"She is very angry with you, Master. Being with you has made her more Darkyn, less human. She wishes to be left to do her work, and to find the answers she seeks about our kind."

"It is not the way." Michael wanted to find her, drag her to his chamber, and keep her there, making love to her and feeding her his blood until she shed the last of her human self. "The sooner she reconciles herself to me, the happier she will be. She is mine."

"No, she is not," his seneschal said without hesitation.

He eyed Phillipe. "She carries my blood and my seed in her body now."

"She stands between two worlds. She must decide for herself to which, and to whom, she belongs." Phillipe gave him a wry look. "She cannot be yours, Master, if you must tie her like a horse in order to ride her."

Michael gritted his teeth and stayed away, immersing himself in safeguarding the jardin and looking for the hunter from Rome. He obtained updates on Alexandra's progress with the Durands through Phillipe, but otherwise left her alone.

Alexandra worked ceaselessly, divided her nights between Jamys and Thierry, performing the operations to repair the boy's crushed hands in the early evening and working on Thierry's shattered legs late in the night. The surgeries were highly complicated procedures that kept the doctor utterly preoccupied, according to Phillipe, and Heather working until she staggered with exhaustion. When Alexandra requested a second, backup nurse to spell Heather, Cyprien had the Kyn working at Charity Hospital send over a surgical RN with enough experience to keep up with Alexandra.

Marcel and Liliette hovered anxiously outside the separate operating rooms, and Michael stayed with them when he could. Jamys remained in his catatonic state, but he looked better each time Alexandra operated on him. At last she finished and it was time for Marcel to have his foot repaired.

"It unmans me to say this," Thierry's brother told Michael, "but I am afraid."

Cyprien thought of the long hours he had spent under the knife. "So was I."

Alexandra was able to correct the deformities in Marcel's foot with two procedures. After the second, Marcel walked normally for the first time in his life.

As Alexandra and Liliette watched, Thierry's brother made one trip down the hall and back, and then pulled the doctor into his arms and wept against the top of her head.

"No pain," Marcel was saying. "Mon Dieu, no pain."

Alexandra held on, patted his back, and made some soothing noises. She looked over Marcel's shoulder and saw Michael at the end of the hall.

He wanted to go and tear them apart from each other. Instead, he kept his expression neutral and his mouth shut as Alexandra accepted Marcel's watery thanks and gave him a little peck on the cheek. Michael would not chase her down, would not drag her to his chamber.

Not yet.

Michael was still brooding over Alexandra when a courier from Chicago delivered a package from Valentin Jaus. In it were the dossiers Jaus had prepared on the four men who had attacked Luisa Lopez, the payment Michael had promised to give Alexandra in exchange for her services to the Durands, as well as a report on her brother, recently returned from Rome and currently on a leave of absence from his parish.

Jaus's investigator noted that upon arriving from Rome, John Keller had been detained at customs and searched. A copy of the customs officer's incident report, which among other items noted Father Keller's poor physical condition, was included in the package. Even more interesting, John Keller had taken his leave and flown to Atlanta only one day after arriving in the States.

Michael picked up the phone and called the suzerain in Atlanta. "Locksley, it is Michael. Very well, thank you. I have a favor to ask."

Atlanta, with its monstrous traffic and maze of business offices, had swallowed John's sister.

It took forty-seven phone calls to find the last hotel Alexandra had stayed at, an economy inn that catered to the business cla.s.s. Four blocks down from the hotel, John found the bar from which she had called Leann Pollock.

"I don't get a lot of hotel trade in here," the bartender warned him. "They cruise the bars downtown." He took Alexandra's picture from John and studied it. "Oh, yeah, the babe. She was here."

"Did she meet someone?"

The bartender shook his head. "Sat at the bar, kept to herself. Wasn't drinking. Left me a big tip." He handed the photo back and looked again at John's clerical collar. "She in trouble?"

"I hope not." He thanked the man and gave him a card from the hotel where he was staying, along with his room number. "If she happens to come in again, will you call me, please? It's important that I find her."

The trail went cold there. No one in the area around the bar remembered seeing a woman matching Alex's description, so he went one block over and began showing her picture around the shops and businesses.

As John was coming out of a diner, he nearly walked into three scantily dressed women loitering at the corner. The photo of Alex fluttered to the ground. "Excuse me, ladies." He tried to pick up the picture.

"Well, h.e.l.l, there goes the neighborhood," one of the women said. She scooped up the photo and examined it. "This your girlfriend?"

John tried to smile. "I'm a priest."

She patted his shoulder. "That's okay, honey. We got a special price for preachers. Volume discount, you might say."

The other two prost.i.tutes snickered.

"Do you ladies work this neighborhood regularly?"

Their smiles disappeared. "Yeah," one of the two that had laughed said. "And we don't need n.o.body come round here talking Bible and chasing off our tricks."

"I was only wondering if you'd seen my sister." John nodded toward the photo. "Her name is Alexandra, and she was in the area a few nights ago."

The three women huddled over the photo, and it was the third who nodded.

"I saw her, that night the cops rousted us off the street. She was with three big guys. She looked pretty p.i.s.sed off.

They had her over there for a while." She pointed to the recessed doorway of a women's clothing store. "Thought she was doing the cutest one, you know, with the way the other two stood, blocking the view from the street."

John had better luck with the store proprietor, an older man who had been working late that night and had listened to Alex's conversation with the man in the black trench coat.

"Sure I remember that bunch. Scared the s.h.i.t out of me. From what I heard, I thought they might be mixed up with that child molester who got murdered over in the alley three streets over. I wrote everything down so I wouldn't forget, called it into the cops." The man reached under his counter and took out a notebook. "That girl was your sister?" he asked as he flipped through the pages.

"Yes, sir."

"Here it is." The man folded back the notebook. "Yeah, started with her telling him she won't go back to New Orleans. Said she'd kill him. Then she touched his face all over, queer like, with her fingers, and asked him about his surgery."

A patient? "Was he scarred?" "Not that I could see. Handsome fella." The store owner read over his notes. "He told her he was sorry. She asked him to leave her alone and she didn't want to do it with him no more." He shook a finger at John. "See, that's what made me think they did that sick piece of s.h.i.t over by the storage place. I felt bad that I reported it and then come to find out he had a little girl over there. Then I call the cops, and they blow me off like it wasn't important. No never mind to me. If that bunch killed that rapist, they should get a f.u.c.king medal, I say. Oh, pardon my French, Father."

John wondered why the police hadn't seized the connection between the two cases, or the description of Alexandra, whom he had listed at the missing-persons national database. "Was there anything else they said? Where they were going?"

"All I got here is that the guy talked her into doing it. Said he'll help her burn someone in Chicago-all she has to do is come to some place with a fancy name. I wrote it down, too." He turned the page and studied the dense writing on the back. "Here you go. Lah-fon-tane. Sounds Frenchy to me."

"It is." John had taken a year of French in high school. "It means 'The Fountain.' "

Phillipe came down to the bas.e.m.e.nt level after Alexandra had finished working on Thierry for the night and was cleaning up. "The master needs you in the library."

"I'm tired." It wasn't a lie. To keep the Kyn infection from advancing any further, Alex had been skimping on her injections. It was all she could do to get through the surgeries every day.

"He has... information?" Phillipe gave her a rea.s.suring smile. "It is good. You will want this."

She didn't want this, didn't want anywhere near Cyprien. But she went upstairs with Phillipe and entered the library. She stayed near the door, just in case.

"You wanted to see me?" she asked.

Cyprien was sitting behind a large, modern desk and flipping through some files. He selected four and pushed them to the edge of the desk. "These are for you."

"Not more patients, I hope."

"Information." He tapped the top folder. "Complete criminal records and current locations on the men who attacked Luisa Lopez. As I promised."

Slowly Alex went over and picked up the first dossier. Inside were mug shots and an in-depth report on a convicted burglar/rapist who currently resided about five blocks from Luisa's old apartment. The others were just as detailed.

"Suzerain Jaus will keep them under surveillance until you are finished here," Cyprien told her. "Then either his people can deliver them to you, or you can go and collect them yourself."

She picked up the folders and tucked them under her arm. "I thought you'd wait until I was done with the Durands before giving me these."

Cyprien took a cigarette from an enameled box on the desk, glanced at her, and put it back. "Consider it a gesture of faith and love."

Alex didn't like those words. At all. "What do you want now?"

"Nothing but what you agreed to do. Help my friends." He got up and walked out.

Alex took the files to her room and over the next several days tried hard to forget about them. Now that Marcel was healed, she could concentrate on Thierry's lower body exclusively, and began restoring form and function every inch of the way. Finally she got to his feet, which were the biggest challenge she had ever faced.

"I would think this to be the simplest part of it," Liliette commented one afternoon after Alex had given her a progress report. "His feet are so small compared to his legs."

"They're small, but they're complicated," Alex told her. "Each foot has twenty-six bones, which together represent one-fourth of all the bones in the body. There are also one hundred and seven ligaments, thirty-three joints, thirty-one tendons, and nineteen muscles, too. All of them work together, not just to hold the bones in place but to allow the foot to move and support the body." She put up the X-rays of Thierry's feet on the light panel Cyprien had had installed in the treatment room. "As you can see, they wrecked just about all of them, too."

Liliette's smile faded as she studied the films. "How can you hope to fix this?" "I'm going to build him new ones, from the inside out." The work involved was tedious, nerve-racking, and risky, but the only alternative Alex had was amputation, and that was strictly last resort. "I'll be honest. I don't know if it will work, madame."

"Do what you can for him."

There was no piecing Thierry's original bones back together, so Alex set out to sculpt him new ones out of the old bone material. Harvesting the pulverized fragments, she slowly grafted and formed seven thick, short, tarsal bones to give him a new heel and back instep. From there she formed five parallel metatarsal bones to form the front of the instep and serve as a platform for the front and ball of the foot.

As Alex progressed to the smaller phalanges, she realigned his torn muscles and repaired his shredded ligaments, allowing them to heal in place to connect and hold the new bones. After harvesting grafts from his b.u.t.tocks and lower abdomen, she recreated the thick layer of fatty tissue under the sole of his foot, which would serve as a shock absorber when Thierry walked, ran, or jumped.

a.s.suming that he ever would.

When Alex had finished with the right foot, she didn't wait but repeated the entire process on the left. It took another week of eighteen-hour days over the operating table. She left Thierry only to transfuse herself or sleep for a few hours. At length, his feet were almost whole again.

One more operation, and she would be done.

Alex left him with the nurses, gave Marcel and his aunt a brief report, and then went up to her room to collapse and sleep for a week. Cyprien was waiting for her, but she was too tired to chase him out. "What?"

"Phillipe told me you have nearly finished with Thierry." He tucked his hands in his pockets. "Do you wish to return to Chicago? I can arrange a flight out tomorrow night."

She stripped out of her lab coat. "Here's the deal, Mike: I'm tired, I'm grumpy, and I'm in no mood to talk about travel arrangements or dance with you. So do I have to yell, or will you show how much you love me and leave now?"

"I would like you to stay."

She rubbed the back of her neck. "No mood to dance includes-"

"Arguing, s.e.x, or blood, I know." He came over, swept her off her feet, and carried her to the bed. "Your feet must hurt."

She snorted. "You try standing on yours for eighteen hours; see how they feel."

He sat on the edge of the bed and began rubbing his thumbs in circular motions against her soles. "I would like you to stay with us, Alexandra. We are not as different as you think. You believe in preserving life as much as I do. The Kyn need you." He looked up at her. "You already know how much I need you."

The soft voice and pleading eyes didn't fool Alex-this was the same man who had introduced her to bondage in a big way-but she was tired, and his hands were pure magic. "We'll talk about it tomorrow night, after I've finished surgery. I'm tired."

"Tomorrow, then." He rose and bent to kiss her on the forehead. "Good night, Alexandra."

She hid her confusion by yawning and closing her eyes. "Night." She didn't peek until she heard the door to her room open and close. Then she covered her face with her hands. "I have got to get out of here."

Alex was tired, too tired to crawl under the sheets. She closed her eyes and tried to mentally run through Thierry's final surgery one more time, but slipped off before she'd gotten to the third incision.

The dream came and enveloped her like an old, soft quilt.

Alex was standing over Thierry, grafting bone and snapping out orders to Heather, while everyone stood around watching her. She scanned faces and saw Phillipe, Marcel, eliane, even Jamys. The only one missing was Michael.

Thierry opened his eyes and looked up at her. What are you doing to me, Angel?

I'm not anyone's angel. Alex tossed her b.l.o.o.d.y scalpel aside and watched Thierry's leg heal shut. And why can't I have a nice dream, like being on a beach surrounded by four nearly naked lifeguards feeding me pina coladas and frozen grapes?

The operating room disappeared, and Alex found herself stretched out on a lounge chair. It was sitting on a completely deserted white-sand beach. The only thing in the immediate area besides sand and sea was a small table with a frosty white drink sitting on it.

Alex glanced down at her scrubs, which had turned into a teeny black bikini. I'll have to rethink that fantasy about working in the M&M's factory now.

Motion caught her attention; someone rose from the turquoise water and walked up onto the beach. Thierry, only his legs and feet were whole, and all he wore was a brief pair of black swimming trunks.

Alex grinned. d.a.m.n, I do good work.

The very wet and near-naked Thierry sauntered up over the sand to join her. He looked around. This is a pleasant dream. What kind of grapes would you like, darling? Blanc? He produced a handful of picture-perfect green grapes. Rose? The grapes turned a dusky pink.

The edges of the beach were hazy, sort of wavering. Alex knew she was dreaming, but it was nice to see Thierry whole and sane. How about four nearly naked lifeguards to ogle me?

He c.o.c.ked an eyebrow at her. You wish to watch me kill four other men with my bare hands, man coeur?

Alex laughed. No.

He knelt beside her, and the beach and the sea went away. They were both naked and huddled together in a dark place with no windows, and only a torch on the wall sputtering with smoky firelight. They will come for us in the morning, Angel.

Alex was still adjusting to sitting bare-a.s.sed on cold, damp stone. Who will?

The Brethren. Thierry pulled her into his arms. All my life, I have loved only you. He kissed her with the desperation of a man facing death. I have wanted only you.

She tried to wriggle out of his arms. Thierry, I'm not who you think I am. Look at me. I'm not Angel; I'm Alex. His big hands were all over her. Alex, your doctor.

It won't save us this time. He pushed her back, covered her with his long, heavy frame, separating her legs, hunting against her. Let me inside you, Angel. One last time, before they take us. He frowned down at her. You are my wife. Why have you changed your hair? I liked it the color you made it the last time.