"You're right." I sighed. "But what's the message? And why did we get it, instead of Sabine?

We were the ones who found Sebastian's body. Did the killer simply miscalculate- figure that Sabine would find him before we did? Or was it deliberate?"

"You ask a lot of questions," Lucian said, smiling good naturedly.

I looked at him, and felt queasy. It was time to ask my second question, off the record. I was just afraid what the price of the answer would be.

"I do," I said, "and I have one more. But first, I need to clarify something."

His expression was inviting. "What's that?"

"This question pertains to Sebastian's case," I said, "but it's also somewhat personal. It's complicated-"

"And your superiors don't know what you're about to ask me." He smiled.

I felt a chill. "Not exactly-no. So I guess you could consider it a kind of personal favor. What I need to know is, if you answer, will I be indentured to you somehow? Will I owe you something?"

"You will simply owe me the courtesy of answering one of my questions-either tonight, or some other night."

I didn't trust that it could be that simple.

"Just a question?" I asked. "That's it? You ask, I answer, and then the two of us are square?"

"Exactly."

My eyes narrowed. "Do you promise not to ask something that will get me in trouble with the CORE?"

His smile widened. "Scout's honor. Or to be more accurate-necro's honor?"

I was momentarily surprised by his easy use of the epithet. Or maybe I was really surprised by my own easy use of it, a term just as debilitating as any other. It was like hearing Derrick say "fag" in relation to himself. It always made me want to jump up, to throw my own body between him and the slur, even though he'd spoken it in the first place, invoking that curious commerce of marginality and its reversals. Talking street. In the same way, unexpectedly, I wanted to protect Lucian from his own term, to shield him from some kind of necrophobia, even if I didn't understand why.

"Fine." I said. "I agree to those terms."

"You agreed the moment you walked through those doors," Lucian said. "I mean-if we're going to get technical."

His playfulness made me uneasy. Like other demons on the dark side, necromancers could be needlessly cruel; they could be bizarre, sadistic, and unpredictable. But they rarely had this sort of playful, boyish charm. It was like talking to a petulant teenager. James Dean with a penchant for the occult. All he needed was the red vinyl coat from Rebel (as Derrick always reminded me, it was something that he stole on the spur of the moment from a paramedic on set, knowing that he would be filmed in color and wanting to glow; another queer boy with his own style of magic).

"Fair enough," I said.

"Good." He lay down on the couch, putting his feet on the armrest, mere inches away from me. I stared very intently at the soles of his boots. They were deeply grooved-the kind of boots made for hiking. Did necromancers do much hiking? Must have been night hiking. In graveyards.

The fear was making my mind wander.

"My question involves the siring process," I said. "It's about blood, specifically."

"I'm not a vampire," he said, with what might have been defensiveness.

"Nobody's debating that," I replied. "But you're close to them. Nobody's asking you to divulge anything classified."

"Oh, but it's always secrets, isn't it?" He smiled. "Everything's a secret with our kind. We deal in secrets."

"We deal in different things entirely," I said, before I could help myself.

His eyes betrayed something close to pleasure. "You loathe me, don't you, Tess? Everything about me-you find it abhorrent."

"I just-don't understand it. That's all."

Lucian was silent for a moment. Then he said something odd.

"Stillbirths."

I blinked. "What?"

"That's where we come from. My 'kind,' if you want to call us that. We aren't hatched from eggs, or torn out of pregnant bodies like Macduff."

I was silent. He wasn't actually asking a question. He was giving me something, a secret, a piece of himself. It was unexpected and confusing. I just listened.

"There are nurses," he continued. "Connected. Women in the know. Not every stillbirth has the mark. It isn't the same as SIDS or being born premature and dying soon after; a shriveled, white little thing, like torn silk or"-he stuttered and laughed softly"-or a marshmallow, lying in an incubator, struggling to breathe, all tied up in tubes with some poor mother tickling his feet to keep him alive." His eyes had gone soft, elsewhere. They shone weirdly.

"But some are marked. Born dead alive. Dying to live and living to die. And after the doctor breaks the bad news, and the crying and wailing starts, and the bloody spandex gloves get tossed in the trash along with the wadded-up cotton and what's left of life-after that, sometimes a nurse will slip into the room when nobody's looking. And she'll reach into that tiny white body bag, and she'll unzip it, carefully. She'll take the small thing, bruised and purple, into her arms, and she'll wrap it in cloth of black and gold, and brush oil against its cold brow. And then she'll take it away."

His expression returned. But I imagined that a part of him was still following that dead, swaddled child along forlorn paths, along dark Homeric ways. Following, perhaps, the same route that he'd traveled as a helpless babe. I wondered what waited for him at the end of that journey. Maybe a dark city of glittering emerald, opal, and jet, languishing beneath eternal sunset. A velvet parlor, filled with spider demons and goddesses with snow-pale shoulders wearing black masks, wrapping him endlessly in ties of purple and vermillion. Or a vast room filled with crying children, where a single lightbulb swung back and forth like a pendulum on its chain, casting just enough light to see the shadow things that waited in all four corners, waited with open mouths. I shivered. I wanted to know more, even as I understood that this was a pact between us, a legend meant only for my ears. The CORE would never hear about it.

It was my secret to sleep with, and my new terror in the dark.

"Well," he said at last. "Ask your question."

I ignored the jibe. "Is it possible," I asked, "for demonic viral plasmids-blood pathogens-to be suppressed within a human body? Suppressed through psychic power? Or by some other means?"

Lucian pondered this for a moment. I couldn't tell if he was actually unsure of the answer, or just playing with me. He had that singularly annoying look that some very intelligent people have-the smug knowledge that they're one step ahead of you, no matter what you happen to be talking about.

"That's a very interesting question," he said neutrally. "I think, though, that it would be easier to show you."

Now this I hadn't been expecting.

Lucian rose. "Follow me, please, Miss Corday."

Shit. I had no other choice. I had to go with him. But what exactly was I walking into? Something told me that, whatever Lucian was about to show me, I wasn't going to like it. And I thought I was going to get home early tonight. Now, I'd probably be lucky if I got home at all.

15.

My foot struck something, and I almost yelped. But it was just a discarded box that someone had pushed against the wall. Lucian grinned at me.

"Jumpy, Miss Corday?"

"It's been a long night," I said. "I'm just looking forward to going home and curling up with a Jane Austen novel." I tried to sound slightly diffident about the possibility-not like someone who was desperately hoping to survive the night.

"Jane Austen?" Lucian raised an eyebrow. "I would have expected you to read something a bit more exciting-like true crime novels."

"I have enough excitement in my life already. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and read about ladies fussing over men and embroidery."

His eyes gleamed coldly. "Surely, Austen's work is also a pioneering aspect of the feminist movement. Her women are interested in more than embroidery."

"Of course," I said simply. "Or maybe I just like horses and intrigue."

"Intrigue-that I believe." Lucian smiled again. "You're old enough to be wary but still young enough to enjoy the danger."

"Yeah, it's a magical time in my life," I snapped. I wanted to curb the sarcasm, but I really was getting tired of this. I wanted to go home. This place was sinking into my bones, making me shudder, and I didn't like it. I didn't want to know what sorts of powers were curled up just beyond my vision, watching me, waiting.

Lucian chuckled. "Fair enough. But take it from someone who knows-someone a lot older than you, Tess. You've got to enjoy this time while you still have it. One day, you'll wake up, and the danger will still be there-but you won't want it anymore. You won't want much of anything."

Lucian stopped in front of a reinforced steel door. I expected to feel some kind of magical defense glowing around it. I didn't expect to see a numeric keypad, a magnetic card scanner, and small luminescent panel in the center of the door.

He typed a code onto the keypad, then withdrew a small metallic square from around his neck and swiped it through the card scanner. I heard a chime, and the panel began to glow a soft shade of blue.

"Surprised?" Lucian asked. "You were expecting maybe an army of skeleton warriors guarding the door?"

I shrugged. "I know that vampires are hip with technology."

"Some of them are very good computer engineers, too. You'd be surprised how many work for Microsoft."

"Actually, that doesn't surprise me at all. I'll bet a lot of necromancers work for 7-Eleven as well."

"We prefer Kinko's, actually."

He grinned, then placed his hand on the panel, fingers splayed. A light passed over his fingertips, making them glow red from the inside. It seemed like a lot of security, especially considering the fact that this room was already in the heart of a heavily guarded vampire complex. Who were they protecting it from? Other vampires?

If Lucian read my thoughts, he merely smiled, beckoning me in as the door slid open. This was how the spider beckoned in the fly.

I swallowed my fear and stepped into the room.

It wasn't a warehouse or a storage room like I expected. It was a small laboratory. I saw several microscopes in one corner-high-quality ones, too: a scanning electron microscope, or SEM; a compound microscope that was actually two scopes joined by an optical bridge; and a spectrograph for measuring light wavelengths. Our microscopy techs would be jealous. I saw what looked like an ultracentrifuge for spinning blood plasma, petri dishes, and other predictable instruments.

There was a bank of computers against one wall, their monitors displaying scans of some sort.

I looked closer. One of them was an ultrasound, although I couldn't decipher the numbers in the corner. The screen next to it looked like a CT scan of a human chest wall, with different layers showing the lungs, ribcage, and musculature. One screen was filled with symbols that I couldn't understand. Vampiric script. The language of the old demons who'd walked the earth thousands of years ago, destroying human empires and killing as they saw fit. The same script that we'd seen on the note in Sebastian's pocket. Modern vampires seldom used it, except for literature and legal contracts, or secret rituals.

"Follow me," Lucian said, crossing the lab. There was another door in the far corner, nondescript except for the number "7" painted on it in black. I only had a second to ponder that before a wave of mystical energy struck me like a blow in the face, making me stumble and step back. The door was juiced with enough power to incinerate anyone, human or vampire, who touched it. That kind of defense didn't come lightly-it required blood sacrifice, or worse.

"Unless I'm mistaken," I replied, "that sort of power is designed to keep something inside as well."

Lucian grinned. "You're not mistaken." He passed his hand across the door, and I felt the threads of power separate, felt the space around us give a peculiar twinge as it came undone.

Lucian grasped the knob and turned.

The room beyond was small, and most of its space was occupied by monitoring equipment-an EKG, blood pressure gauge, and several different screens outputting various bio readings and information. In the center of the room was a steel gurney, and lying on it was a figure. I didn't want to look too closely, but Lucian beckoned me forward with a reassuring glance-as reassuring as he could manage anyway.

"Don't worry. He's asleep-he won't mind you taking a closer peek."

I stepped forward. The figure on the gurney was a young man, probably about fifteen or sixteen, judging from the barest hint of stubble on his cheeks. He was stripped to the waist, and his pale chest was covered with electrodes. An IV was pumping something into him, although I couldn't tell what. Probably just saline solution from the look of it, or some kind of nutritional supplement.

"Touch him," Lucian said.

I gave him a look. "What?"

"Go ahead. Touch him." Lucian looked at me curiously. "What do you sense from him?"

It was an odd question. Tentatively, I reached over and put my hand on the boy's chest.

Teenager would have been a more accurate description, but he looked so small and vulnerable lying there, pale and silent, that I thought of him as more of a boy. He had short brown hair with blond highlights that fell across his eyes, which were closed. I wondered what color they were.

"Well?" Lucian leaned forward.

I could feel something from him, but the feeling was- incomplete somehow. Like I was only getting part of an audio signal, just one channel instead of two, or something that was garbled.

His skin was cool, but not cold. There was a faint warmth somewhere, a vibration beneath my fingertips, like a quiet engine humming away beneath all the bone, muscle, and flesh. And somewhere even deeper, a tang of ancient power. A fierce oldness, like dank earth, dust, copper, doom.

"He feels . . . almost like a vampire," I said at last.

"Almost?" Lucian was smiling at me. His infuriatingly amused look made me want to hit him-hard.

"I can't explain it any other way. It's like, there's a hint of vampiric essence, but something else, too. Something-I don't know"-I frowned-"I've never felt anything quite like it before. I don't know what it means."

"Would you like to?"

Such a question. I tried to keep my look neutral. "I'm not sure, to be honest."

Lucian idly studied one of the monitors. "His name is Patrick."

"Patrick?" I studied the firm jawline, the hint of developing muscle in his arms, evident beneath all the electrodes, tubes, and bandages. He looked like a Patrick, if that made any sense at all.

"Yes." Lucian leaned against the gurney. "He's a very special case. A project, you might call it."

"That doesn't make me feel any better."

He chuckled. "Would you like to know more?"

This was pissing me off-the baiting game that he was playing. Suddenly, I didn't care anymore. I turned around and scowled at him.

"Just tell me, or kill me-whatever. Do what you're going to do, but don't play games, Lucian."

"Games?" He was behind me. I hadn't seen-or felt- him move, but his breath was on the back of my neck. His fingertips grazed my shoulder. I shuddered.