She was pressed up against the wall of the reeking alley, her long silver hair thrown carelessly over one shoulder as she pushed the vampire away. He lunged at her, fangs out, but a nimbus of green energy swirled to life around her left hand, and she struck him hard across the face. The air between them skewed, and the vampire spun backward, dropping to one knee on the ground.

"Bitch!" His shaggy hair was matted with blood. He wasn't quite newly minted undead, but he was still relatively inexperienced-maybe only ten, twenty years since the "change," and still feeling the disorientation. He hadn't yet adopted the cold, dispassionate manner of the ancient undead-the terrifying absence of expression that signaled how bored they were with killing you.

"Oh, please." The older woman rolled her eyes. "I've been called a lot worse in my time, by things a lot more distressing than you, night child. Don't try to compete." She flashed a quick glance to the opposite corner of the alley, where a younger woman was doing her best to fend off two more vampires. "Tess, how are you doing?"

One of them struck the girl across the face, raking nails across her exposed cheek. She winced, then kicked him in the stomach, channeling enough force into the blow to spin him almost completely around. Then she kneed him in the groin, while disarming the vampire who was lunging at her from behind.

"Oh, just fine, Meredith. Things are-" She elbowed the second vampire in the mouth, and he swore, spitting out blood. "Peachy!"

"Good to hear, love." Meredith smoothed her leather jacket, then withdrew the athame from her belt. It was a very old blade-peerlessly crafted, with a pearled hilt and a single piece of flawless rose quartz encrusted on the guard. Runes swirled along the edge of the blade, glowing softly, like small stars.

"Let's finish this, shall we? I've an early morning meeting tomorrow, and I do hate to arrive in a bad mood."

The vampire sprang at her, pushing off the ground with the balls of his feet like a leopard. He flew through the air. For a moment, he seemed to hover in the darkness, the moonlight glinting against his pale skin and red-rimmed eyes. He was hopelessly lost in the hunger-acting stupidly, carelessly. Mages knew that hunger, too, although it was of a different quality. That feeling of being so locked within a spell, so filled with the power, that you could do anything- be anything. The thirst for that warm, cleansing fire that burned through your veins, a million times more powerful than the purest heroin. The euphoria of spellcasting.

Meredith skewered him in one smooth movement, reaching up with her athame and cleanly slicing open his chest. The iron whispered across his flesh, within him, snnnick, like a garment tearing, and then blood and viscera spilled out of his ruined form as he crumpled to the ground, screaming.

"I'm sorry," Meredith said softly. Her eyes betrayed no expression as she drew the athame across his neck, swift and clean. The blade was sharp enough to partially decapitate him.

The vampire stared at her, confused, as if she'd just said something strange or funny. His left hand spasmed, and then the light vanished from his eyes. His head slumped forward.

Meredith wiped her blade-not on the vampire's clothes, but on the edge of her own jacket.

Even now, she wasn't willing to defile a fallen body.

She turned, about to say something to Tess- -turned, but didn't see the fourth vampire, the one who'd been crouching in the deep shadows of the alley, waiting. He held a long, heavy chain coiled between his fingers, making little clinks as he shifted position amid the garbage and scraps of newspaper. Too quiet for even Meredith to hear.

"Tess, are you-"

He was behind her in an instant. Tess looked up from her melee, about to respond to her teacher's voice, but terror froze her. She saw the chain glimmer, as if suffused with moonlight, as he wrapped it around Meredith's neck.

The older woman's eyes widened, just for a second- -then he pulled the chain taught with a barely audible snap, like a book slamming shut, or an ornament dropping to the floor-the sound of life fleeing from its warm, huddled cell, the whisper of a soul straying- -and Meredith's head snapped sideways.

The light left her eyes.

Tess screamed.

She raised both of her hands, and power-dark, graceful, obliterating-poured through her, out of her, in all directions, like a flood.

And she was gone.

The timecode on the video screen recorded a date: May 18, 2004.

The DVD ejected. Carefully, a hand reached out and placed it back on the shelf filled with security footage, stacks and stacks of DVDs and VHS cassettes, going back-lord, who knew how far? Sometimes it seemed as if the CORE's records stretched back to the very moment of creation, the parting of darkness and light. Antediluvian.

The flood.

Eyes stared thoughtfully at the blank screen.

"Damn."

So I was smoking. I was smoking in the west parking lot behind the lab, in that shady spot where I used to go with Derrick to eat Snickers and complain about men. Only this time, I'd purposely evaded Derrick so that I could be alone.

Alone and smoking. I felt like someone from a lesbian pulp novel. Derrick showed me one called Lavender Love Rumble once, and I almost choked on my milkshake from laughing so hard.

Now here I was, furtively tearing open my pack of Dun-hills, momentarily savoring the brush of the golden foil as it crumbled between my fingers. You couldn't get Marlboros in Vancouver, which shouldn't have mattered-since technically I wasn't a smoker-but Derrick didn't know that sometimes I snuck a pack or two into my purse when we were visiting Seattle. I enjoyed the oral fixation more than the nicotine high, but like any girl who'd once been a bit heavy in her teens, I knew how to smoke. Derrick had never mastered the art, which led him to believe that he was a failure as a gay man. I explained to him that he only would have been a failure in the 1950s, but he was still pretty inconsolable.

I held the smoke in my lungs, enjoying the papery feel of it, the sudden tug and smooth, velvety shock of the cigarette doing its work. The wind outside picked up a bit, and I cupped one hand around the glowing cherry, using the other to pull my jacket closer around me. Just call me Beebo Brinker.

"Can I bum a smoke, Corday?"

I looked up, half expecting to see one of the lab techs, or maybe even Selena.

Instead, I saw Lucian Agrado.

I took a step back. "What the hell are you doing here?"

He raised his arms in a gesture of detente. "It's a parking lot, Tess. I don't need a keycard to get in."

As soon as he said the word "keycard," my eyes narrowed.

"You son of a bitch."

He stared at me. "What?"

"You know what, so don't what me, Lucian-" I gestured angrily with the cigarette, wishing I had my athame. "You stole my keycard!"

His lip curled a bit. "Are you accusing me of something?"

"I'm accusing you of being a big skanky pain in my ass. Now give me the keycard before I call security."

Now it was his turn to look mollified. "No need for that. I didn't steal anything, Tess. You dropped your card when we were in Patrick's room." He reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew the familiar plastic square.

I snatched it from him. "Oh, I dropped it, did I? Maybe I dropped it after you grabbed me from behind-which is cheating, by the way."

"I didn't know that we had rules and an end zone."

"You mean a blueline and hashmarks-this is Vancouver, after all. Even necromancers have to love the Canucks."

"Well, Trevor Linden's been playing for so long-he must have made some type of pact with the dark forces. You've got to stand up and salute that kind of commitment to necromancy."

I laughed-I couldn't help myself. "You know, when you're not holding court at your psychotic vampire club and scaring the hell out of me, you're almost halfway charming." I exhaled. Very Garbo. "Not that I care."

"Right. So can I?"

"What?"

"Bum a smoke." He grinned. "You know, you have to watch out for the early onset of Alzheimer's. I hear it's an epidemic among mages."

I stared at him. God, he was cocky. Wearing his svelte black coat, with blue jeans and those same army surplus boots, like he'd just gotten off work from the night shift at Costco. Like he wasn't a death-dealer.

Like you aren't dreaming about him.

I dutifully handed him a cigarette. He gestured for the lighter, but I just smiled.

"You're the one with all the badass power. Why do you need a lighter?"

"I don't like fire." His eyes darkened as he looked at me. "Neither do you, Tess."

Just for a moment, I felt his mind brush against mine- not an immense, crushing force, like Sabine's ancient consciousness, but a kind of feathery touch. Like the way your lover puts a hand on your back, ever so slightly, and leads you into a room, or the way a man sometimes helps you zip up a dress without saying anything, even though you know he's pleased. I felt it like that, and the surprising tenderness of it, the finger-brush-sway of contact, was a million times worse than Sabine's invasive power. It was an intimate rape, and I recoiled from it.

"You-" All of my shields were up instantly. I was already drawing power to myself, so much that it shimmered around me like a heat-haze, clumsy and visible but nonetheless reassuring. "You do not get to say things like that to me, Lucian. It's none of your fucking business what I'm afraid of, so stay the hell out of my mind unless I give you a goddamn written invitation. Are we clear?"

He looked confused. "I just want to know why, Tess. Darkness and fire."

I blinked. "What?"

"It's always darkness and fire with you. That's the image I get whenever I see you"-he glanced at my hand, still touching the cigarette-"whenever we touch. It's like I'm drowning in it, and so are you."

Darkness and fire.

"You can't just crack open my life and expect to read about every little neurosis. You're not entitled to that kind of-access."

"I don't want to do that, Tess." He gave a weird sort of shrug. "I just want to know why you're-like you are."

"And how's that?"

His face was a mystery. "Sad. Powerful. Angry."

I just stared at him. I didn't know what to say.

"Drowning," he said. "And it all comes back to darkness and fire. But I don't know why."

"Because it's none of your business."

"It's not about business." His eyes narrowed, but his expression wasn't necessarily angry-just strangely committed. "You're not a job, Tess, you're not business. I'm talking about the real you-"

"Okay, crazy stalker man"-I took another step back- "you don't know the first thing about the 'real me.' You're not my friend. The only thing I really know about you is that you scare the hell out of me."

"But I haven't done anything."

"You don't have to-you exist, Lucian. That's enough."

It was his turn to look pissed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Crap. Let's just annoy the powerful necromancer, shall we?

"Whatever. It doesn't matter."

"Oh no, I get it." He scowled. "It's not me that you're frightened of, it's my kind. That's what you meant to say."

I shrugged. "Your words, not mine."

"Well, I might as well oblige, then. Wouldn't want to disappoint you."

Right-this is exactly the type of scenario you were trying to avoid, Tess. You've taunted Jim Stark, and now he's going to turn you into a zombie.

Lucian extended his hand palm-outward. I felt something- a kind of tug, similar to the feeling of the smoke in my lungs. But this was metaphysical. A coil of green energy blossomed between his fingers. It looked almost like a votive candle, only elemental flame wasn't supposed to look like that. And there was no heat. Just a dispassionate coldness, a sharp edge to the power that made me want to turn away. Necroid materia. I strengthened my shields, but ultimately I wasn't sure how to fend off this sort of attack.

We knew so little about each other. Mages and necromancers were opposite sides of the same occult rune, positive and negative forces whose tension basically propelled the universe along.

Not in a creepy Zoroastrian way, but in a much more precisely physical and ontological sense.

It was basic thermodynamics.

"You're so scared of my power," he said-but I was more scared of his face. It was entirely without feeling. "Don't you want to see it?"

"Let's not do this, Lucian," I said. Crap-where was Selena, or even Marcus? Someone must be feeling these vibes. Why wasn't anyone coming to investigate?

"Haven't you ever thought to ask yourself"-the blossom in his hand swirled, grew, becoming a tongue of impossible flame-"if I was afraid of your power? If 'my kind' isn't even more terrified of yours?"

"The truce between your side and ours has held since the Middle Ages, Lucian. Longer than the vampire pact." I kept my movements small, trying to smooth out my defensive energies so that they weren't so blazingly obvious. "Since Busirayne gave up his undead armies. Since Archimago turned to dust in his crypt. Storybook stuff. That's not going to change tonight, with us-is it?"

Sure, I knew the stories. Wild necromancers who raised corpse armies, plundering the ancient graveyards of the Britons, Celts, and Saxons. Templars and Knight-Hospitallers who fought on the other side, their cruciform broadswords gleaming with sunstruck materia and holy power. Who were we? Just two people in a parking lot, with our borrowed power and our forgotten legacies.

"Who are we to do this?" I demanded. "To change things?" I wasn't even sure what I was talking about anymore. Necromancy? Desire? Sex?

"Who are we, Lucian?" I asked.

"Close your eyes."

I felt my heart beating faster. He had more power than me- that much was obvious. All I understood about necromantic magic was that it was viral, destructive, trafficking in curses and macrophages. It was about unraveling, obliterating, separating chains of DNA, tearing phosphate from sugar, guanine from adenine. He could rip me to shreds, and what could I do to stop him?

"What-"

"Close your eyes," he repeated.

I don't know why I listened. It wasn't trust, or even fear, but something else. But I did as he asked. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, he was gone.

I was silent for a while, trying to get my trembling under control. Finally, I finished my cigarette and went back inside.

I never said anything to Derrick.

The MCD firearms expert was a short, plump guy named Linus, who wore horn-rimmed glasses and always seemed to be chewing on a wad of gum. People who didn't know him very well often thought that he was clinically depressed, but he actually just had an exquisitely deadpan sense of humor. He would sound positively bored as he described the annihilative power of an AK-47, or ask me what I wanted for lunch after immediately demonstrating what a hollow-point bullet could do to a human femur.

At present, he was test firing a gun into a water tank. That way, he could study the rifling marks that the bore of the gun imprinted on the bullet-what were called "lands" and "grooves." I knew very little about ballistics, not just because I was relatively untrained in the area, but because I hated guns. I always had. I'd trust my athame before I trusted a nine any day.