Chris looked down at the leather cutout vest and silk leggings under the dozen or so silver-studded belts wrapped around her waist. "It's my look."

"Kind of, uh, black."

"I'm only wearing black until they invent something darker." The navy-blue lipstick she wore made her teeth look snowy. "You don't get it. Okay. I'm a goth."

That explained the hair, the piercings, and the attitude. "Aren't you a little young for that? What happened to grunge and punk?"

"It's postgrunge now. I think punk is buried next to disco. And, in my opinion, you're as old as you want to be. Steady." Chris reached out and grabbed Sam's arm, and only then did Sam realize she was swaying. "I am not making a pass at you, just so you know. Now let's get you inside, Officer."

With Chris's arm supporting her, Sam found her door key and unlocked the two dead bolts and knob lock. "I'm not gay," she told the kid. "And if I were, you'd be too young for me."

"I'm so relieved. Is that why Keri was so pissed at you?"

"She had the right." Sam couldn't get her key out of the bottom lock. "I didn't discourage her when I should have. Just so you get the gossip straight."

"I don't blab, and that shit can happen easy whether you're straight or gay." Chris pushed open the door for her. "You're kind of paranoid, though, huh?"

"Goes with the job. Thanks for the hand." She wandered back to her bathroom. When she had taken a pain pill and came back out, she found Chris standing in front of her bookcase.

"You're really into poetry," her neighbor said. "Old stuff, too. Keats, Byron, Shelley. Who's Rainer Maria Rilke? Is that a guy or a chick?"

"Rilke is the only one who makes sense anymore." Sam opened the sliding glass door to the balcony to let in some fresh air, dropped into her favorite armchair, and pushed it into recline. "He was a man."

"His mom fucked up his name, then. I bet Keri hated your place." She gazed around at Sam's shabby furniture. "What do you call this look? Early American yard sale?"Sam considered smacking the kid, but she was too far away, and Sam wasn't getting up from the armchair again until Thanksgiving. Maybe Christmas. "Aren't you going somewhere, dressed up like that?"

"Down to the beach. They don't card as much, not that it's a problem for old chicks like you and me." She winked at Sam.

"There's a new goth place my friends want me to check out."

"Infusion?"

Now the kid gaped. "How did you know?"

"I'm a cop, and this is my town. Don't go there." Sam cradled her sore hand against her chest. "A woman who was there a couple of nights ago was murdered."

"Oh, I can take care of myself." Chris put back the book she was reading and walked over. "Jesus, you're really pale. Like Snow White from the dwarf movie. Should I call nine-one-one or something?"

"No, I'm okay. I lost a little blood and it hurts, that's all." The pain pill was starting to work its magic, but Sam forced herself to focus on Chris. "I'm serious about that nightclub, though. There are some scary characters there. It's not a place for a young girl to hang out."

Another lightning smile flashed. "Good thing I'm not a young girl."

"I could run your ID just to verify that," Sam said. "Our lease agreements state that a sublet tenant has to be twenty-one years of age or older. We wouldn't want you to put Keri in danger of losing her security deposit."

Chris held up her hands. "Okay, Officer Do-Right, I won't go there. By the way, you left these in the door." She dropped Sam's keys on the side table. "I'll throw the bottom lock on my way out. Mind if I borrow that Rilke book?"

"As long as you bring it back." Sam's eyes began to close on their own. "You don't, I shoot you."

The last thing she heard before she fell asleep was her blue-haired neighbor chuckling.

Taking blood from two beautiful human females who came to dance at Infusion didn't satisfy Lucan. Neither did pacing the floor for several hours after the police had left. He considered sending for Alisa, but to use her twice in one day would be foolhardy, if not fatal for her.

That he was in such a state was not his fault. Detective Brown had done this to him.

He had been pleased by the suspicion and determination Samantha displayed as she confronted him about Lena Caprell.

America was his country now; he was glad the humans put some effort into policing themselves. Shaking her composure had been mildly amusing as well. He so enjoyed disconcerting a woman of conservative sensibilities, and he suspected that the detective had inhibitions atop reservations wrapped in reticence.

If only he hadn't touched her.

Lucan could still taste her blood, still smell her skin; she was all over him. Taking another shower erased the physical traces, but wouldn't remove the lingering memories of her from his head, or ease the hunger surging through him.

What did the stubborn little bitch do to me?

All of this upheaval was because of the cross. Someone within his jardin thought to taunt their new suzerain by unearthing that relic from his past and using it to kill the human woman. What they did not realize was that the cross was now as meaningless to Lucan as Lena Caprell had been. He would have it retrieved from the police and then use it to ferret out whoever had thought to frame him for the woman's murder.

As for the detective, her resemblance to Frances was the only reason he'd temporarily lost his control. He had no interest in a paltry human female wasting her youth on avenging the dead. Her blood was sweet, and under her ugly clothes she had the body of a goddess, but other than that, the detective had offered little in the way of temptation.

Lucan was a connoisseur of some of the world's most beautiful women; Samantha Brown did everything but put a brown bag over her head to disguise her assets. She didn't smell of floral perfume or enticing spices, but of rich, dark-roasted coffee. Her pale mouth had certainly not offered any inducement, not until he had touched it and watched her lips tremble and her eyes go dark.

Frances had never done that. Frances had never permitted him to put one finger on her person, not until the night before she died.

Samantha had made things worse by resisting and then trying to run away from him. Nothing brought out the predator in him more than a female he couldn't have. He hadn't felt such a surge of lust since seeing Alexandra Keller for the first time in New Orleans.

Yet unlike Cyprien's sygkenis, Lucan could have Samantha Brown. As much and as often as he liked. He had only to bring her under his control. He remembered thinking that as he had taken her blood. Feeding from her hand had invigorated him. It was kissing her mouth afterward that had been his ruination.

Samantha Brown's mouth was as much a hidden banquet as her body: all heat and pleasure, lush and endless.

One moment he was tasting her; the next he was knocking things off his desk and stepping between her legs. His cock still ached with the memory of pressing her taut thighs apart and rubbing against her soft mound. Even as she had refused him, he had smelled and felt her body's response, even through the velvet of his glove. He had come very close to ripping off her ugly trousers and putting his mouth to her to taste it.

Permitting her refusal and allowing her to walk out had been a terrible waste.

If he'd had a shred of wit left in his skull, he'd go out, track down Samantha Brown, and drag her back here. Why had he let her go, when he could have her under him right now? She was nothing to him. No, he should have kept her, and laid her out on his desk, and fucked her until he had purged himself of this needling, infuriating desire.

"My lord."

Lucan strode out into the front room, where Rafael stood with yet another file. He had ordered his seneschal to discover everything he could about Detective Brown, and it had taken him a damnably long time. "What have you learned?"

He opened the file. "Lena Caprell was drowned in freshwater at an unknown location, and then transported and left on the bus stop bench across from the club. The cross was found around her neck, which bore ligature marks."

"He used it to kill her."

"It would seem so, my lord. I have also retrieved the information you requested on the detective. Samantha Brown is thirty-one years old, unmarried, childless, and dwells alone in an apartment two miles from here. She has worked for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department for twelve years." Rafael gave him a brief outline of Samantha's turbulent career.

Despite the lust maddening him, Lucan felt a twinge of pity for the human female. Small wonder her eyes look as if someone has been taking bites out of her soul. "What of her family?"

"At age three, Detective Brown was abandoned by her unmarried mother, now deceased, taken into state custody, and raised in a foster-care facility known as a group home until the age of eighteen." Rafael looked up. "There are no indications of contact with any other relatives. She lists her partner, Harold Quinn, as her beneficiary on her insurance policy."

He doubted the old man with the breathing problem was anything more than a colleague. "What of her current lovers?"

"Our man in the department says no," his seneschal said. "Popular opinion has it that Detective Brown is a lesbian."

Could that be the reason for her resistance to him? Lucan had never had a woman under the influence of l'attrait defy him as Samantha had. "I want to know who has bedded her. Everyone who has been between her legs."

Rafael inclined his head. "May I make a suggestion, my lord?"

"Why not?" Lucan rubbed the back of his neck.

"Retrieve the cross and terminate the detective."

He stared, thinking his seneschal was making a poor joke, but Rafael's expression appeared completely serious. "Now why would I wish to kill her?"

"Our man indicated that she is tenacious, defiant, and unrelenting. From what little you told me, I assume she demonstrated some resistance to l'attrait." The file closed, and Rafael set it on a side table. "If this woman has some immunity to the Darkyn, she may cause a great deal of trouble for us, my lord. For you especially if she manipulates your... attraction to her."

There were rare individual humans who did not respond to l'attrait, the Darkyn's primary means to lure and control humans.

Resistant humans also tended to build up a tolerance to l'attrait with each successive exposure, so in time she would become immune to it. Often such tolerance was a genetic trait, passed from parent to child. The Kyn valued such humans, and recruited them and their families to serve as tresori.

Detective Brown could not be made his human servant, but that did not entirely exclude her from serving him. In centuries past, the Darkyn would take humans who proved resistant to l'attrait as kyryas, the household lovers.

There, that is how I will do it.

"She would be of more value as a kyrya than a corpse." Lucan didn't kill the innocent; nor would he waste such a woman on the fear of what she might discover about the Darkyn. "Forget about the cross; it is a counterfeit. Instruct Burke to conduct an extensive background investigation on the detective. Find something with which I can convince her to work for us."

"I will see to it at once." Rafael's black brows arched. "Do you really believe that you can bring a strong-willed woman like that under your control?"

"I foresee very little difficulty." Lucan remembered how, despite the fact that he had barely touched her, she had made his glove damp. "What is the address of her apartment?"

Chapter 7.

Too impatient to endure Burke's careful driving or continual nasal evacuations, Lucan took one of his cars to Samantha Brown's apartment complex. Most Darkyn disliked operating vehicles of any sort, and a few still kept horses for their personal use where possible, but Lucan enjoyed the technology of this new era. No nag on the planet could cross two miles in less than a minute, but his black Ferrari devoured the road.

He parked the car in a shadowy section of the lot, and looked up at Samantha's building. Cheaply built, narrow, and joyless, it had neither aesthetic or practical appeal. There was no elevator; one had to traverse a narrow zigzag of stairs to access the upper-level apartments. He found it puzzling that so reticent a woman chose to live in a dormitory of humans rather than her own home.

"Where are you?" he murmured as he mounted the steps. Some helpful soul had posted numbers next to the doorways of each apartment; from the series it would seem his future kyrya lived on the third floor.

Lucan found apartment 303 at the very top of the stairs, but a number of strong locks prevented his entry. He looked out at the back of the building, and saw a ridiculously tiny balcony that promised easier access. He swung out over the short wall blocking the stairwell and jumped the eight feet to grab the wrought-iron balcony rails and hoist himself over.

Lucan turned to deal with the glass door to the apartment, but it had been left ajar. Just inside, not six feet away from him, lay Detective Brown, asleep in a reclining chair. Silently he stepped over the threshold and sniffed the air. Another female had been here recently, but at the moment Samantha was alone.

Alone, asleep, and all his.

It bothered him to see her like this. He turned and closed the glass door, perversely annoyed with her for leaving it open. Did she think herself invulnerable to intruders? Her weapon lay on the minuscule dining table; had a villain entered he would be on top of her before she could reach it.

"I am a villain," he murmured, amused by his own anger and protective feelings. He certainly wouldn't mind climbing on top of her, either.

With deliberate steps he walked past her to see the rest of this, her home. She seemed to favor strictly functional furnishings in drab colors and posters of mountains and waterfalls instead of inspired art. Her bedroom was hardly more than a nun's cell, with its too-small bed and walls of bookcases. Dust coated her television, and her kitchen appeared to be used for two things: making coffee and reheating it.

He turned around, taking in everything that was not there. "You live here as if you never live here."

It was perplexing. Samantha Brown was a female, and yet there was nothing feminine at all to be found in the surroundings. Not even a single flower-or the photo of a flower-anywhere. Frances, an avid gardener, would have loathed such a colorless place.

Lucan slipped into the bath, which was the most intimate and telling room in a woman's home. Samantha Brown's was almost empty. She possessed no cosmetics or perfumes, and her toiletries encompassed, like her furniture, only the necessities. A single scented candle sat on the edge of the tub, and when he lifted it to his nose he smelled cinnamon. Frances had despised strong and piquant scents, which she claimed were vulgar and assaulted the nose.

"Who are you?" Lucan murmured as he replaced the candle and looked around the stark room.

A search through her dresser revealed no silken lingerie or negligees; Samantha preferred simple, serviceable underthings. The thought of that magnificent body being clad in nothing more than plain white cotton and the scent of soap oddly stirred him, and he walked back out to where the human female slept.

She lived as if she might be forced to walk out and leave this all behind her with but a moment's notice-exactly as he did.

Lucan knelt down by the chair to have a better look at Samantha's face. Her straight, dark hair fanned one cheek, contrasting sharply with her fine skin. Nothing enhanced her curling lashes or delicate lips; her skin had a faint bloom of sun but smelled dusky, as if she bathed in the night. She was not beautiful or girlish or even pretty, and yet her features were more mysterious and enticing than Frances's open, guileless countenance had ever been.He leaned over to breathe in her scent, which was as rich and unexpected as the cinnamon in her bath. Samantha might dress herself to avoid notice, and live like a nun, but she smelled of the green, earthy depths of the Amazon, where dangerous things roamed the dark hours.

The woman was a complete mystery.

Alone by choice, in this place that could barely be called a home. Was she more than she appeared to be? Did she long for a companion who understood that loneliness, as he did?

A pulse point ticked in the slim column of her throat, and he couldn't resist pressing his mouth there for a moment, touching his tongue to the strong throb. Her blood flow was strong, like her body. Despite having fed well not an hour past, he felt his fangs ache for her. He had not taken the pleasure of biting her when she had come to question him, and he wanted his teeth in her, to feel her flesh yield to him.

Lucan lifted his head and heard her soft sigh as she shifted in her chair, turning toward him, baring her throat like an invitation. It took most of his will not to climb atop her and have her right there.

"Are you like me?" he whispered. "Better to be lonely than unloved, reviled?"

"Lucan," she muttered.

He smiled. She slept, but on some level she was aware of his presence, and that gave him a certain amount of influence over her. He couldn't enter dreams, the way Thierry Durand did, but while she slumbered, she was more susceptible to l'attrait. He could begin the process of coaxing her away from this dismal life of hers.

He stroked his velvet-covered fingertips along the side of her neck. "You are young, and strong, and healthy. You belong in the arms of a lover who understands you. I think I may do, Samantha."

She frowned. "Lover?"

"Yes." He saw her eyelids opening a fraction, and rested his hand over her heart. "Do not wake. Listen to me." For a moment he thought she might rouse, and then her breathing slowed and deepened. "I want you to dream of being in my arms. Of being with me. I will do the same. In our silences and our solitudes, we can burn for each other, Samantha. Would you like that?"

She sighed, shifting closer to him. "Mmmmmm."

He was massaging the full, ripe mound of her breast, Lucan discovered, and the rest of him ached to do much more. If he didn't leave now, he wouldn't until he had her a dozen different ways.

He caught the end of her breath with his mouth, brushing it back over her lips. "Come to me again, Samantha. Whenever you want me. I will fill every emptiness you feel."

Father Mercer Lane wound up the tour of the grounds of Barbastro Abbey by climbing the three flights of stairs in the back of the cloister so his friend could look out over his tiny domain.

"This was all alligator- and snake-infested swampland forty years ago," he told John. "Nothing but sawgrass and palmetto bugs, as far as the eye could see."