"Games are all we have, you and I." His voice curled along the length of my skin, like smoke. I could smell it. I wanted to scream from the weight of it, but I stood my ground. I closed my eyes briefly, then swallowed, concentrating on the earth beneath my feet. The power of the earth-the ancient steadiness of it. My senses linked me to it, all that geothermal energy slumbering just underneath me. I felt it flow through the soles of my boots, through the tendons of my legs, into my blood.

Mages and necromancers drew power from the same place-just through very different methods. We might even be equals in a fight. I doubted it, though. He was older, more experienced.

Less human?

"Is this the part where Sabine jumps out of a closet and slits my throat?" I asked. "So that you can both get off on watching me die?"

Lucian took a step back, smiling. "Sabine doesn't know that we're here. If she knew, then your life would be forfeit."

I glared at him. "So you deliberately endangered my life by showing me this?"

"You want answers, don't you?"

"Tell me-what you need to tell me," I said slowly.

Lucian chuckled, but he was already standing on the other end of the room. I heard the laughter in my ear, regardless. I resisted the urge to run.

"You're strong," he said simply. "Maybe stronger than you even realize. I find that refreshing, Tess."

I stared at a space above his shoulder, but said nothing. Damage control. Don't do anything else to piss him off- just let him spin his story, and then get out of here. See another day. It sounded like a plan.

"Patrick is a special case," he repeated. "A pureblood. He's a potential successor to the magnate of the city."

As far as I knew, the magnate controlled-well, just about everything within Vancouver's city limits. If normal vampires were scary as hell, then the magnate was a walking nightmare with fangs.

"Potential?" I asked.

"There are others like him-children sired by the magnate. We won't know who'll be chosen until the time of succession is at hand."

"And what happens to the ones who aren't chosen?"

Lucian merely looked at me.

"Gotcha." I frowned.

Lucian returned his attention to the boy on the gurney. "Patrick," he said, "was sired at ten years old. He is now sixteen. "

"I don't get it." This, at least, was true.

"The siring process began when Patrick was ten, but it still isn't finished." He smiled. "The boy has been- gestating-for six years now. When the time comes, if he truly is chosen, then he will be given the grace of the magnate. He will ascend and absorb a part of the old magnate- just as the magnate once absorbed a part of their sire, and so on, for the last ten thousand years. In that moment, he will gain access to the history of the bloodline. The collective memory of vampire civilization."

I took a moment to process this. "So-right now, he's- what-absorbing power? Sucking up memories?"

Lucian nodded. "If he's chosen, then the memories will be unlocked. If not, then they will vanish with him." He cocked his head. "The boy will have many abilities-if he is chosen. The process fortifies his body; much like you might age a bottle of wine, he is being aged, infused with the power and experience of a creature thousands of years older than him."

"How does it work, then?" I asked. "How do they slow the process?" I stared at him suddenly. "Are you part of it? Is that why you work for them? Some kind of truce so that you can combine your powers?"

Lucian kept his expression to himself. "They find my powers useful, yes-and I find their company useful."

"Their protection, you mean."

"It's complicated, Tess."

He gestured to one of the monitors. I saw what looked like a single helix revolving on the screen, elegant in its simplicity.

"RNA," I said.

He nodded. "Vampirism is a retrovirus. It starts out as RNA, and then uses reverse transcription to turn itself into DNA. The same as AIDS."

"I get that," I said, a trifle annoyed.

"Then it's amazing that you haven't figured out the connection yet," Lucian replied, giving me an amused look. "AIDS can't be stopped, but it can be slowed. Drugs like AZT worked for a while on humans, before the side effects became evident. Before you discovered that your drug companies were selling a 'cure' at least half as destructive as the disease itself, profiting from the sick and the dying. Vampirism is just a retrovirus, like any other. It can't be stopped, or reversed, but it can be slowed to a crawl."

"With drugs?"

"They help, yes. But most of it comes from power." He tapped his head. "You know what kind I'm talking about."

"The sire can slow the process. So I've heard."

"Only the most powerful of our kind can do it-for just this purpose. And nobody in the city has more power than the magnate."

I frowned. "So he-what-telepathically broadcasts his mojo to all of these sleeping kids? I don't get it."

Lucian blinked. "Mojo?"

"It's a technical term."

"Ah." He nodded. "It's not telepathic. The magnate leaves a mark on the potentials, and the mark changes their body chemistry. Slows everything down. Here, I'll show you."

Lucian pushed down the blanket covering Patrick's lower half, and I saw a curious mark just above his left hip. It was vampiric script, and I didn't need to touch it to know that it was infused with power. I could feel the energy rippling from it-the kind of power that I didn't want anywhere near me. I took a step backward.

He smiled. "Are you afraid of the mark, Tess?"

"I'm cautious," I said. "They're not the same thing."

"Of course not." Lucian pushed the blanket up. "So now you know. The siring process can be delayed, if the sire himself is powerful enough."

"Could someone other than the magnate do it?"

His eyes gleamed. "Possibly. But without the magnate's permission, and the approval of the council, such an experiment would be-inadvisable."

"I still don't have all of my answers," I said. "Vampirism isn't the same as magic. The two follow similar biological processes, but they still aren't the same. I don't understand how a mage-" I blinked, realizing that I'd been about to tell Lucian everything. Was he compelling me? Or was I just incredibly stupid?

He looked at me expectantly.

"I don't understand," I said, concentrating on every word, "how someone who isn't a vampire might do this."

"Is that your mystery?" Lucian looked mildly interested. His eyes were like a cat's-you could never tell when he was truly engaged by something. "Has one of your kind done something like this?" He swallowed. "Or someone like me, perhaps?"

It was my turn to be aloof. "It's complicated."

"But it has to do with this girl, no? The same girl that you think Sebastian was looking for before he was killed?"

I sighed. "Yes."

Lucian regarded me amiably. If he could sense my moral conundrum, he said nothing about it. After communing so long with the forces of death, was his brain very different from mine?

Did he perceive the world in a way that I could never understand, a universe filled with bizarre smells, flashes of color, sensations, rich tastes, and insatiable desires? At the moment, his frustration seemed all too human.

"What are you thinking?" he asked.

I swallowed. "That I'd like to leave now."

He laughed-a rich and terrifying sound. It wasn't the sort of thing that needed an accompanying statement. The laughter itself was his reply. And I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just stared at the wall uncomfortably. As much as I wanted to learn more about this mysterious boy, and the siring process, I didn't want to overextend my hand. I was barely holding a pair of deuces anyway, and Lucian was the House. The House always wins.

I looked once more at Patrick. He seemed so small and vulnerable lying there. Who knew if he'd make the cut-if he'd earn the honor of being the new vampire monarch. If he failed, he died. It was pretty simple. The very thought of it made me weak with anger, but I was powerless to do anything. These were vampires, and this was their culture. Patrick had been a human child once, but he wasn't anymore. His life, as he'd once known it-playing with the family dog, eating ice cream, riding his bike through the neighborhood streets-that was all over. I couldn't do anything for him, but I didn't want to leave him either.

You can't see her.

I remembered my mother's voice-her hand holding me back as I tried to grab the hospital curtain.

Honey, she's- And then I remembered my mother crying. I'd never seen her cry before, and it frightened me. It wasn't sobbing-just a strange convulsion of her face, almost graceful. Almost beautiful. The tears slid down her cheeks, but her grip remained on my shoulder. I knew that she could hold me-she just couldn't protect me. Not anymore.

Eve has-she's been very badly-hurt- Burned.

Burned beyond recognition, beyond humanity. I wouldn't recognize her. Nothing but a calcined body, the shadow of the girl I used to play with, a cruel darkness that now lay dying (or dead) on some cold hospital gurney, her blackened digits- their nerves forever eradicated-being snapped off with shears like unwieldy branches. They pruned her annihilated body like a sapling in winter, and she never knew that she was losing fingers and toes while she slept on, darkly and dreamlessly.

You shouldn't see her. You wouldn't want to.

I suddenly hated Lucian-hated vampires and the necromancers who acted as their smiling daylight faces, not for being killers, but simply for following their own demonic natures. I hated that there were demons in the world, and mages to deal with them, and others-like Lucian-in between. Sometimes I just wanted things to be black-and-white. But that was never going to happen.

All I could do was protect Mia, before-like Patrick- she became a lost cause.

16.

I had to sit in the front seat of my car, gripping the wheel, for about fifteen minutes until I'd calmed down enough to actually drive somewhere. The adrenaline was still pumping through my system, and I was torn between the desire to smash the windshield or throw up all over the upholstery. Maybe I'd just do both.

Lucian was hiding something-a big something. He was a politician, after all, and it was his job to protect the interests of the vampire community. But how was Mia implicated? She was the key, but what the hell was the lock? I could feel a world-class headache coming on. I was also hungry, which was odd, since my stomach should have been turning itself inside out.

There was certainly no way that I'd be getting to sleep anytime soon. My body was still vibrating. I checked my watch: 10:30 p.m. God, I'd been in there for only an hour. It had felt like an eternity.

It also didn't help that Lucian Agrado-a skilled necromancer, and possibly one of the most dangerous creatures I'd ever met in my life-happened to look like a hot, thirty something Latino guy. Sure, he was deeply into the dark arts, but I was also a red-blooded city girl whose last memory of getting laid involved a value-priced bottle of Ruffino Chianti and an investment banker named Rog.

Great-sorry, Mia, can't save you now, Mama's too busy getting her freak on with a death-dealer. God. Could I be more selfish?

My cell phone rang, scaring me half to death.

I flipped it open. "This better not be a demon."

Derrick cleared his throat on the other end. "I do happen to be part-demon. Will that work for you?"

"This isn't a nine hundred number, hon. What's going on?"

"How did the meeting go?"

I swallowed around the bile in my throat. "Words come to mind-like abject terror. I almost lost it a few times, but I managed to get through the evening."

"Well, I hate to add to your stress-mountain, but we've got a bit of an interesting situation right now."

I closed my eyes. "Interesting means bad, right?"

"I'm not sure yet. I'll let Mia explain."

My heart seized. "What? She's with you?"

The phone crackled for a moment, then I heard Mia's voice. "Tess?"

"Mia, what's wrong? Are you hurt? What's going on?" Lord-I sounded like a hyperactive mom. I sounded like my mom.

"I'm fine, Tess. Don't have a stroke."

I suppose I deserved that. "Okay. I'm good. Just tell me what's up. What are you doing in the city this late at night?" I frowned. "On a school night?"

Mia chuckled. "Yeah-'cause I'm allowed to watch demon carnage, but you wouldn't want me to screw up my social studies report on John A. MacDonald."

She wasn't panicking-that was a good thing. I allowed myself to relax a bit. "Just tell me what's going on, okay?"

I heard Derrick say something inaudible in the background. It sounded almost like "cherry sundae."

My eyes widened. "Are you at Denny's?"

"Yeah," Mia replied. "I was going to meet Derrick at the apartment, but he thought it might not be safe. So we're at the Denny's on Thurlow and Davie."

"But what are you doing-"

"I had a dentist's appointment, and my aunt drove me into the city on her way to work." Mia paused. "I know I should have called you earlier, but I was still a bit freaked out from yesterday. So I just sort of walked around-"

"Excuse me?" I was trying to keep the righteous mom anger out of my voice. "You almost got killed by a demon yesterday, and now you're-what-shopping? Doing a bit of sightseeing downtown?"

"Chill out. I've been careful. I spent most of the day at the library." I knew that she was smiling on the other end of the phone. "You know-big public place, lots of books and security guards?"

"You still should have called us, Mia."