"And what agreement would that be?" I scowled. "Oh wait, don't tell me-it's complicated. God, I don't even need to be talking to you, I just need an annoying 8-Ball that gives me shitty, half-assed answers all the time."

Even so-the thing about the hashbrown patty was kind of funny. He almost had a sense of humor.

Lucian sighed. "I'm here to help, Tess. Honest. After you came to visit me, I became very interested in this case of yours. I want to figure out what happened to Sebastian, just like you do."

I tightened my grip on the gun. "I don't believe you. I don't believe you're capable of caring about another life- even one of your vampire playmates. You're in this because you've got something riding on it, but I don't know what that is yet."

"You see conspiracies everywhere, but I'm only trying to help you. I came here tonight to warn you."

My eyes narrowed. "No shit."

"Is it so hard for you to believe that I want to help you? Just like you're trying to help Mia?"

"I'm a human protecting another-that makes sense. You're a death-dealer. All you care about is the game-the power."

He took a step forward. "Aren't you forgetting something? "

"Oh, what-that I'm a demon, too?" I rolled my eyes. "We are nothing alike, Lucian. My mother was raped by a demon, and so my genetics got messed up-I inherited the magic gene." I thought about his story-about that tiny, half-dead (undead?) baby being swaddled in black and gold, his cold brow anointed with myrrh, whisked away to some court of shadows.

Where was his choice?

Were we really so different?

"You must think I'm a monster." His eyes were almost black-but they weren't those terrifying orbs that I'd seen earlier. They were the color of damp earth. A brown so dark that it was almost colorless. Like the soil of a grave.

"I don't think. I know."

He shook his head. "You don't understand the first thing about necromancers-or about vampires. You see us as indiscriminate killers, cold-blooded predators, and sexual sadists. But what would the human race look like, if we only judged you by your serial killers, your rapists, your pedophiles? " He stared at me. "Every species has violent individuals. Some demons kill for pleasure, and some live in perfect synergy with humans. You can't judge all vampires when you've only met a few terrible ones. And you can't judge a necromancer when you don't know the first thing about us. You can't even admit that we might share the same power."

He was uncomfortably close now. I couldn't tell if he was playing with me, or just being polite. If he wanted to disarm me, he could do it easily. I knew how fast he could move. Right now, he was being slow-almost careful. But I didn't know why. Staring at this strange half-demon, I suddenly realized that I knew as little about him as he knew about me. Our lives were a coil of dark secrets. We were both perfect strangers, facing each other, and maybe neither of us knew what would happen next.

"I've killed." He said it offhand, like one might say, "I play the flute." "Many times. When it was necessary."

"But never just for the fun of it?"

"Desire and death are always closer than they seem."

"Is that supposed to turn me on?"

"What do I have to do to earn your trust?"

"Well, you could start by getting the hell out of-"

He was behind me in an instant-pressed up against me. His right hand was on top of mine, pressing down on the gun. His left hand was wrapped around my waist. I still had the athame, but I lacked the leverage to do much damage with it. I might be able to slash him, but that was it.

It felt like the dream. His hand on my waist. His tongue- Focus!

I could feel his breath on my neck. His lips were an inch away, and I could smell his body. Not sweat-but a dark, spicy kind of tang, a hint of something metallic, a whiff of earth, cloves, leather, and leaves. A hundred impossible smells mingling with each other. I'd expected him to be cold, but his hand was surprisingly warm against mine. I felt a flush creeping up my neck. Lucian seemed to sense it, and his breathing quickened.

"Do you trust me now?" he whispered.

I could see the dark hair on his arms, the burnished gold skin, and beneath that, the veins thrown into startled relief. There's a stage just before decomposition that we call "marbling," when hemolysis begins to break down the red blood cells in the body, causing them to spill out hemoglobin like punctured balloons. It makes the veins appear dark and appalling against the skin, almost writhing as they slowly begin to disintegrate, being broken down by bacteria inside the body. Lucian's veins reminded me of that. Somehow, he was both dead and alive.

Necromancers absorbed death, and their bodies told the story of every ritual, every spell. Like the track marks of an addict.

His hand applied a gentle pressure to my arm, slowly pushing the gun down. If he wanted to, he could rip my arm right out of its socket. But it was clear that he didn't want to hurt me.

He'd been telling the truth about that, at least.

"You know," he said, as if by way of conversation, "vampires are about as different from us as we are from real humans-the normal ones, I mean."

The lucky ones, I thought momentarily.

"When a vampire is turned," he continued, still slowly forcing my arm down, "his body changes. Blood pressure drops. Heartbeat slows. Temperature falls. But he doesn't die. When humans die, their cells break down. The process is called autolysis-correct?"

"You're suddenly a biology major?"

He smiled. The Browning was in his right hand now. He casually let it fall onto the bed, a few inches away and completely useless. "A vampire's body goes through a similar process. The cells 'die,' in a sense-they undergo a partial kind of autolysis, but then they are transformed. The vampire sees, smells, and tastes everything in a completely different way. He uses different parts of his brain, and understands his body in a way that a human never could. But he isn't dead. Far from it."

"And what happens to necromancers?" I swallowed. "Lucian, what happened to that baby, swaddled in black? Where did he go?"

He smiled slightly at my recognition. "There are rituals," he said. "Secret rites. Complications. The same as with your kind. Less paperwork."

I turned around, and was suddenly surprised that I could. He wasn't holding on to me anymore. I still had the athame in my left hand, and the gun was within reach-although I didn't think that I could move fast enough.

Lucian was just standing there, staring at me with this mild expression, like we'd only been talking about politics or the rainforest.

"What did you come here to warn me about?" I asked coldly. "Try condensing it to five words or less."

"You know that your life is in danger, Tess. You know that you're getting close to something very old and powerful- something that you don't have the resources to fight. You must feel that."

"And I suppose you understand exactly what's going on."

"I understand that Mia is connected to the vampires. Someone has chosen her, left a mark on her. Whoever that vampire is, they won't let you stand in their way. I just want to make sure you know what you're dealing with. That you're fully prepared."

"There's a lot you aren't telling me."

He shrugged. "There's a lot I don't know."

"Bullshit. You're their liaison, and it's your job to know every little thing that goes on there, every step that your buddies take. You must know who infected Mia, but for some reason, you want to protect them."

"The only person I want to protect is you."

"Oh, quit it with the puppy dog eyes. I don't buy your false concern for a minute, Lucian. You've got an agenda here, just like I do."

His expression was mellow. "Of course I do. But part of that agenda happens to be keeping you safe, and protecting the life of an innocent girl-a girl who's been violated and threatened, probably by someone close to me. They aren't just my employers, Tess. Some of them are my friends, my companions." His eyes darkened. "You could even call them my family. Don't you think that betrayal makes me furious? Ashamed? Don't you think I want to see the vampire who did this punished?"

My arm was aching from keeping the knife raised. I tried to ignore it. "I have no idea what your motivations are. I don't pretend to. But when you skulk in here, in the middle of the night, telling me that you have to warn me and then throwing out some cryptic horse shit- yeah, I'm a bit skeptical, Lucian. Can you blame me?"

"No. I understand-"

He reached out his hand, and my body acted before my mind could. I slashed downward with the athame, and the blade sliced through his palm. There was no castoff spray of blood, though. It was the oddest thing. I saw a red line form against Lucian's flesh, but the blood just hung there, frozen. It didn't drip.

Lucian looked genuinely surprised. He stared at his palm, as if in wonder.

"I'm sorry," I said. "You moved, and I just reacted on reflex. It was stupid. I'll go get you a bandage-"

"No need." He held his palm out. As I watched, the cut slowly closed up, as if a zipper was being drawn across the flesh. A thin trail of blood remained on the surface of his palm, but the cut itself was gone. Lucian looked at the blood. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

I knew that necromancers could heal, but not that fast. It was uncanny.

I don't know why I reached out to touch his palm. Maybe I just had to feel it for myself. Maybe it was a compassionate reflex-some need to wipe away the blood. When my fingers touched his, I felt a shock. It was similar to what I'd felt back at the club, when our powers mingled with each other. It wasn't just my hand touching his. Some darkness inside me was brushing against his own. I felt the hairs on the back of my arms and neck standing straight up. His blood was wet against my fingertips.

I looked up, and his eyes were fixed on mine. They looked human. It may have been a trick of the light, or just a necro mind trick, but they seemed once again like the eyes of a young man in his early thirties, still flickering with some kind of promise. I saw that there was a faint scar on his chin-possibly from some childhood accident. It would never heal. Like vampires, the most powerful necromancers could defy death. Maybe his hair would never grow, his body would never change. The normal fusions of muscle and bone, the tectonic shifting and wearing down of a human body, would never take place. He would stay like this, just like this, forever.

It seemed almost cruel. And yet I could understand the desire for it. A writer once said that people desire immortality only because they know that it could never happen. If they really understood it, they'd never wish for it.

If I could see into Lucian's mind, would I even understand it? Would his thoughts, his emotions, make any sense to me? Or would it be like reading a foreign language, or trying to watch television with the sound turned off? Some frightful, silent play, where nothing made sense, where the actors seemed inseparable from their parts, where there was nothing but penumbra, dance, and blood.

I could see his mark now-the lily. The touchstone of my dreams. Just below the collar of his shirt. I reached up, brushed the fabric aside. It blazed white against his skin, just as I remembered it. I wanted to touch my own neck, to make sure that I wasn't marked as well. Because I could feel it. Still. I could feel it moving beneath my skin, and it terrified me. Lucian gave me an odd look. "How did you know about that?"

I swallowed. "It was in my dream-you-and that mark. I touched it." I stroked the skin without meaning to, and Lucian's breath quickened. It was hot, like I remembered, almost feverishly so.

"What is this thing that connects us?" I asked. "What is it, Lucian? Because it scares the shit out of me. You scare the shit out of me. But I'm dreaming about you, thinking about you-it's driving me crazy!"

Lucian was silent for a moment. Then: "I'll ask my question now."

He touched my face and kissed me.

I felt like I was back in that alley again, all those years ago, being attacked by the vampire.

The heat of his breath, the terrible pain of his fangs sinking into my flesh, and the disorienting rush of desire rising up all at once, as if my whole body was freezing and on fire at the same time. It felt like that again, only this time, I was more frightened-not of the vampire, but of myself. In the alley, I'd known that it was only a ploy. That vampire was going to die as soon as I could raise the power, and my body was just the distraction. Now, I wasn't so sure. A voice inside me screamed: You're letting this happen! You're letting him do this! He wasn't a vampire, but he wasn't human either. And what did that mean? What had he become? What was I becoming?

Before I could stop myself, I felt the power flowing up the hilt of the blade, into the athame, through my arm. Lucian's blood burned against my fingers. I pushed him away with my left hand, and struck him across the face with my right.

I channeled a lot of power into that punch, and he actually staggered backward a bit. He stared at me with a ridiculous expression of surprise.

Then he was kissing me again. And that was good. Sweet Jesus, that was good. His weight pushed me down on the bed. I shifted, rolling onto my knees so that I could straddle him, my palms pressed against his chest. His eyes were half-closed, and he smiled, but didn't say anything. Lucian didn't suffer from the particular weakness that some men have, that desire to talk with your mouth when you should be talking with other body parts. I didn't want composition. I wanted to burn.

The door was still partway open, but I didn't care. If Derrick got up for some ice cream, he was going to get an obscene surprise. But I liked that sliver of warm space, that connection to the rest of the apartment, to my life. It kept me from drowning.

I pulled off my shirt and threw it-I don't know, somewhere, that random place where clothes go when you fling them unthinkingly at some corner of the room. It takes forever to find them in the morning, but in the moment, you feel like you actually know where they'll land, that you can divine those coordinates. Like you pretend to know whose bed your body might land in, whose mouth might be pressing on yours. It's all really a fucked-up lottery. Or one of those equations like pi that goes on forever.

I reached my hands up his shirt, pressing my thumbs into his chest, kneading, as I licked his neck. He gasped softly, leaning into my tongue, and I realized that our positions were now reversed. This was no dream. And if I was going to hell, at least I'd fucking be on top for once.

Lucian reached his arms above his head, and I pulled the shirt off. The tattoos flared-black leaves against his skin, crow's feathers and mottled islands slowly coming together through tectonic upheaval. I kissed the ouroboros, and felt his tail moving against my lips. I tongued the lily, fast, then slowly, and he made a muffled sound as he grabbed my hair.

I reached down to unfasten his belt-as tricky as undoing a bra sometimes, although girls will never admit it. He didn't say anything, but his grip on me tightened. His body felt so malleable-not like the bad dates who pawed you all over and then fell into a tedious, uninspired rhythm. Lucian moved with the unhurried grace of someone who'd enjoyed sex with a lot of different partners, who knew how to surrender to the ebb and flow and about-turn of what was always strange, unpredictable, didactic, sometimes even funny. He didn't have to lead because we were both under thrall, both in control of each other. Like Paul's gospel. My body belongs to you, and your body belongs to me. But please, be kind, even in the dark, because it's still my body.

I slipped off his socks. His toes were golden and small. Almost petite. I kissed the pad of his foot. He arched his back. Were necromancers ticklish?

I tugged his pants halfway down, still holding on to the belt. He shifted position-not an invitation, but more of a suggestion. A careful lover can tell the difference. I pressed my mouth against the soft fabric of his briefs, tasting the heat, inhaling; there was that powerful, sweet bitter smell, dank and incredible. I trailed two fingers along the edge of the waistband, and he shivered. I felt his stomach muscles clench. I dragged my tongue upward, licking small circles around the column of fine, black hairs on his abdomen while I cupped him with my other hand.

I've got you, I wanted to say. I've got you and I'm not letting go. But talking would have only confused matters. Our bodies knew perfectly well what to do.

He wrapped his arms tighter around me, and I sat astride him, rocking slowly, letting him get closer and closer. He didn't push forward. I let him feel the contours of my body, the silken edges, and he breathed harder into my ear and bit down, tenderly, his legs tightening around my waist, but he still didn't push. I reached down farther, slipping past the black cotton until my fingers closed around him. Slick. I rubbed some of it between my thumb and forefinger, then stroked him along the ridge of flesh that was most sensitive, applying pressure so that I could feel him breathe in sharply.

I spread his legs and worked him gently with my fingers. His ankles were dark and beautiful, like Athena, olivine and sandaled as she rode the currents of the air. I moved my tongue, and his feet went back and forth against the sheets. I could feel the pressure building, but he didn't want it to be over yet. He pulled me on top of him, and his tongue was all over, like a Bedouin, dragging along every slant and surface of my body. He kissed my wrists, my fingertips, my thighs, swirling hot circles so close to my center but never going farther. I rocked with every movement of his mouth. The feeling of him pressed against me, of his legs around me, of all the curious muscles in his arms moving in unison like an eternal golden braid, and the smell and the feel of his baby fine hair, his spit-I was gone.

Gone.

I'm gone. My name is gone.

Eve was bleeding. Mia's face was in my mind, her eyes stained with tears, her mouth open in a silent scream.

Fuck. Fuck!

"No-" I tried to push him away, but he wasn't holding me, so all I did was push myself halfway off the bed. "I can't-fuck-Lucian, we can't-"

We were both out of breath. He stared at me, his face slick with sweat, his eyes opaque as the surface of the moon.

Then he dressed, quietly and efficiently, and walked out of the room. I didn't hear the door close behind him, but I knew that he was gone.

I threw my shirt back on and walked into the living room. I was shaking.

Derrick groaned, shifting in his blankets. He looked up at me, blinking sleepily. "Hey. Did I hear something?"

"No, hon. I was just talking to myself. Go back to sleep."

"S'good ... have to fight the giant Jell-O monster anyway . . . and all the squirrels on bicycles . . . where did they learn that?"

He was already asleep again.

I stood in the darkness of the window, staring out at the massive silhouette of the Wal Centre in the distance. A pale red light was blinking on its roof. The lights of the city surrounded it, all of those skyscrapers, where people worked their normal jobs and ate lunch and felt like they were safe.

Derrick's quiet breathing filled the room.

I sat down at the kitchen table again, exactly where I'd started, holding the gun in my hand.

Feeling its cold weight.

I knew what I had to do.

26.