"What-she's alone in this building, waiting for us? In what dimension does that make sense?"

There was a sudden crash. It sounded like breaking glass.

"Aunt Cassie?" Mia rushed past us.

"Mia, no!" I drew my athame. "Shit!"

I saw Mia disappear into an office at the end of the corridor. The door was ajar-no, wait. The door was ripped off its hinges.

"Come on," I said grimly.

Mia was standing just inside the office-not saying anything or even moving a muscle, just staring. She had the right to be surprised. The office looked like a combat zone. The window in the far wall was shattered, and the ground was littered with papers. Some of the papers were splashed with blood. A filing cabinet in the far corner had been overturned, and a gutted computer was lying on the floor, its monitor smashed.

The only intact piece of furniture in the room was a steel desk, and a body was draped across it. Not a human body. It was bent at a horrible angle-its back must have been broken-and blood was quietly pooling around it. I saw a rib protruding, glistening white, and turned to Derrick.

"Get her out of here."

"Aunt Cassie!" Mia dodged me and ran forward. "Are you-" Her eyes got very wide as she got closer to the demon's body, and she put a hand on her mouth. Derrick tried to grab her, but she was already on her knees, retching.

I took a closer look at the body. Black eyes and detachable jaws, although one row of fangs had been ripped clear off. Vailoid demon. Jesus. Someone had done this to a Vailoid? I leaned forward, then froze.

There was another body lying behind the desk. A middle-aged woman wearing a denim dress that was covered in blood. Cassandra. Oh God.

"Derrick!" I didn't turn. "Get Mia out of here. Now!"

"What? What did you see?" Mia lunged forward, but Derrick managed to grab her this time.

"You don't want to look, sweetie," he said.

"No! Get off me! I have to-" She strained against his grip. Derrick wasn't exactly a heavyweight, but he was still twice the size of Mia. "No! I have to see! I-" She sobbed.

"Oh God, is it my aunt? Oh God-"

"Let's just get out of here," Derrick said, trying to soothe her. "We'll wait for Tess in the car.

I promise you don't want to see this-"

There was a large puncture wound in Cassandra's chest, and her face was covered in blood. Her gray hair was plastered to her forehead, and I saw her glasses, still dangling from that silly chain-smashed.

I didn't get it. Had she done this to the Vailoid? Had they both killed each other?

"Shit," Derrick whispered.

"Don't touch anything," I said. I stared at the broken window. Whoever did this was here a minute ago. We'd heard the glass break. They could very well still be in this room. I didn't feel anyone's presence, though. I just felt sick.

I walked over to the window, carefully avoiding the blood. Slipping on a pair of plastic gloves from my purse, I studied the broken glass in the window frame. Our lab techs would have to study it, but I was pretty sure of what they'd find. The stress marks in the fractured glass would be moving outward, which meant that the window had been broken from the inside.

I carefully leaned forward. The window looked onto the parking lot. Lying in a crumpled heap on the pavement below was a second Vailoid demon.

That didn't make sense at all.

"Two Vailoid demons," I said softly. "They both kill Cassandra, and then-what happens? Somebody kills the assassins? "

"Whoever it was," Derrick said, "they moved fast. You heard the breaking glass. The killer was here no more than a minute ago."

"So why didn't he-or she-attack us? Why throw a demon out the window, and then leave the other body for us to find?"

"Ah, Tess-" Derrick glanced at Mia. "Maybe we should figure out the forensics later."

Shit. I was the worst human being imaginable. Mia was staring at her aunt's body, and I was trying to process the crime scene right in front of her.

She wasn't crying. I could feel her standing next to me, but she wasn't crying. Her face was white. There was power-a fierce power-curling off her skin, flowing around her like smoke. This time I could feel it.

Mia wasn't moving. I put my hand on her shoulder. "I know this is horrible, sweetheart, but-"

"Don't talk to me," she hissed.

"I-" I closed my eyes. "Mia, I don't know what to say."

"I just want to go home." Her voice was numb. She didn't even look at Cassandra's body. She walked out of the office.

"Take Mia into the lobby," I told Derrick, "and call it in. Selena might already be on her way, but we don't want to be accused of not following protocol. I'll seal off the lab and try to make sure that nothing else gets contaminated."

"Tess-" he began.

"I know." I closed my eyes. "We are very screwed."

"We had no choice."

"We could have remanded Mia to CORE custody. Could have assigned her a bodyguard. Could have done a million other official things."

He stared at me. "None of which would have really protected her. You know that we did the right thing, Tess."

I shook my head. "It doesn't matter. I'm past the point of caring. Marcus can do whatever he wants, but I won't stop working on this case." I met his eyes. "We aren't just involved, Derrick. This case is our lives now. We're right in the middle."

"Our favorite place to be."

He gave me a sad smile, then walked out of the office.

I stared at Cassandra's body. Her secrets were inviolate now. She'd never be able to talk to me. I'd never get my answers.

It just wasn't fair.

As the unmarked black car sped us silently back to the lab-the CORE had its own emergency service-I felt myself slipping in and out of consciousness. Derrick stared out the window, saying nothing, possibly scanning the psychic airwaves for any kind of disturbance that might follow us. Mia was crumpled against my right shoulder, and I held her like you might hold a fragile seedpod, something ancient and weatherworn and indescribably precious.

She could break like a brittle amphora; she could blow away in a flood of black petals.

Her breath was warm against my neck, and its regularity assured me that, at last, she was asleep. Not a fulfilling sleep, but the cruel and utter blankness of dead sleep, the slumber of the exhausted. Like falling into a pool of morbid energy that penetrated every cell, blasting memory away.

I kept drifting. I would start to slip away, then jolt awake abruptly, remembering to hold her, remembering that she was there. For now, she was safe and she was in my arms, under my aegis of protection, however useless that might be.

"Just sleep," Derrick finally said.

"Mmhh?"

"It's okay." He kept looking out the window. "The AlexFraserBridge is all clogged up-we probably won't reach the lab for a good twenty minutes. She's out like a light, so you might as well get some sleep while you can."

"Could say the same about you."

He shook his head. "Don't be contrary. Just do what I say for once. I'm here, and I'll watch out for the both of you."

I smiled and touched his arm. "Yeah, you always do."

"Yeah." His smile was tight.

That was all I needed. I slipped down, through the skein of memories and half-felt impressions that Freud called the primary process, into the deeper stained glass of true dreaming. I kept falling, through every layer of hell, into the endless winter that Lucifer himself might have been trapped in, bisected by cruel ice-if he existed at all. If Earth itself wasn't just the underworld. All of it. Everywhere, and all of us at the helm, with no exit in sight.

Then something unexpected came out of the dark. Lucian Agrado.

He wore the same outfit that I'd seen back at the club, torn jeans and black boots, only he'd discarded the shirt now. His tattoos lay in startling relief against dark skin. They seethed, the Devil's calligraphy, like some curse sent down through the ages by a mad Egyptian sorcerer, and all I could do was stare at them. Vampiric script crawled across his hands and wrists-I couldn't read it. Just above his right shoulder was the ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail. And below his left clavicle-surprisingly-a white lily. So white against his skin, lighter than any conventional pigment or tincture could possibly achieve.

And I knew, in that moment, what the lily meant. That patch of skin-the place where the shadows had marked him. Necromancers were part-human, like us, but the other part belonged to something else. A room with a swinging lightbulb, where shadows with mouths waited. A city of black basalt, without light. He'd been sired and reborn, not like a vamp, but through some other kind of ritual. It was always about power. He belonged to those forces now, the hidden place where necroid materia came from, like a mote in the eye of the visible world-but what had they given him in return? I stared at it, the cruel mark that would never change, but also a last fragment of his mortal life, an impossibility of muscle, cordage, blood.

I imagined him crying out, terrified, dying, as penumbral claws, nails of moonlight, tore through his major subclavian artery, the push of blood, how sweet the sting. And ekphrasis. Love. The flame and the fracture of dying, only to live again-different. To unknot your old life, undo the ancient ligature and fashion something newer, darker, beyond sin and above any sort of terrestrial judgment. Or maybe he didn't remember, after all. Maybe he'd never known anything but those black swaddling bands, the kiss of the dark.

"What are you doing in my dream?" I asked him.

Lucian reached out, smiling, and touched me on the mirror image of that spot-just beneath my right clavicle. His fingers pressed against the vein, and I felt the vapors of power swirl through them, beneath my skin, calling to my blood in a kind of lingua hema that no part of me could resist. Thrombocytes, leukocytes, erythrocytes, all stirred beneath that awful touch, the arterial system suddenly aflame, the blood-rich organs-liver, kidneys, spleen-swelling, en-gorging, fruits about to burst. The pain was indescribable; the joy was evil, ineluctable.

My blood was boiling. I felt something swelling to the surface. The flesh that he touched was bubbling, seething.

I saw the outlines of the lily. I felt it blooming as it moved through each layer of skin, the subdermal structures, the papillae, the tiny hairs on my neck and shoulders that stood right on end.

"What is this?" I stared at him. "Do I belong to you now?"

Lucian shook his head.

"You belong to nothing, Tess. You don't exist."

This close, he was like gravity. His smell was oaken, timeworn, overpowering. I touched his mark, the mirror image of mine, and the pattern rippled beneath my fingers like a charm. He said nothing, but his eyes were wide and sharp. I pressed my lips against the lily. I inhaled it, kissing, and his skin was hot. Feverish. The hairs on his neck and shoulders were darker, more visible, but still soft. Silk. Ashes.

"If I kiss you," I said, "will this all end?"

He smiled. "You're always trying to read the text."

"Fine." I could smell his breath now, see how soft his lips were. Men's lips could be so fucking sexy, mostly because they never paid any attention to them. His cheeks were smooth, but the dark hair on his arms and chest hinted at something more masculine, adult, not the androgynous youth that we always associated with vampires. Sabine had selected him for that very reason-because he was a man. The trail of soft hair, starting just above his navel and vanishing at his waist, made me curious. Hadn't I always wanted this, in one way or another?

An affair with a death-dealer, my hypocrite self, my ethical opposite?

And how fucked up was that?

I'd been created by a demon, born from an act of rape, and now I was about to do something completely forbidden.

"I guess I'll try anything-" I said. "Once."

I kissed him, and that was an end. The beginning of an end.

17.

I was sitting in a small interrogation chamber deep within the CORE crime lab. It was the same scene that I'd witnessed hundreds of times before-a suspect getting grilled by Selena and another officer, sometimes a telepath-only I was the one in the hot seat this time. And it was a very uncomfortable chair. I was seated at a small table, with both Marcus and Selena staring at me from the other side. They'd already questioned Derrick, but they wouldn't let me see him. There was a sheet of two-way glass on the other side of the room, and I had no idea who was standing beyond it, watching. Maybe two agents poised to arrest me. Maybe something worse.

I was trying to keep my mind on the matter at hand, but I kept flashing back to that dream.

God. My subconscious had a really sick sense of humor sometimes. I also hadn't mentioned my gaffe with the lost keycard. I'd convinced myself that it was a minor fuck-up, and I could just convince Becka to encode me a new one. She owed me for recommending a nontoxic hair dye.

Mia had been taken to the small common area where lab techs and OSIs usually chatted, smoked, and ate dinner. She was being watched at all times. I hadn't seen her in almost an hour, and I could only imagine what might have been going through her mind. Cassandra was gone. Her only living relative, that we knew of, was dead. Now she had absolutely no one to take care of her. Except me.

Selena motioned to the glass of water sitting next to me. "Have some more. You're not exactly at a hundred percent tonight, and we need you to be thinking clearly."

"Yes." Marcus glared at me. "You wouldn't want to leave anything crucial out of your story."

Ignoring him, I took a drink. If they'd put some kind of sedative or truth serum in my glass, it was well hidden.

"All right," Selena said. "Tell us again. Be as specific as possible, and try to remember everything that you can about last night."

I nodded.

"Mia called your cell phone-we pulled the phone records, and confirmed that a call was placed from Derrick Siegel's cell at 10:28 p.m. last night. The call lasted for approximately three minutes. So what did you talk about?"

"I spoke with Derrick first," I said. "He told me that Mia had called him at home, and that she was worried. Her aunt-"

"Cassandra Polanski?"

"Yes, that's her. Mia said that Cassandra was supposed to pick her up after work, but she was two hours late."

"And Mia was nervous about this."

"See"-Marcus flashed me a meaningful look-"this is where I get confused. You were removed from Mia Polanski's case, were you not, Tess?"

I started to protest, but then thought the better of it. "Yes," I said simply.

"You were instructed, by your director, not to speak with Mia Polanski or to come within a mile of her. So when Mia called you, your first instinct should have been to notify one of your superiors-either Selena or myself-and explain what was going on. Isn't that right?"