Riding it was impossible. Surviving it seemed improbable. The second climax made her scream, and he drank the last note from her mouth, and kissed her without stopping as he f.u.c.ked her to a third.

His was building. Alex could feel it, like some unseen monster lurking under his skin, gathering and bunching in his muscles, rising and spreading until she thought she might scream again, scream from the horrendous pressure and the terrible thrill of it.

"Alexandra." He wrenched his mouth from hers and pressed her cheek to his chest. She heard his heart and his breath roaring beneath his skin, and then his voice shattered over her as he stabbed deep and held himself there as he poured into her.

Alex held him as he shuddered over and over. She ran her hand over his sweat-damp hair, and held back a moan when he pulled out of her body and rolled onto his back. She stared up at the canopy, exhausted, throbbing, and very close to turning on the tears.

No tears. No regrets. She loved him; he loved her. They'd all but said the words. They'd gotten their rocks off together. Now they could play master vampire and helpless little love slave for the rest of eternity.

No way in h.e.l.l she was staying under his roof another G.o.dd.a.m.ned second.

Cyprien said nothing as she got off the bed and took a robe from his closet. He didn't try to stop her when she went to her room, and cleaned up, and dressed.

Alex walked downstairs and out of the mansion.

Gelina adjusted the blindfold, which had slipped again, over Leann's eyes and put down the clothes iron she'd been using to burn Leann's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Vomit, urine, and blood soaked the rug beneath the woman's still-convulsing body; it would not be long now. Ah, she was choking again.

Tenderly Gelina peeled back one side of the duct tape covering Leann's mouth and rolled her to her side. While the woman was regurgitating the last of her stomach's contents, she admired the pattern of whip marks the electric cord had left on Leann's back. The candlelight made the blood glisten like ribbons of liquid ruby, and aroused her to no end.

Gelina sighed as she idly rubbed her hand between her legs, stroking the vague itch that Leann had satisfied for only a short time. The American woman hadn't lasted very long-just three hours-but she had been stunningly responsive.

"Please." Leann had finished vomiting. "Please." It was the one word she had said for the last thirty-three minutes.

Gelina considered using the wooden handle of the broom on her again, but the last time Leann had hardly twitched, and there was a great deal of blood gushing from between her thighs now. "Are you sure you have told me everything, Ms. Pollock?"

Leann's head jerked up and down.

She had already told Gelina a great deal about her friend Alexandra and the strange information she had requested.

She had even been persuaded to make a hypothetical connection between vaccinations she and Alex had been given to the antibodies that might have been present in the blood of someone from the fourteenth century. Gelina had recorded the sobbed explanations on a handheld tape recorder, and when there was something she didn't understand, she had beaten the woman until she put it into laymen's terms.

All of this had to be relayed to Stoss immediately, of course. Gelina planned to call the cardinal the minute she finished amusing herself with Leann, who was rapidly fading now. She decided to tell her what she was going to do to John and, if the cardinal gave her permission, to Alexandra, as well.

Blindfolded and dying in the dark she feared so much, Leann wept at first. Then she gave Gelina the respect she so richly deserved and listened to every gory detail. She was so quiet that Gelina poked her at the end, to be sure she was still conscious.

"What do you think, eh? I like the part where I make him eat his own t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es best." She had read that in a book about the Inquisition, and had not yet had the time or subject to try it out herself.

"I'm sorry for you," Leann whispered. Gelina laughed. "For me? I am not the one hemorrhaging all over this lovely beige carpet, Ms. Pollock. I am going to live. I am going to catch your friend and her brother. I hope very much that I will be able to play with both of them."

Leann began to mumble something. Gelina had to lean close to hear it. It was the Twenty-third Psalm, the lovely lyrical song of faith that the monks had made Gelina recite whenever she was whipped.

It enraged her.

"There is no G.o.d," she shouted at the dying woman, hitting her over and over. "Only the valleys of shadows and pain and death. Only h.e.l.l, you stupid b.i.t.c.h, and it is mine. All mine."

Leann had stopped praying. "I know." Blood bubbled up from her split lips. "And I am sorry for you."

Gelina ripped off the blindfold. "Are you sorry now?" She used her long, sharp nails on Leann's face and throat, tearing at her like an animal. When both of her hands were dripping red, she licked the blood from them and spit it in the woman's ruined face. "Now who is sorry? Eh? Who is sorry?"

Leann didn't answer. She only stared at the candle burning next to her head, her eyes wide and grateful, the pupils fixed.

Phillipe found Alex in a tourist bar called Midnight Sax in the Quarter, where she was sitting in a dark corner and drinking a bottle of ale. On stage a large black woman sang a slow, sad song, but Alex wasn't paying any attention to her. She was watching a heavyset man at the table next to her. The man sat alone and was drinking heavily.

Since his master had brought Alexandra back to La Fontaine, Phillipe had tried to do what he could to make her comfortable. As Cyprien's seneschal, it was his duty, and Phillipe still felt partially responsible for her situation.

He also liked Alexandra. She reminded him of his sister, Maere, who had been just as small and dark and terrifying in her fearlessness. Maere had nursed him when the sickness came, catching the sickness from him, and died a few days after he had risen to walk with the Kyn. In secret Phillipe had watched her simple grave for months after her death, but few women were cursed, and Maere stayed in the ground.

Phillipe did not wish to haunt Alexandra's grave.

He walked over and sat down in the empty chair beside her. "How is the ale?" he asked in his careful English.

Alexandra regarded the bottle in her hand. "Corona is beer, Phil. And it's too warm." She looked over at the heavyset man.

Phillipe studied the man, too. He had bruises on his fists and the small, sour features of a bully.

"Cyprien send you to get me?" She didn't wait for him to answer. "He wouldn't chase me himself. No, he'd send a flunky to do it. Does he think he can tell me to go out and grab someone in the middle of the night?" she asked the ale bottle. "If he does, he'll be picking those pretty white teeth of his out of the carpeting."

"The master wishes you return." He waited a minute, but she said nothing. "Alexandra, please?"

"I heard you. Your master can bite my a.s.s."

"If he try, you hit him." He hated her language-even German made more sense-and shook his head. "My joke, not so good. Like my English."

"No, actually, it was pretty decent." She sighed. "Tell me something, Phil. Have you guys really been alive since twelve hundred something?"

"Oui."

"You're really seven hundred years old." She rested her cheek against her fist.

"I do not know exact," he told her. How did he put into English that he had been a simple peasant, and no one bothered to record the year of his birth? That part of his life existed only in the cycle of the seasons he had spent working in the fields. Cyprien was his senior by a handful of years; he could remember him as a young lordling, riding by the cottage where he and his father lived. "A little less than the master."

"You don't get it, Phil. I just f.u.c.ked a seven-hundred-year-old man."

Phillipe knew that, but only because he had changed Cyprien's bed linens. He should say something to make her feel better about it. "Congratulations?" Alexandra looked at him and burst out laughing. Her laughter made him smile, but then, many things about her did.

"Come on, Phil." She got up from her seat and held out her hand.

He took it and she pulled him to his feet. "We go back now, oui?"

"No." She dragged him by the arm out to the clear s.p.a.ce in front of the stage. "We're going to dance."

Under the smoldering stare of the woman singing, Phillipe froze. Her song was slow and sensual, the music laced with s.e.x and regret. "I do not do this."

"You do tonight." She studied his face. "You don't know how?" He shook his head. "It's easy. You hold me"- Alexandra pulled his limp arms around her-"and move me around. Come on, you can do it."

Phillipe suspected he would walk unshod over red-hot plowshares for her, so he gathered her close and moved her around the floor.

"Slower. Watch my toes. Yeah, like that." She rested a soft cheek against him. "This is nice."

Since he had no basis of comparison-his life had been many things, but never nice-he took her word for it. But it was pleasant, to hold her, to listen to the song, and to move this way.

"Why have you stayed with him all this time?"

He took a minute to translate the English into French. "No other... place for me. I serve him. Make... oath, yes? To stay. Protect."

"You're just as powerful as he is." She looked up and then down over him. "You're not bad-looking, for the strong, silent tank type. Women love French accents. You could go anywhere, do anything, be anything that you wanted."

Phillipe lost her at type but understood the gist of what she was saying. "I not say right. Cyprien is master, but he... ma seule famille. No one more." Over the top of her head, he watched the heavyset man rise and go to the privy.

"Not like you."

"No, not like me. My only family dumped me for G.o.d." She sighed and rubbed her forehead against his jacket. "I didn't ask for this, Phil. I love him, but I do not need his s.h.i.t. I was doing fine without his s.h.i.t."

He didn't understand why she equated the master's business with fertilizer, but asking would only annoy her.

"Love is free, Alexandra, but it brings... duty. Obligation."

"You got that right."

Cautiously he lifted a hand and touched her curls, then eased his fingertips into them and ma.s.saged her scalp. A harlot in Bayonne had once shown him how to do it, and claimed nothing relaxed a woman more.

"Not so fine, be alone, no one to love. Marcel, the boy, Thierry... they have need for you." He hesitated for a moment before adding, "Cyprien has need for you. Very large." And with her in his arms, like this, he could certainly understand his master's desire.

"Yeah. Huge. It would look great in white marble." Alex pulled out of his arms. "That's enough dancing for tonight."

Phillipe silently followed her back to the table. She looked at the empty chair where the heavyset man had been sitting, made a disgusted sound, and took a swig from the bottle. A second later she thumped the bottle down. "I've been able to tolerate small amounts of liquid before now. Why is this making me sick?"

"Blood not make you sick."

She glared at him, and then smacked herself in the head. "His s.e.m.e.n, of course. How could I be so frigging stupid?

It's as bad as his blood. I can't have that. I need to run tests on myself. I need to cure this thing or I'll never be a doctor again."

Cyprien had told Phillipe about how the doctor was using injections to slow the process. Human death was something Alexandra had yet to experience. Would she survive the final change, or like Maere, would she stay in the ground?

"Is so bad," he asked her at last, "be Kyn? Be Kyn docteur?"

She gave him an unreadable look and got to her feet. "Excuse me, I have to go and throw up my beer now." Phillipe followed Alexandra to the privy marked on the door with a symbol for women. He knew that meant he had to wait outside, or any females inside would start shouting at him. When she came out, he would find enough English to reason with her and convince her to come back to the mansion. If that didn't work, he would do as Cyprien had ordered and compel her.

He hoped the English would work. He did not like using his ability on Alexandra. He would obey his master- there was no question of that-but she deserved... better.

Alexandra came out of the women's privy at the same time the heavyset man came out of the one marked for men.

Drink had made the man unsteady, and he collided with Alexandra.

"Git out my way, ya twit." He gave her a hard shove to the side.

Alexandra grabbed a handful of the bully's flannel shirt and used it to push him back into the men's privy.

Phillipe swore ripely and went in after them. He expected to find Alexandra in danger, not pinning the red-faced man between two paper towel dispensers.

"You like knocking women around, don't you?"

The bully raised a knotted fist. "Turn me loose or I'll knock you on your silly a.s.s."

"You'll find"-she took his right forefinger and broke it-"it's a little harder"-she did the same to his left-"to do that when you're in traction."

The man squealed and doubled over, cradling his broken fingers against his belly. "You crazy! What you done to me!"

"Stop, Alexandra." Alarmed now, Phillipe tried to tug her back.

"He's already beaten one wife to death, haven't you, Buford? Using his fists." Alex wriggled out of Phillipe's grip and jerked the man upright. She drove her foot into one of Buford's knees, then the other. He went gray in the face and sagged, unresisting, between her fist and the wall. "Just his fists."

"How do you know this?"

"I can see it all," she said, a faraway look in her eyes. "After she was gone, he tossed the house and had a buddy clock him in at work early for his alibi. The police thought it was a burglar who did her." She glanced at Phillipe.

"What?"

"You know this man?"

"No."

He had watched the change in her eyes as she told the bully's story. The lovely soft brown was eclipsed by amber, and her pupils were long and narrow. "But you know his crimes."

Alexandra blinked. "Yeah. I do. But only if they're murderers. Only if they've killed, or will kill."

Phillipe knew of many Kyn talents, but not one like this. "How did you read him so completely?"

"He was thinking about the first one, and the new one. The girlfriend he put in the hospital last week. Broken ribs, cracked jaw. She's pressing charges, so tonight he was going over to finish the job. Not anymore, though." Alex let the unconscious man drop to the floor and bent down. "How about I break his neck? A nice, clean T-3 fracture should do it, and he can do his time as a quadriplegic. See how he likes being helpless in a place he can't escape."

Phillipe crouched down and checked the man's lower limbs. "He's already helpless. You broke both of his legs."

"Good," Alex said, and took his hand in hers. "We can go now."

Chapter Twenty.

Michael kept some distance between him and Alexandra while she performed her surgeries on the Durands. Phillipe had advised him to do so after relating details about the incident at the bar, and the unusual talent Alexandra had displayed.