears on the table. "Have you got time to give me a trim?"

"Of course." Phillipe retrieved a towel to drape around her shoulders, then brushed out her hair. "Four and a half inches in one day. A new record."

"Mmmmm." Alex closed her eyes and enjoyed the soothing motions of the brush through her curly hair. "Why does it always feel better when someone else brushes your hair?"

"It is one of the first things our mothers do for us," he said. "Mine always devoted a few minutes each morning and night to combing my hair."

She was charmed. "What a great mom you had."

He picked up the shears and began snipping. "In my time, it was more to remove nits and lice than for grooming."

"She must have really loved you. I'd have just dipped you in RID." Alex looked down at her fingernails. They were still the same length, but she hadn't bothered with a manicure for a while. She had been in such a rush to get down here for... something. She frowned. "Phillipe?"

He had the comb in his mouth. "Hmmmm?"

"Why am I here?"

His hand went still for a second before he continued cutting. "Because you wished me to trim your hair."

"Here in Florida."

"You are here to be with the master while he and Paviere hunt Faryl." He was trying too hard to sound casual. "You did not wish to be left behind, as always."

"There was another reason." She caught his hand and stopped him, turning around to face him. "And I can't remember it. Isn't that funny?"

Phillipe said nothing."You can't tell me because he ordered you not to." She got to her feet. "That son of a bitch. That scheming, conniving, cold- blooded, manipulative jackass. This time, I will kill him."

"Alexandra, please."

She whipped up a hand. "No. Don't you dare tell me this time that it was because he loves me. I'm his sygkenis, his life partner or whatever the fuck it means. I gave him back his face, Phil. I've reassembled his friends. I stopped being human because of him. I took a goddamn copper bolt in the chest for him."

"It is because of your hard work, love, sacrifice, and devotion," Phillipe said, "that he wishes to protect you."

"Protect me how? By picking my brain apart? By deciding for me what I can or cannot handle? Nothing could be that bad."

When the seneschal remained silent, she whirled. "Fine. I'm out of here."

Phillipe set down the scissors. "You cannot leave."

"Who's going to-" She turned around. "You wouldn't."

The seneschal came around the table. "He is my master."

Alex fought him for as long as her physical will remained her own, but then the room filled with the sweet scent of honeysuckle.

Her mutation did not protect her from any Kyn talent, and Phillipe's was the ability to take over a human being's body and operate it by remote control.

"How long can you keep this up?" she asked as her body calmly walked back to the chair and sat down. "A few hours? Two days? A week? You have to rest sometime, you jerk."

Phillipe picked up the scissors and finished trimming her hair in silence.

Alex fought with everything she had the compulsion to remain still and acquiescent. Nothing could dent the seneschal's hold over her, though, and she was held as spellbound as the first time Phillipe had used it on her, when he had compelled her to operate on Cyprien's shattered face without any proper anesthesia.

He turned her to face him. "When the master returns, I will release you. I am sorry, Alexandra."

She was sorry, too, because she would never again trust the oversize bastard. Tears of frustration pricked her eyes, but through them she saw the door to the kitchen slowly open, and a man step inside. In his right hand was a tranquilizer gun.

"There's a man with a gun standing right behind you," she told Phillipe.

The seneschal removed the towel from her shoulders and brushed some cut hairs from her shoulders. "Distracting me will not- " He stiffened and tried to turn around. "Rafael."

"Forgive me," the other seneschal said.

Alex was released from Phillipe's compulsion as soon as he fell unconscious to the kitchen floor. She jumped out of the chair, but a blast of golden light radiated out, enveloping everything around her, until she could see nothing but the light. She still tried to run, but collided with a pair of hard hands.

"You will be blind until I release you," the man said, "but I mean you no harm, Doctor."

She struggled, but even her Kyn-augmented strength was no match for his. She couldn't pick up any murderous thoughts from him, either. "Then why are you doing this? Who are you?""I have my orders."

Alex felt him pick her up in his arms and carry her out of the kitchen. She screamed for the guards, and then felt something sharp and burning stab into the side of her arm. The familiar feel of her own Kyn tranquilizer flooded through her, ending her struggles, silencing her last cry.

John didn't return to Barbastro Abbey for several days. He left the abbey's station wagon parked in town where it could be easily found, but he used the cash Mercer had given him to rent a room and feed himself while he thought of what he could do.

He knew he was committing the sin of stealing, but Mercer had lied to him. In his readjusted view, that made things even.

His first impulse was to move on, leave Florida and find another place for himself. That the Brethren had corrupted another good man was no business of his. The only thing that kept him from leaving was remembering how ruthlessly he had abandoned the homeless kids he had supervised at the Haven runaway shelter in Chicago, just as he had his sister and the priesthood. If he didn't stop running away every time he faced tragedy and adversity, in time he'd never find a place for himself.

He began by doing something ordinary: He called Maurice's brother, Lamar Robinson, and asked him for a job interview.

"I don't have no office, brother," the roofer told him. "But you want to meet for a meal, okay."

John took the bus to the restaurant in North Fort Lauderdale. Heaven's Kitchen had once been a gas station; the concrete pad converted to a parking lot, the food mart section serving as a diner, with kitchen in what had been a drive-through car wash. A pair of black youths stood outside the front door, but both gave him only the briefest glance as he walked in.

The months of working outdoors had darkened John's skin, just as Dougall Hurley, the bigoted shelter manager who had been killed in Chicago, had predicted it would. Apparently now he passed as a black man.

Lamar Robinson rose from the booth where he was sitting as soon as John came in and walked over to shake his hand. A tall, heavily built black man with hair gone mostly gray, he looked more like Maurice's father.

"Robinson," he said, shaking John's hand. "You hungry? Good."

They sat down and a pretty teenage waitress with braces brought John a glass of iced water and took their orders.

"You don't try the barbecue sandwich lunch platter," Robinson warned him, "you're gonna regret it the rest of your life."

John dutifully ordered the meal and a glass of iced tea to go with it.

When the waitress left them, Robinson gave him the onceover. "You got any outstanding warrants on you?"

The question almost made John choke on his water. He started to say no, and then thought of the car he had left in town, and the money he had stolen from the abbey. "Not that I'm aware of."

"Good answer." Robinson called to the waitress to bring him a cup of coffee. "Cops come looking for anybody on my crew, I hand them over. Keep my ass out the county lockup. I work a four-day week, from Jupiter to Biscayne and anywhere in between, so you'll need a car. You can't get one, let me know, I'll fix you up."

"I've been passing as Caucasian since I was a kid," John suddenly said. "I've made people think I am. I've never... I've not lived as what I am."

Robinson peered at him for a moment, and then he chuckled. "Boy, if I could bleach this old black hide of mine, I'd make 'em think I was a white man, too." He put his hand on the table next to John's. "Lawd, look at that. Like night and day. I know some brothers don't trust no mix-color folk like you, but I say a man's more than his skin. Most white folks not like that, though, are they?"John shook his head.

"So tell me where you been working the last year."

Feeling curiously relieved, John recited the names and places where he had been employed; there weren't that many. When he mentioned the labor-pool job in Kentucky, Robinson nodded as if that had some weight. "I've been staying with a friend of mine, but that didn't work out."

Robinson sat back as the waitress brought their orders and placed them on the table. "You need a place? My cousin runs a pay-a-week place out on U.S. One. He'll take you on until you get your first paycheck."

John looked at the delicious food in front of him, and then at the man on the other side of the table. "You'd hire me. Just like that. No resume, no job application, no background check?"

Robinson shrugged. "Maurice sent you to me. That makes you all right."

"But you don't know anything about me," John persisted. "I could be lying to you."

"You could." Robinson picked up his sandwich and took a bite. "I'll tell you about my little brother, Maurice. He the baby; came along when I was twelve. My daddy died, and I was married and out the house by the time he got old enough to give our mama trouble. Got into enough of that, too, and like to kill her with worry. Time I bail him out for burglary, he only sixteen. I told him, 'You get busted again, I take you out to the 'glades, leave you for the gators.'"

"That convinced him to straighten out?"

Robinson shook his head. "He did time up until he was seventeen. Then one of them gangsters he ran with got himself shot up, and my little brother saw what his future would be. It was just that one thing, but that was it. Maurice came to me after his friend's funeral and asked me for a job. I threw him out of my house. He came back the next day, and the next, till I stopped slamming the door in his face. So I put him on the crew, and I worked his skinny ass harder than anyone else. Took him a bit, but he turned out to be my best man."

John couldn't resist the tangy odor of the barbecue any longer, and took a bite. The pulled pork was as tender as butter, and the savory, smoky sweetness of the sauce made him take a second bite, and then a third.

"I told you." Robinson watched his expression with smug satisfaction. "Rest of your life."

"How did Maurice end up with the bus company?"

"He always liked to drive, Maurice did. While he was on my crew he took a course on bus driving. Quit roofing when he got a place with the county school system. Went from there to public transit, and then to the big companies. Now he drive all over the country." He took a drink from his glass. "The whole time Maurice been driving, ten years now, he give my business card to just three men. One of them married to my daughter and own a shoe shop in the mall. The other's the chief of my crew. And here you are. But you ain't looking for a job, brother."

John put down what was left of his sandwich. "I'm not."

Robinson shook his head. "You ain't no roofer, not with the way you talk, man. There's something about you, too. I'm thinking you already got yourself something lined up. You just ain't made up your mind how you gonna do it, or where."

John thought of telling this simple, decent man about the church and the Brethren. About his struggle to hold on to his faith, which had been as solid as sand, and had slipped through his fingers just as quickly. Then there was Mercer, and the monster hiding under his smiling mask. But Lamar Robinson had earned his peaceful existence, keeping the roofs over people's heads, looking out for men in trouble, and doing his small part to make the world go on."Everyone I've trusted has left me, lied to me, or used me," he said slowly. "I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know where I belong."

Robinson nodded. "You got to make a change, then. Way Maurice did."

John suddenly knew with a deep, unwavering conviction that he would never possess the kind of contentment that Lamar Robinson radiated unless he chose, once and for all, between the two great forces on either side of him.

They ate the rest of their lunch in a companionable silence. When the waitress brought the check, John took out his wallet, but Robinson shook his head.

"I'm working; you're not. 'Sides, how often a man get to buy himself and his friend a little bit of heaven?" he asked, winking at the waitress, who giggled.

"Mr. Robinson, the food was delicious, and I appreciate your seeing me about the job." John stood and held out his hand. "I'm sorry I wasted your time."

"It don't work out for you, this thing you got going, you call me." He grinned. "I can always use another strong back to haul shingles and slap down tar for me."

John checked the bus schedule, and determined what connections he had to make to go from Heaven to hell. It was time to make a stand against the order. As the first step toward his personal salvation, he could do worse than saving an old friend from them.

It took changing buses three times to get within walking distance of the abbey. He took his time, reaching the front gates just as the sun was beginning to set. He rang the bell, and as soon as Brother Jacob heard his voice he opened the electronic locks.

Mercer met him halfway between the gate and the cloister. "John, I was so worried about you. Where have you been? The police called us about the station wagon being left in town. Were you robbed? What happened?"

John smelled the wine the abbot had been drinking coating every word, hanging in the air between them, another silent slap at their so-called friendship.

"We need, to talk." He looked over the abbot's shoulder at the other brothers walking toward them. "Alone."

"Of course, after vespers-"

"I know about the Brethren and the Darkyn, Mercer," John said in a low voice. "They're the reason I left the priesthood. We talk alone, or we talk here."

Mercer turned to address the brothers. "Brother Patrick has returned safely to us. I must speak with him about his misfortune in town. Go on to services without me."

The friars exchanged uncertain looks before obeying the abbot's orders.

Mercer had gone shock-white when he faced him. "Why didn't you tell me that you knew? Are you part of the order? How in God's name-"

"The Brethren pretended to recruit me, but they were only interested in using me to get to my sister." He gestured toward the abbot's house. "Shall we?"

Acting as if they were being pursued by demons, Mercer hurried him inside, locking the door behind them."I'm so relieved you know about them," the abbot said. "I hated keeping it from you all this time. But you can't talk about the order openly. They've killed everyone who has tried to expose them."

John sat down and let him babble on. He could see how Mercer's alcoholism would have given the Brethren a hold over him.

The order knew how to ferret out any weakness-and exploit it-to get what they wanted.

"I came here to get away from them, John," his friend was saying. "I swear to you, I thought they'd forget about me, the way they did Bromwell. And they have, until now. We've been able to live and work as the Lord intended us to here."

"You're not a priest, Mercer."

"No, not officially," the abbot conceded. "But you can't argue with the good we've done here. We've helped this community so much. I can't tell you how many families we've brought back to God. We've all found true serenity and peace in devoting ourselves to good works."

John rubbed his eyes. "What about the breeding program? How you threatened Ignatius? Was that all part of your good works, Mercer?"

Mercer's hesitant smile disappeared. "I don't agree with everything I'm told to do, but Brethren's mission is to protect humanity.

These things that they fight, they are evil incarnate. I have no choice but to follow their methods."