Then she offered me the bottle.

Tears rose hot and prickling. I pushed them down. Took a swallow, the licorice tang turning my stomach over and my cracked lips stinging. When I handed it back to her, she didn't wipe the mouth of the bottle. Instead, her gaze holding mine, she lifted it to her lips, too.

I bit the inside of my cheek. Hard, so hard I tasted blood. The thought that it would be tinged with black made my stomach revolve again. There were so many things I wanted to say. Things like Thank you, or even, I love you.

Because I do. We are lonely creatures, we hunters. We have to love each other. We are the only ones who understand, the only ones who will ever understand.

Except I wasn't a hunter anymore, was I?

"I need a car," I croaked. "It won't be coming back."

When I woke, the dream faded. For a second I had everything, it trembled inside my head...then it was gone. And I needed to go, too. Dusk was rising, and something told me the hotel might not be...safe. The need to get out and move itched under my skin.

I found out something else, too: I liked heights. I especially liked gliding along rooftops like a ghost, peering into the streets below. Looking for something I couldn't define while dusk rose from every corner, cloaking the city in peculiar static heat, the rising wind bringing me an oddly familiar tang of river as everything exhaled.

Preparing for the plunge into darkness.

Everything about it was familiar. Even the shapes of the city streets, the arterial bloodflow of traffic, the quiet neighborhoods and the back alleys, the parts that lit up only when the light failed. And yet, everything was unfamiliar-the sneakers were too light, and I felt oddly naked. Like I should have more, a heavy weight on my shoulders and something flapping at my ankles, something on my face and those little weights tied into my hair. Not to mention the fact that my left hand kept dropping to my side like it expected to find another gun. Or something else.

The city revolved inside my head. I knew the street names, sometimes only after I dropped down to their level and looked around a bit. The town clung to the banks of the river, a big granite Jesus on top of a hospital downtown spread his arms in a menacing blessing, nightclubs pounded and weird things skittered in the shadows. Every building greeted me with a secret smile, little bits of the geography whirling like snowflakes until they settled against the rest of my mental map.

It was next to the granite Jesus, looking out over all those tiny dots of light, that something else stirred inside my aching head. I crouched in Christ's spreadeagle shadow, watching the very last dregs of light swirl out of the sky, and sniffed the wind. Even in summer, nights out in the desert can get chilly. No trace of moisture in the air, but a thin faint thread of something candyspiced and wicked tickled my nose.

What the hell's that? Half-rising from the crouch, keeping to cover, I almost swayed because I didn't have a counterweight hanging behind me to keep me steady. A cloak of stillness folded over me, my pulse dropping, my entire body chilling. Gooseflesh rose hard like little rubbery fists under my skin, I ignored it.

Follow that. It's not supposed to be here.

I was moving before I knew it, bolting across the rooftop, the world around me blurring. Hit the edge going full speed, a moment of weightlessness, and smacked the pavement stories below with a crack like a shotgun and a breathless feeling of holy shit did I just do that?

I would've been laughing with crazy joy, if not for the gun unholstering itself and the sudden fierce buzzing in my right arm, like a band of metallic flies was breaking for the surface of an infection. Right at my wrist, too. It pulled me along on a reel of silk, I flashed through a deserted alley and straight up a brick wall, barely touching the rough surface, my left hand catching at the top and heaving me over with little effort.

It was like flying. And I might've liked some time to enjoy it before I collided with a long tall thin thing out of a nightmare, its flesh glowing waxen-pale as it snarled, flying backward with its legs and arms drawn in, spiderlike. Its eyes glowed with a powdery sheen, and the thing it had been crouching over was a rag of bloody bone and meat that had once been a human being.

Trader. Put him down quick, Jill. But not so quick you can't question him.

Well, at least now I had a goal.

He smashed through two struts, snapping them like matchsticks, and the strength flooding my veins was definitely bolting up my right arm from the...thing, the gem, whatever it was. I was on him in a hot heartbeat, punching him twice and something cracking in his torso; we skidded and a lick of hot pain went up my arm. Skin erased by concrete, the smell of blood, and the Trader's chin jutted forward. His teeth were sharklike points, steaming saliva dripping and foaming, and we hit a retaining wall with a sound like a good hard break on a pool table. Something snapped in my side just like the struts, the pain was a spur. His teeth buried themselves in my shoulder, grating on bone, I screamed. Not with the pain.

No. I screamed in pure frustration. I knew what to do, but I didn't have the tools to do it. I didn't have my knives, or my coat, or- The gun bucked in my hand, its roar oddly muffled. A hole opened in his back, the exit wound blossoming obscenely. The Trader howled through his mouthful of my flesh, blood squirting and whatever venom he had on those sharp triangular teeth burning as it sizzled, spattering my neck.

He didn't quit.

I shot him again, twisting, and the thought-thank God for judo, Jillybean, get him good-seemed completely normal. Another hole opened in his back. Why was he still moving? Squeezed the trigger again, and his torso was mangled now. Another hole opened in his back, this one spattering and spraying wider than the first two. A mist of copper droplets hung in the air.

I got lucky.

The flat, shine-dusted eyes glazed. He twitched, teeth grinding in the ruin of my shoulder, and I let out a sound that probably would've haunted a nightmare or two if there was anyone around to hear. It took working the gun barrel into his mouth and cracking the jaw to get the teeth to loosen up as his body twitched and jerked. I jammed it further back-he was still twitching-and squeezed the trigger again, the roar way too close for comfort.

The back of its head evaporated.

Corruption raced through its tissues, little veins of dust spilling from a crackglaze like fine porcelain glued back together and unceremoniously busted again.

Would've been easier with my knives. Where are my fucking knives? It didn't matter. I scrambled out of his slackening embrace, my sneakers squishing and sliding in a tide of brackish fluid. It was blood. But the edges of the red fluid held a taint of black, hungrily threading through and turning it to dust as the body twitched and jerked, heels drumming in a weird dance against the rooftop, the mangled head spilling brainmeal as the neck twisted. My ribs flickered; heaving breaths shaking me like wet laundry. I hit one of the listing iron struts reaching up like fingers-it was bent crazily where he'd gone right through it.

Yes, I could see now it was a he. He'd been naked, and his genitals were altered, too. Barbed and spiked, like...I don't even know what like.

They always go for body mods. Part of the personality of someone who'll trade their soul away. I know that. It was a relief to find something I did know for sure. Even if this was weird as fuck.

I was making a whistling sound. Hyperventilating. Something inside me clamped down, made my pulse and respiration calmer, my eyes locked on the twitching, disintegrating body.

You must watch death you make, a man whispered from my soupy, darkened memory. Is only way, milaya.

Mikhail. I remembered his name, now, with a lurching mental effort. Sweat stood out, cold and slick, all over me. The gun was steady, pointed at the swiftly rotting corpse as if it might take a mind to get up for round two.

You never know. You just never know.

My shoulder burned, but I ignored it. The gun didn't waver. So this was what I did. I leapt off multistory buildings like I was stepping off a patio. I found weird smells. I got into fights on rooftops.

I killed things that shouldn't exist.

The gem on my wrist glowed softly.

When you're ready.

Is that what he'd meant, my blue-eyed breakfast-buying hallucination? Was I having another hallucination now?

That's the trouble with waking up in your own grave. A whole lot of weird shit suddenly seems pretty reasonable.

Maybe that wasn't your grave. Maybe your name isn't Jill. Maybe Mikhail is something else. Can't assume. That's what he said, all the time. "Do not ever assume. Is quickest way to get ass blown sideways."

I stared at the bubbling mass until it was clear it wasn't going to get up and come after me again. The night air was full of traffic sounds, faraway sirens, whispered secrets. My shoulder had stopped bleeding. When I looked down, craning my neck, the bubbling pink froth squeezing out of the flesh as it knit itself back together sizzled a little, eating at the T-shirt. Bile whipped the back of my throat, I forced it down by swallowing. Bad idea, because then it hit my stomach and revolved. I was kind of glad I hadn't eaten anything, because I heaved once before I got myself back together and used the spar behind me to muscle my way back to standing. My knees definitely felt gooshy.

The next step was examining the victim and looking for evidence. Like a cop.

Not a cop. A hunter. You do what the cops can't.

My own voice, hard and clear, addressing a class of bright-faced boys and girls in blue dress uniforms.

I will be blunt, rookies. You'll all be required to memorize the number for my answering service, which will page me. Pray you never have to use that number. Three or four of you will have to. A few of you won't have time to, but you can rest assured that when you come up against the nightside and get slaughtered, I'll find your killer and serve justice on him, her, or it. And I will also lay your soul to rest if killing you is just the beginning.

"Holy fuck," I whispered. The city whispered and chuckled.

I shuffled like an old woman, back to the victim. There was a pile of clothing-workman's boots, overalls, a red plaid shirt, a billfold in one of the pockets. A nice wad of fifties and hundreds that I took without compunction, ID showing a sullen, lean face-it was dark up here, but I had no trouble picking out the features of the thing I'd just killed. Back when it had been human, its name had been Eric Allen Dodge, and he lived in the Cruzada district. Staring at the address gave me a map of the city, different routes I could take to get out to his house if I needed to give it a looksee. There was one more thing, and I held it while I crouched to look at the rag of meat and bone he'd been hunched over when I hit him.

The victim was female. There was enough of her left to tell, mostly because the breasts were chopped free and laid to one side and her plumbing was oddly untouched.

He must've been saving that for last. My gorge rose again. What did it say about me that I could guess?

Not enough blood on the roof, so he'd killed her elsewhere and brought the body here. Her heart, a fist-sized lump of flesh, was set neatly aside with her tatas. There were other bits, something that was probably her liver, long strings of guts. Her face had been savaged. About all I could tell was that she'd probably been dishwater blonde or light brunette; her shoulder-length hair was matted with clotted blood and filth. White slivers of teeth poked through the hamburger of what was left of her features.

Her left hand. A gleam of gold-wedding ring, on the third finger. Just where silver rested on my own left hand.

"Do svidanye," I murmured, and looked at the only other thing that'd been in Dodge's wallet.

It was a plain, thick, dove-gray business card. MONDE NUIT, it said, and an address out near the meatpacking district. I knew exactly where the meatpacking district was, and the location seemed...familiar.

More than familiar.

Wasn't this just my lucky night.

6.

The place looked foul. The atmosphere over it had thickened like a bruise, my left eye smarting and watering as it untangled layer after layer of rotting cheesecloth. Etheric bruising, my helpful unmemory piped up. That means it's a haunt. You know what a haunt is, right? A place where wild animals go to feed. There's 'breed in there, and Traders. You need silver.

Silver. My right hand flashed up, touched my hair. That's what should be there. Silver charms. Tied in with red thread. It was traditional.

Doesn't help me now, though.

I loitered at the edge of the parking lot, sunk in shadows. There was brush here, and I crouched easily, sometimes moving to keep muscles from stiffening, sometimes utterly still and watching. The place looked familiar-a long, low building, parking lot shading to gravel at the edges, a couple of gorillas at the door and a line waiting to go in. Faint thumping bass reached me as I studied the shapes of the people in line. They moved...oddly. Scary quicksilver grace or twitching almost-stasis, and even at this distance I could see the twisting under the surface of their normal shapes. The twisting threatened to give me a headache until I figured out I could simply make a note of it and it would stop bothering me. I just had to acknowledge it.

Someone in there knows who I am.

But these were things like the thing I'd killed on the roof. Wrong. And very, very bad. I had no silver. Just the business card and- A long black limousine took a right into the parking lot, crunching on gravel before bumping inelegantly up onto cracked pavement. The line twittered and whispered with excitement. The car glowed, wet light from the tangle of red neon over the building's front sliding over its sleek flanks. My focus narrowed and I leaned forward, coming up out of the crouch as if compelled. My body obeyed smoothly, but my right wrist twinged. I glanced down, but the gem set in the skin was the same, a colorless sparkle. The wind touched my hair, playing with the curls, cool with the flat metal tang of river water, the desert's sand-baked exhale picking up the water and vanishing.

The limo banked easily, like a small plane, and one of the bouncers stepped forward to open the door. I took another two steps, gravel oddly soundless underfoot. My right hand touched the gun butt, fingers running over it like they expected to read Braille.

A pale head. He rose out of the car on the other side, and a rippling sigh of excitement went through the line. I moved forward, impelled, cutting through a line of dusty parked cars. The limousine scorched, dirt-free, the only thing in the lot that didn't look tired or filthy. My hand curled around the gun, but I didn't draw it yet. The ring on my left hand ran with blue light, a seashine gleam.

They became aware of me in stages, as if I was a storm moving through from the mountains. First the eerie-graceful part of the line, with their seashell hips and liner-drenched eyes, stilled. Their heads came up, and sculpted nostrils flared. Cherry-glazed lips parted, and a collective exhale lifted from them along with a bath of nose-tingling corruption.

They were beautiful, but under that beauty lay the twisting.

The jerky, oddly-shaped ones were next. They hissed, lips lifting and sharp-filed teeth showing, some of them crouching. One of them, a broad wide manshape dressed in a caricature of a construction worker's plaid shirt and Carhartts, his work boots stained with something dark and fetid, actually growled. The sound rose in a rumble like boulders grinding together, and some sure instinct made me pause, staring at him. Yellow eyes, unholy foxfire in the irises and the pupils flaring and constricting like a cobra's head. He tensed as his knees slowly bent.

He's getting ready to spring.

Movement. The pale head of hair was approaching. They cringed and fell back from him, but I didn't look. I stared at the Trader, my fingers slowly tightening on the gun. If he jumped me I had some running room and cover in the parking lot. Maybe I could tangle them up and- There was a blur of motion, cream-colored linen streaking. A pale clawed hand flashed out, and the construction worker fell sideways, arterial spray blooming high and red. The drops hung in a perfect arc, and I saw each one was tinged with that tracery of black, hungrily gobbling at the fluid as it splashed.

Holy shit. I stared.

He stepped out of the way, polished wingtips gleaming just like the car, and my gaze snapped to him. The gun left its holster with a whisper, and my arm was straight and braced.

Pallid hair in a layered razor cut. Blue eyes, and the face wasn't beautiful. He looked normal-average lips, average cheekbones, an average all-American nose. The suit was linen, sharply-creased and expensive, and the eyes were bright blue. He regarded me with pleasant, cheerful interest, and I blinked before my left eye gave a twinge and I caught a glimpse of the twisting rippling under his flawless skin. A wine-red tie, he lifted his right hand and touched the half-Windsor knot, as if it had been knocked a millimeter out of place. Taller than me, his shoulders braced and his hips narrow, my mouth suddenly filling with copper adrenaline and my pulse dropping into a low steady rhythm.

Because this was a face I knew.

His left hand twitched. The fingers drew up like claws, and his paleness was a shade or two darker there. Something had happened to that hand, something my brain shied away from even as it threatened to plunge through the fog and remember. A spark popped from my ring's silver surface, photoflash blue.

"I know you." My lips were numb, but I simply sounded wondering. "From..." Words failed me, balked and twisted away. "From somewhere. I know you."

He studied me for another long moment. His smile widened.

He actually grinned. Pearly teeth, very sharp but very normal as well. It was a television newscaster's beaming, wide and practiced. Those blue eyes lit up, and another ripple went through the crowd.

"Of course you know me." Even his voice was reassuringly normal. Bland as the rest of him. "Our darling little Kismet, returned. How lovely." He stepped forward off the curb, but the bruisers looming behind him-one with a submachine gun, the other just a pile of over-yeasted muscle-didn't move. I almost twitched, but he made a soothing noise. A low exhale, his tongue clicking as if I was an animal to be gentled. "You look beautiful."

7.

I twitched outright this time, nervously, the gun tracking him. He paid no attention, heel-and-toeing it across the concrete as if we were on a dance floor. He only stopped when I took a restless step sideways, and that brought him up short. But he leaned forward, balanced on his toes, his entire body focusing on me.

"My lovely," he whispered. "My own. Of course I know you. What have they done to you?"

They? Whoever it was left me in the desert. In a grave. I rotted, but I came back.

No. That wasn't quite right. I hadn't come back. I'd been sent.

"They sent me back. To...I don't know." It was work to whisper. My throat was suddenly dry. Queasy heat boiled through my stomach, and I was suddenly aware the entire crowd of them was too still to be human.

If they jump you now, a clear cold voice warned me, you're not going to have an easy time of it. You're not even really armed. Just this gun with useless ammunition. You need silver. And lots of it.

Well, it was a fine time to remember that. And what did this have to do with the thing on the rooftop and the flayed, opened-up body, its organs set neatly aside?

I backed up, even more nervously. One step, two. He kept leaning forward.

"Don't." His unwounded hand came forward. The body of the Trader behind him slumped, twitching and jerking as corruption raced through its tissues. "Don't leave, dear one. Come inside. You look hungry."

What a coincidence. I was suddenly starving, an empty blowtorch-hole in my guts. I examined his face. Whatever lived underneath that skin rippled.

It didn't look good, and the business card in the wallet of a murderous thing was not an endorsement. But...he was familiar. Whoever he was, I knew him.

That doesn't mean he's any good.

Did I have any other option?