My gun lowered slightly. The night exhaled around me, dangerous sharp edges and the neon glaring, the hunger suddenly all through me. My right wrist twitched, a fishhook under the skin yanking restlessly.

"That's it," he crooned. "Come inside. There's a bed, and sharp shiny things to make you feel safer. You want knives, don't you."

A guilty start almost made it to the surface. I stared at him.

His smile widened just a notch. "And a gun or two. And a long, long black coat. And shining chiming things to tie in your lovely hair." His tongue flicked out and touched his bloodless lower lip. In the uncertain ruddy light it was a startling wet cherry-red, rasping against the skin. That quick little flicker made me nervous again, and I sidled another step. That brought him forward in a rush, fluidly, his bones moving in ways a human's shouldn't.

Even that was familiar. Half-disgust boiled under my breastbone. The other half was something I couldn't name. "Perry." I found his name. But nothing else. It was like thinking through mud. "You're Perry."

His irises glowed, sterile, cold blue. Thin threads of indigo slid through the whites of his eyes, a vein-map. His pupils dilated a little. "At your service. In every conceivable way, Kiss. That's what I call you. A pretty name for a pretty girl. Come. There's food. And drink. And a place to rest." His head cocked slightly. "And answers. You would like answers, wouldn't you? Your perennial plaint: Tell me why." A short, beckoning motion, his long, expressive fingers flicking. "You'll be under my protection, darling one. Nothing to fear. Just come, and let me soothe you."

It sounded good. Better than good. For a moment something else trembled under the surface of my memory, but it retreated again. Maddening, the feeling that I should know. That I should understand, instead of pushing myself blindly forward from place to place. The ring was warm, a forgiving touch against my flesh.

The gun twitched. My finger eased off the trigger. It lowered slightly. "First tell me something."

"Oh, anything." He eased toward me again, supple and weightless as if he was simply painted on the air. "Anything you like."

I searched through every question I had. There were too many of them crowding me. His pupils swelled, and the roaring sound filtered into my head again. The wasps, eating and buzzing, little tiny insect feet prodding as they crawled over me again. A galvanic shudder racked me. The gun dropped even further.

"Who am I?" I whispered. "What the hell are you?"

The laugh was another rumble, as if a freight train was passing me by again. It came from him, a subvocal roar, plucking at the strings under the surface of the world, and his fingers closed around my arm. Everything in me cringed away from that touch, but his fingers were warm and exquisitely gentle.

"You are my Kiss." Very gently, experimentally, he pulled on my arm. The ring sparked again, but it was unimportant. I followed, numb, the wasp-roar filling my skull like the cotton wool of illness. "And I, my darling? I am Legion. I am unconquerable fire." His grin was absolutely cheerful, and oddly terrifying, but all the soothing in the world was in that voice. "But don't worry. I am also your humble host this momentous evening. You've arrived just in time."

He led me past the bouncers, the submachine gun dangling as they watched, slack faced. The crowd muttered, hissing, but he paid them no notice. The doors were open, a red velvet curtain hanging in tattered folds, and he drew me through it and into the pounding music. I could barely gasp in a breath before the noise folded over my head like wings, and his grip on my arm never faltered.

I had a confused impression of swirling bodies on a dance floor lit with migraine stabs of brittle light, a monstrosity of a bar with two slim male shapes handing out what could have been drinks in twisted sparkling glasses, the press of the crowd alternately feverish and cold. The whirling crowd snarled, pressing back against each other as stipples of light flashed around me. Those little sparkles weren't from the disco ball-and who the hell has a disco ball nowadays? It was a slowly spinning planet, ponderous, a great silver fruit that pulsed with malevolence.

No, those little sparkles were half-unseen spikes surrounding me, their tips fluorescing up into the visible. An aura.

An exorcist's aura. Be careful, Jill.

I wished that voice had spoken up before. I'd killed a thing on the rooftop, a thing like these things. Now here I was in the middle of them, nowhere near as terrified as I should be.

This was normal. And what did that say about me?

It had something to do with him. With his hand on my arm and the thrumming growl coming through him, the noise that carried us both through the press of the crowd.

There was an iron door behind a frayed red velvet rope, and as soon as he pulled me through and the door shut with a clang I found myself on a staircase, going up.

So far so good. I'd been here before, several times. The gun dangled in my nerveless hand. He drew me up the stairs, and under the bass-throb attack of the music played at jet-takeoff levels I swear I heard him humming. A happy little tune, wandering along like a drunken sailor past alleys full of cold, dark eyes.

Another door crouched at the top, and he pushed it open. White light flooded the stairwell, and I blinked.

The room was white, too. An expanse of white carpet, a mirrored bar to one side, a huge swan bed swathed in bleached mosquito netting, a bank of television screens flickering at odd intervals. Some of them were dark, some fuzzed with static; others showed the club's interior and exterior, flicking rapidly through surveillance angles. Still more held news feeds, footage of explosions and disasters shuddered soundlessly. Once the door slid shut it was eerily quiet, a faint thumping through the floor all that remained of the noise below, a dozing animal's heartbeat.

He led me across the room, pushed me down on the bed. I sat without demur, my feet placed side by side like good little soldiers. He finally let go of my arm, stepped back, and brushed at stray strands of my hair that had come loose.

I didn't flinch. I just waited for clues, my eyes fixed on the blue gleam running under the ring's surface.

"There." The smile was still wide, but he looked pained. "That is...perfect. Just perfect. I've often thought that if I could have you sit just there, just so, all the problems would fade into insignificance."

"Problems?" I cradled the gun in my lap. The buzzing wouldn't go away. Rattling, chrome wasps in a bottle.

The thought that some of the carnivorous insects might have been left inside, maybe in my sinus cavities, nibbling at my brain, sent a rippling jolt through me. The bed made a soft shushing sound, silk sliding and netting twitching. The bottles racked above the mirrored bar were all clear glass. Some held gray smoke, shifting in screaming-face shapes. Others held jewel-glowing liquids, and the harsh white light stroked them.

"I have no problems, darling. Now that you're in my sight. Apple of my eye, flesh of my flesh." He stalked to the bar, his wingtips crushing the pristine carpet. "And you must be hungry. One moment."

My breathing had turned shallow. The horrific buzzing rattled my skull, I hunched my shoulders and went still. The air was curiously flat in here. The bed smelled faintly of fabric softener, but that was it. There was nothing else. It was the equivalent of a blank page.

There's something you're not seeing. Look deeper. Look again.

If I could get the meat inside my head to stop sounding like an overworked lawnmower on crack, I would. The sound crested, filling my bones, shaking me like a terrier with a toy in its sharp white needle-teeth. My ribs heaved, lungs burning, as if I was chasing something across rooftops.

The business card was crumpled, but I lifted it anyway. It still said the same thing.

Think. A card in a wallet. Doesn't mean much. Or it could mean everything. Which one are you betting on?

"Et voila," he murmured. A flicker of motion jerked my head up, and I stared.

In the middle of the arctic expanse of carpet, a table had bloomed. Covered by a fall of snowy linen, a bloody half-closed rose in a vase like fluted ice, two places set with exquisitely simple porcelain. Forks and knives and spoons of heavy, pale golden metal. A bleached, brassy candleholder like a twisted tree held thin white tapers. Their flames were colorless, standing straight up.

"Now." He indicated the chair with its back to the bed, a high-backed, spine-shouldered piece of pallid metal with a cushion of faded-red velvet. "I have no violinist, and no apples. But I think we shall do very well. Come, sit."

The buzzing receded like a sand-gurgling wave. I crushed the business card in my fist, suddenly very sure I didn't want the twisting under his skin to see it.

"I." My throat closed up. I cleared it, a harsh sound rustling the mosquito netting. "I, ah, have questions."

"Of course you do." He set down two water-clear champagne flutes. "And I'm in a position to give you answers. Plenty of them, too."

"Then start." My voice didn't belong to me. There was some other woman using it, her mouth twisted half up into a pained, professional smile and her hand ready on the gun in my lap. She peered out through my eyes, taking note of everything in the room and chalking it all up on mental lists-how easy it would be to get her hands on it, how much damage it would do, what her chances were. Percentages and likelihoods, all whirring inside our shared brain like clockwork gears. "Who buried me in the desert?"

"Well." A dusty bottle appeared out of nowhere. Its cork popped deftly free with a wrenching, violated sound, and the fizzing, pale-amber fluid poured in a couth stream into the flutes. "Hardly dinner conversation, Kiss. But I suppose you have a right to know." He set the bottle down with a click and picked up both glasses, cocking his head as he stared at me. His tongue flicked again, a blot of cherry-red, shocking against the paleness. "When I saw you last, you were dead."

"When was that?" She shifted slightly, the woman suddenly using my body, and cursed us both for putting us right in the most vulnerable location in the whole damn room.

"Oh, about two months ago." His teeth flashed, lips parting. "What would you like for dinner, my dear?"

I shifted again, uneasily. I was starving, but that other woman was warning me not to take a single sip or bite of anything he'd give me.

Where had she been when Martin Pores was feeding me?

"Knives." I swallowed hard. "You said knives. And...a coat."

"Don't be uncivilized. Sit over here." Faintly annoyed now, a shadow between those feathered eyebrows. The rippling under his skin had quieted, but the indigo threading through the whites of his eyes warned me.

My legs tensed. They carried me upright, and the gun dropped to my side. His teeth looked a lot sharper now.

So did the rest of him. A shadow of bladed handsomeness passed over his face, his eyes burning.

One step, two, my sneakers making little dry sounds against the carpet. Everything up here was new, freshly unwrapped. Like the whole stage had just been waiting for me to step onto it, under a brilliant skull-white spotlight.

"Right here." He indicated the chair. "That's a good girl. We'll have a nice, happy dinner. The first of many."

Does that mean I've never eaten here before? I think that's a fair guess. And I'll bet I had my reasons. The time for me to make any move was narrowing, ticking away in microseconds. The gun twitched, my pulse thudding along even and sonorous like a deep underground river, my right wrist suddenly burning. The buzzing had moved out into my fingertips, and it fought to bring the gun up, squeeze off a shot and let- Footsteps. High and hard. The door burst open, and I whirled, gun trained on the new arrival.

8.

Perry was suddenly there, slim pale fingers tensing and crackling at the man's throat. Man, or boy, he was so slight I couldn't tell. His ears came up to high points and his teeth were only bluntly human, but dapples of shadow-bruising ran over his skin, and his hair writhed in fat brown dreadlocks like it had a mind of its own.

He choked, and Perry hissed. The sound was freight trains rubbing together at midnight in a cold deserted yard, overstressed metal squealing in pain.

Helletong, I realized. The language of the damned.

Which gave me all sorts of interesting ideas about the position I was in. The hiss-roar died away, and the Trader's face turned an unpleasant purplish.

"I thought I said I wasn't to be disturbed." Perry cocked his head, each word quiet and level. "This had better be-"

"-caught-" The Trader choked again, and Perry eased up.

"What?" More 'tong, plucking at the strings below the surface of the world. I could glimpse the spreading stain, corruption welling up and torquing reality one way or another, my blue eye suddenly hot and dry. "Speak up," Perry snarled.

He probably could, if you weren't holding him a foot off the floor and cutting off his air. But I kept that thought to myself. It would probably be unhelpful in this situation.

It was looking like I was going to need all the help I could get. Lights were turning on inside my head, flickering in rapid fire, and the things they showed weren't very nice at all.

"Caught one," the Trader wheezed as the fingers in his throat loosened slightly. "We caught one. Watching us."

"Indeed." Perry went still for a few seconds. A hot, dry draft reeking of spoiled honey brushed the room. Even immobile, you could see his molecules trying to escape, jittering away. Under his suit coat his back shifted, something straining inside the shape he wore. Horror crawled up into my throat, my brain shivering away from the suggestion underneath. Like a twisted alien body under a blanket, so horribly wrong a chill walks up your spine with ice-glass feet.

I've seen that before, though. I survived seeing it. I know I did.

Perry glanced to the side, his profile severe and handsome, a classical statue's long nose and relaxed mouth. His eyes scorched, and he made a sudden swift movement. A greenstick crack echoed, the Trader's feet flailed, and the hellbreed dropped him like a dirty rag.

Bile whipped the back of my throat. My face stayed frozen, numb. Keep your pulse down. Training clamped down on my hindbrain; I could actually feel the pressure sinking in, hormonal balance mercilessly controlled, heartbeat and respiration struggling to escape those iron fingers.

Mikhail was always on me to keep my pulse down. I stared at the body as it slumped to the side, twitching and juddering, dusky corruption racing through its tissues. The naked, hairless chest, the ribs flared oddly to support different musculature, legs in a pair of fluttering black pants caked with something filthy and iron-smelling at the bottom. The stink of death-loosened sphincters ballooned out, exploding across the sterile unsmell, and I shivered.

Then I stilled, hoping that hadn't been a mistake.

"There's no need to fear." Was he trying to sound soothing? Perry rolled his shoulders back in their sockets, cartilage crunching. "This will only take a moment, darling mine. You can even watch."

He stood there, staring to the side, the indigo threads in the whites of his eyes swelling and retreating obscenely. As if expecting a reply.

I searched for something to say. Finally, I cleared my throat again. "Is that what's called killing the messenger?"

He actually laughed, and the horrible thing wasn't how loud it was. No, it was the sheer gleeful hatred, his lips smacking like I'd just told the world's funniest joke. The laugh cut off in midstream as more swelling crackles slid around under his pale, perfect skin.

"You could say that." He stepped daintily aside as the corpse's legs jerked. "But it's also a lesson. They shouldn't interrupt me, not while I'm with you." A sidelong glance, sipping at my face. "Come along. This should be...instructive."

What else could I do? I followed.

Down on the ground floor, twenty seconds spent passing from one iron door to another along the edge of the vast belly of the Monde. The damned paid no attention, writhing against each other while the disco ball spun slightly faster and the music took on a screaming, spiked edge. I glanced out over their sea of chains and leather and slim legs, sweet curves and the bloom of powdery rot on each of them, and something else lit up inside my head.

Hunter, Jill. You're a hunter. And these are what you kill.

Which opened up huge new vistas of contemplation I had no luxury to indulge in, because this second door gave onto a hall lit by low bloody neon tangles, crawling like worms against the wood-paneled walls, and my fingers tightened on the gun again. More doors marched down the hallway on either side, and again recognition rose to choke me. Little half-remembered scenes played out inside my skull, the woman who shared my body unlocking mental doors and throwing them open-just like Perry, his hair and clothes now dyed scarlet, chose a door on the left and flung it wide.

"Well, well, well," he chanted, mincing into the room beyond. "What have we here? Oh, look. A stray cat."

A cold spear went through me. Cat?

The last time I'd been here, these doors had all been standing open, torn-out teeth in a dead smile. Behind the one at the far end of the hall had been a table shattered to matchsticks, an iron throne demolished, and something hanging in silvery chains. Something horribly battered, and as I'd walked in the chains had rasped against each other, fat, dry-sliding tongues.

I stared down the hall. If I walked to the end, would I find a room where the table was put back together as if it had never been broken, mirror-polished and solid? And the throne at the end...would its metal spikes be repaired? Or would a new one have been brought in?

A low, terrible growl cut across the hallway. It was a cleaner sound than 'tong, and it turned another key inside the broken lock my head had become.

-pair of dark eyes, tawny sides moving, the sun picking out gold along a cat's sleek lines, and he nuzzled my throat, kissing while I shook. The crisis tore through me again, and the kiss turned to a bite, pressure applied with infinite care, the skin bruising as he sucked. The neck's erogenous in the extreme for a cat Were, and Saul- Saul? I jolted back into myself. My lips shaped the word, but I said nothing.

He was important. My pulse sped a fraction, control clamped down, and I began to get a very bad feeling about all this.

"Hold it down. She'll want to see this." A low, delighted laugh, and the wasp-buzz was a dark curtain inside my head, bulging over some horrible, unknowable shape. "Oh, this couldn't have been better if we'd planned it. Kiss?" Calling me, like a dog. "Kiss, my darling, come inside."

I hated him calling me that. Another key, another broken lock, muscles hardening as I twisted it. The effort was both physical and mental, the gem on my wrist scorching, threads of silvery pain sliding up the nerve channels all the way to my elbow.

This time, the buzzing was a curtain of shining metallic insect bodies, and the gem on my wrist vibrated as the curtain pulled aside. Dawn rose inside my head, but it was the sterile white light of a nuclear sunrise, everything inside me turning over and shattering as consciousness flooded me.

Jill. Jill Kismet. Hunter.

The memories slammed through me all at once, my entire body locking down, muscles spasming and ruthlessly controlled. Fighting in the dark, night after night spent cleansing the city streets of things like the dancing mob in the belly of this building-and Perry, pulling the strings, our bargain sealed by a scarred lip-print on my right wrist.

I hated everything about him. Everything. But that wasn't important right now. Training jacked my hormone balance, adrenaline a bright copper flood across my tongue, the bloody neon light flashing as my eyelashes fluttered. The ring was a scorch on my left hand, silver reacting to the etheric contamination filling this bruised, hollow place. I dropped back into myself with a thud, and heard Perry laugh again. A low, very satisfied chuckle, a razor against numb flesh. There was a wet sound, and the growl cut short as if a door had slammed in the middle of it.

I knew that sound. It was a Were. Probably a cat Were, too. He'd just been punched in the gut.

If there was a Were here at the Monde, he was looking at a whole lot of hurt. And if it was who I thought it was...