Something tinkled and scraped and the bartender spun around just in time for a bottle to launch itself off the shelf behind him and crash to the floor. "Ah, Christ. There they go again." He glared at the back bar and whispered at the bottles, "Didn't I tell you you could help yourself so long as you didn't break anything? Now, was that nice?"

The mist-shape of a woman oozed out of the racks of liquor and wafted through him to me. She put her incorporeal hand on the bar beside me and then dissolved into the howling storm of other spirits. A small button remained on the bar where her hand had been. As I stared at it, an old-fashioned key dropped onto the bar beside it as if it had fallen from the ceiling. And then the stub of a pencil. Each object was shrouded in trailing blackness. Another phantom woman came toward me from the outside door. She glared at me and her face flickered from fully fleshed to a naked skull. It was the woman who'd lingered in the market office earlier in the day and she exuded malicious intent. All the other ghosts in the room seemed to pull back from her, leaving a clearing around the two of us.

Her face seemed to melt, as if she, too, were starving into a living skeleton before my eyes. For a moment, what stood before me, clothed in only the raging energy of hunger and fury, was nothing that had ever been human. It glared at me and then seemed to turn that baleful expression inward. Then the moment's horrible vision faded.

I felt a burning pain running up my arms where I thought the woman's ghost had touched me earlier in the day and I winced, looking down to see if some creature had snuck up onto the bar to bite me. But what I saw was blood.

I gasped and yanked at my sleeve, but the narrow cuff hitched up and stopped me. I got to my feet and whirled, heading back into the short hallway between the two bars to get to the washroom. Inside a narrow stall, I yanked off my jacket and pulled off my shirt, expecting my clothes to be ruined, but the blood was an illusion. The words burning onto my arms were not. "Tribute does not feed the servant. Leave us be, until your time."

I'd never been warned off with tricks of this sort before. Most ghosts who wanted me gone were more direct, though the phrase "until your time" made me think they had some plan for me I hadn't sussed out. I stared at the words and saw more slowly crawling across my belly. I felt each letter forming as if pushed up from inside my skin. The sensation sent me retching to the toilet.

I got hold of myself eventually and put my shirt back on. I was rinsing my face with cold water when the hostess from the first section of the pub came into the restroom. "Are you all right?"

I nodded. "I'm fine."

"Do you need a cab? I can call one to the hotel at the end of the alley if you do."

"No. Thank you. I really am all right. Bad food. Not drink." I hated maligning the dinner I'd had, but "ghost poisoning" is not the clever explanation you want to offer for barfing in a bar.

She nodded, but her eyes were narrowed and I was sure she didn't quite believe me. I washed my face and hands again and killed a few more minutes until I felt steady enough to venture back out. The ghosts had reconvened, so I hoped that meant the intimidating phantasm had gone for the time being. Before I could escape the room, the bartender flagged me down. Reluctantly I walked through the ectoplasmic storm to the bar.

"Did you want these?" he asked, pointing to the objects on the bar. There were more of them now.

"No. They fell from the ceiling. They don't belong to me." I should have taken them-I was sure the ghosts had left them for that purpose-but I didn't want to touch them at the moment on the chance that they were . . . hers. "Maybe you could put them somewhere in case the owner comes back for them?"

He peered at me as if he, too, was gauging my sobriety and then swept them into a small container, which he put beneath the bar. "All right. If you change your mind, though . . ."

"Yeah. OK," I said and got out as quickly as I could without appearing to run.

Outside, the terrifying phantom woman with the melting face was waiting for me, looking even more skeletal and less human than before. "You cannot take them from me," she said, her voice sighing through the alley on a wind that stank of death. "Tribute is given. It cannot be taken away."

I didn't have a ready reply, though she seemed to expect one, studying me as she was through empty eye sockets with her head cocked slightly sideways. I slid a step backward on the old brick alley floor, my boot soles picking up grit and emitting a slight grinding sound. The revenant lurched toward me and I ducked to spin away. . . .

Something cold and vicious struck me hard from the left-my blind side, knocking me into the railing over a sunken courtyard on the far side of the alley. I fetched up hard and tried to dig my feet in, but there was only hard brick and empty air. I felt myself tipping over the railing and I scrabbled to get a grip on it, or loop my arm around it as something scraped at my face and neck.

I started to scream, but the shout was choked off by an ice-cold hand that clamped over my mouth. But one hand busy meant one less to grapple me with and I hunkered down, pulling out of the remaining grip on my shoulders and wedging myself under the rail. Tucked into the metal bars, I kicked out at the man-shaped thing that attacked me and hit it hard in the knee. It staggered, then turned to take a second swing at me. . . .

Suddenly it spun and bolted away at inhuman speed-it looked like the vampire-ish thing that had followed me to the alley. A second black shape trailing an aura of blood and pain pursued it up the alley and everything Grey fled ahead of it, leaving a vacant eddy of mist and empty ghostlight for me to stand in.

I crept to the nearest bench attached to the railing I'd nearly toppled over and sat down, huddling into myself and shivering as if it were midwinter instead of the first week of July. The melting-faced horror was gone, as was the vampire-like man-if it wasn't the one that had followed me into the market, it was something of the same type.

I breathed hard, catching my startled breath and calming the instinct that urged me to run far and fast as the darkness that had pursued my assailant returned. . . .

Some things never leave your memory; this stomach-turning smell and oppressive clot of dark energy were indelible in my mind. Even though he made no sound and my vision was a mess of Grey overlaid on normal like so much static on a television picture, I knew when he stopped next to me and I raised my head. "Hello, Carlos. Thanks for that."

It's a bit difficult to describe the relationship between Carlos and me. We're friends of a sort, but our history is tangled with unsavory details like death, madness, and vampire politics. I hadn't seen him-or most of Seattle's vampires-in quite a while. Not that I minded: Vampires literally turn my stomach and they always have an angle. They're a frightening lot, but Carlos was much worse than most. He was also a necromancer and he worked as the chief advisor to Seattle's top vampire-a former client of mine. Carlos and I had done some horrible-if necessary-things together and our secrets bound us in silence and uneasy respect.

"Thanks are unnecessary. I didn't catch him." His quiet voice resonated in my chest.

"Maybe that's as good a reason as any to be grateful." I hated to imagine what Carlos might have in mind for any member of the uncanny who'd offended him. He, after all, was a creature who killed for power.

"No. It was he I was stalking. Driving him off you was not what I'd had in mind. But Cameron would not like to hear you'd been injured by one of ours-even if that one has gone rogue."

I shook off some of my discomfort and studied his face. It wasn't just his dark hair and beard that made Carlos difficult to read-his expression is subtle and chilly at the best of times. "You have a rogue vampire on the streets?" I asked, taken by surprise-it hadn't quite looked like a vampire in my Grey sight, but I didn't know everything about that terrible species. Between them Carlos, Cameron, and his inner circle don't miss much and it seemed unlikely that they'd have no idea of it if one of their community was turning against them. "How did that slip by?"

"Not a slip. A theft. My assistant was foolish and fell among evil companions."

I raised my eyebrows. It's hard to imagine companions much more evil than vampires, but given what Quinton had said about his father, I didn't doubt it was true. I chose to address the less frightening half of the statement. "You have an assistant now? Well, I suppose Cameron did sort of graduate out of that job. . . ." I hadn't taken time to wonder how that situation had been resolved, but obviously it had. Cameron had, technically, still been Carlos's protege when the vampire hierarchy came tumbling down and Cameron stepped into the void.

"It would be inappropriate for the Prince of the City to stoop and carry for me, but I must still work-work that you know requires considerable labor. Inman was only a dhampir, so I cannot be surprised if his mind has been persuaded against us."

I guessed that was the situation Quinton had been warning me about when he said the vampires had a problem. "When did this happen?"

"A few weeks ago. The half-converted can be difficult to track since they walk the daylight as well as the night."

"And you didn't come to me?"

"I felt it would not be in our best interest to be seen to rely on your help too frequently, Greywalker. The current cabal is still young in power."

Considering I'd helped put that group in power, I was well aware of how sketchy the underpinnings of the regime were and how quickly the situation could have turned into a bloodbath at any hint of weakness.

"How-?" I started, but Carlos cut me off with a look.

"This is not the best place for conversation. And I have things I would ask you, too."

I was more shaken than I'd thought if I hadn't the presence of mind to realize that chats with vampires are not best pursued in public places, like famous alleys in front of famous bars. I nodded. "Where would you prefer? I'm on the job, but, to be honest, it's not going well. . . ."

He made a humming sound and motioned for me to follow him down the alley, blending into the night as only a vampire can. I came along behind, trusting him not to lead me into danger-which says a lot about our relationship in spite of the fact that Carlos is the most frightening thing I know. He went down the alley and ducked across Stewart Street, heading to a bench in a tiny courtyard behind the Inn at the Market. It was probably a lovely place to sit and talk during the day. At night it was secluded and dark in spite of its proximity to streetlights and busy roads. We sat uncomfortably close, his aura of death and pain lying over me like a blanket of horrors.

Once we were seated, posing like lovers conversing, I asked, "Why didn't you come to me when your assistant went missing? You know I would take any case of yours as a priority."

"I do, which is why I did not. Cameron suggested it, but he was dissuaded. We cannot be seen to run to you with petty internal problems."

"But a rogue vampire is not a petty-"

He cut me off. "No, but we did not want it known that such a thing had happened. And I prefer to hunt those who defy me myself."

I didn't like the sound of that.

"Defy you? That sounds . . . complicated." I wouldn't have thought a demi-vampire could do other than obey the vampire to whom he was tied by blood and power. Purlis had managed a very dangerous coup. No wonder Carlos hadn't wanted word to get out. It also gave me a new perspective on my ambitious and unpleasant nearly in-law.

"It is," Carlos said. "Inman was not the first of our number to go missing. But he has been the first to come back."

I shook my head, not so much confused as amazed at what I was hearing.

"He came back to spy," Carlos explained. "The others may still live, but they remain wherever their captors keep them and we dare not risk an assault to recover them at this time. So we have allowed the situation to lie as it is. So far it has caused little trouble, but that won't last. With Inman's return, we face a problem that I had hoped to keep you out of. I would not like to ask you to choose between our faction-which you have protected and supported, however much you dislike our kind-and your mate."

I felt exhausted by this skulduggery and closed my eyes, tamping down my anger at Purlis, Quinton, and the whole damned situation.

Carlos spoke into my protracted silence. "You see the difficulty I faced."

I opened my eyes and looked at him, steeling myself against the effects of his gaze. "I do, but you shouldn't have hesitated. Neither of us supports his father's project. Or his ambitions. He's been trying to drag Quinton in for a year, but it's a no-go. Quinton won't do it."

"Because of you?"

"Because his father is a psychotic with an agenda that gets innocent people killed."

Carlos nodded. "I see. I'm sorry that we hesitated-that I hesitated to come to you. But we should talk to Cameron. This changes the situation."

He rose and expected me to come along, but I held my place, not least because I still felt disoriented and ill from the swift passage of events. "Wait. I have concerns of my own here. I can't just abandon my inquiry to accommodate Cameron. Time is short on this one."

He arched a brow. "You require something in return."

"I will, yes."

"What will you demand?"

"A favor-when I'm ready for it."

Carlos chuckled, a rumbling that shook my chest and skull. "One to be named at another time. You well know that we owe you many times over."

"Can you speak for Cameron in this?"

"No, but I doubt he'll balk. Come, we'll go to him."

And this time I didn't have a choice. I got up and followed Carlos. He went straight to my Land Rover and leaned against the side with a sardonic smile. "I prefer not to walk, as would you." Which let me know Cameron wasn't in downtown Seattle as his predecessor had preferred to be. Interesting . . .

I don't like to transport vampires. Their presence makes me queasy under the best of circumstances, and the filtering effect of the big truck's glass and steel doesn't work on things already inside it. This was not going to be a pleasant drive . . . wherever we were going.

At Carlos's direction, I drove out of the market and up through downtown and the University District to Laurelhurst-a neighborhood filled with sprawling, well-appointed houses that rolls along the lakeshore between Union Bay and Wolf Bay. Carlos sent me up a twisty street that terminated in a long private drive and a solid gate. I wasn't surprised that he had a keycard for the gate. Nor was I entirely surprised that the gate didn't open immediately. An athletic young woman with a swirling aura of crimson and indigo stepped out from behind a bit of landscaping and paused to look us over. She wasn't wearing a uniform, but something about her outfit hinted at an organization. What she was wearing was a gun-something bigger than a handgun and smaller than a rifle that I didn't get a good look at-on a quick-deploy sling. I guess the vampires were finally giving up arrogance in favor of safety, since even a top-level predator is only as good as his combat reach. Carlos turned a baleful glare on the guard but she didn't flinch. Once she'd satisfied her curiosity, she keyed a radio resting on her collar like a cop's and said something into it. Her energy corona flared and sparked as she spoke and I wasn't able to understand her, though I knew she was speaking English. I was almost glad my left eye was still stubbornly seeing only in the Grey or I might have missed the spell in action. I wondered who'd cast it-the woman or someone else?

The gate opened and I ceased speculating and drove through. I cruised the truck down the long driveway to a dark gray house that stretched along a bit of the hill crest overlooking the Laurelhurst Beach Club and Wolf Bay. The view was spectacular even from the wrong side of the building.

The interior was equally impressive. An eclectic collection of art was casually arranged throughout the rooms in the way most people would display curios and family photos. The carpet in the living room was white-a rather daring choice for a vampire. The furniture was more traditional: black and arranged to face the floor-to-ceiling vista of the bay. Cameron was standing in front of the windows, tall and slim and blond as a young lion. He would always appear to be twenty-one-his age when we'd met a few weeks after his death-but he seemed older. He gazed out at the view with a melancholy posture.

"Don't you find that a bit disturbing?" I asked, recalling that vampires and water don't get along well.

He shrugged without turning. "I like to keep an eye on things that can easily kill me. It just seems like a good idea." His voice now silvered the air with small charms of comfort and relaxation when he spoke. It appeared an effortless performance, though the deep red-and-black energy around him flickered very slightly as I noticed it. He was certainly being more thorough than his predecessor in controlling his environment-right down to how his visitors felt about him. It was masterly, but I didn't like it.

He turned then, flashing a smile that went a long way to dispelling the roiling discomfort that I usually detected pouring off of vampires. His eyes were a deeper violet color than I'd remembered-or maybe that, too, went with the glamour from his smile. I shot Carlos a glance, but saw no magical workings on his part.

"Your former student has come along nicely," I said.

He gave me a small nod of satisfied acknowledgment. "He comes into his own."

I looked back to Cameron. "Very impressive."

"I had the best teacher death could buy." Cameron made a show of taking a deep breath-he'd stopped breathing about five years earlier, so it was strictly for effect-and changed the subject. "It's a pleasure to see you, Harper."

"Is it?"

"Yes. I like you. I owe you . . . pretty much everything."

"That doesn't always lead to joyful reunions and fond remembrances," I said.

"Not for some people, but I'm not exactly some people. Am I?"

"No."

He almost smiled. "Since you're in Carlos's company, can I assume this visit has to do with our sudden loss of membership?"

"A bit. Carlos seems to think we have things to discuss."

"If he thinks so, then it's so. Please sit down. Make yourself comfortable."

I'm rarely comfortable around vampires, but with these two I'd do my best to fake it. Nevertheless, I was careful to sit where I could watch them both, which I knew they knew. Cameron's mouth quirked a bit at one corner, but that was all the notice my caution warranted.

Vampires don't have the same sense of time pressure that living humans have. But in this case, they had an immediate problem and I wasn't yet sure if it was more or less urgent than my case in hand, so I kept a bland expression and waited them out.

Cameron sat down at last, in a chair at an angle to mine so he wasn't in my space but still close enough to talk without raising his voice. Carlos kept to his feet, staying within a degree or two of Cameron's shoulder. Cam leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees, the light reflected off the water illuminating one side of his face with wavering blue light.

"In the past month or so, several of my people have disappeared. It isn't unusual for the weaker members of such a tribe as ours to move on or to fall away. Even we die, and accidents do happen. There have been other indications that something's been a bit . . . off with some of our associates. Carlos said he saw signs of interference with magic-small things, but of interest and possibly dangerous to us. And I began to notice fewer homeless people on the streets."

"You watch the homeless?" I asked, my cynicism coming through, while some other part of my brain wondered if he knew anything about Twitcher and if his death was part of the pattern Cam had detected.

Cameron met my eyes and looked disappointed. "Yes. While it's true that the people who fall through your society's cracks may become prey to the desperate and unscrupulous of mine, they aren't cattle. They are human beings, as we were once human beings. We must coexist without drawing attention to ourselves and that means using every resource wisely. Something Edward didn't always appreciate."

He put one hand up as if warding off a comment he knew was coming. "Yes, I said 'resource.'" His eyes narrowed a little and his face hardened with a touch of cold anger I'd never before seen in him. "The past few years have been a hard education for me. Ours is not a society apart from yours. We're predators, but we're also parasites. We are dependent on normal humans and creatures of magic to maintain us and to keep our existence secret. Unless human society changes in vast and significant ways, we'll always be things that live in the shadows-nightmares, dreams, things half seen by moonlight. Phantom lovers who melt away at dawn," he added, scoffing. "That is the fairy tale we perpetuate for our own interests-thank the gods for the pliant imaginations of Bram Stoker and Stephenie Meyer."

He paused with a rueful half smile and made a slight change to his position in the chair-more for my sake than his, I thought-before he went on, his expression growing harder. "Because there are few of us, we're ruthless. Because we're long-lived, we're acquisitive. And if we're not clever and tricky about it, we're dead. We have to tread lightly on the earth and we have to maintain the balance by husbanding resources, by being careful, abstemious, and-when warranted-manipulative, underhanded bastards. So, yes, I keep watch on the homeless, the transient, and the insane. They're like a pack of idiot cousins-an obnoxious, smelly, drooling horde most of the time, but a few are quite likable. A decent custodian doesn't just stand aside and let them all jump off cliffs. Or push them."

I found his use of "our" and "your" startling and unsettling, but it was an eloquent speech and not at all what I would have expected of the chief vampire of Seattle. I had not given much thought to how much the terrified and confused living-dead college student I'd once rescued from a parking garage would be forced to change by taking the reins. I was pleased to detect a touch of student-activist-style passion there. Some things are, apparently, not exclusive to the living.

I bowed my head a little. "I hadn't given it that kind of thought. But . . . much as I don't like to sound petty, could we focus on the more immediate problem? I do understand the larger context, but for now, we both seem to have pieces of a larger puzzle and I'd like to put them together."

Cameron chuckled. "Yes. I'm sorry. I get carried away on this topic lately. As I said, people have gone missing. Among the homeless it's not uncommon for them to move on and we can't always track what becomes of them. I didn't pay that much attention at first, but when a few of my people disappeared, I began to worry. Initially it was our support people-catspaws, blood-bound, day servants-then a few demi-vampires and the ascending. Those are always dangerous stages, when it's very easy for something to go wrong-you remember what I was like. But the apparent mortality rate was a little too high and then I started to notice that no one could positively say that any of these missing had died-it was just assumed. There should have been bodies, but there weren't. No funerals, no rise in suspicious deaths reported to the coroner's office. They were just gone. Like they'd been taken. But there was a lot more ghost activity-according to Carlos." He indicated the other vampire with a small gesture. "I don't have his acuity, so I can't confirm it, but I'd assume you can."

"I have noticed more ghosts, but only in some areas," I said. "And I can't be sure it's really more activity so much as my spending too little time some places and not being familiar with the normal activity levels any longer."

"Are you sure? Carlos seems to think there's a profound disturbance. . . ."

Carlos took a step forward. "It's not what I think. It's an observation."

I gave it a moment's consideration, mentally cursing James Purlis but holding back my ire. "When did this start? This rise in activity? And did you notice a geographic pattern?"

"Near the end of the year there was a change," said Carlos. "It has surged twice since then. There are a greater number of animate ghosts active in Seattle now than last year, and yet there has been no significant rise in deaths to account for it. There has been no great cataclysm or disaster here in the right time frame. The activities of your lover's father have also had an effect on the weft and warp of magic. He draws the things of magic to him through mechanical contrivance and he has drawn our own away from us-as he did with Inman."

Of course Carlos would know what the normal death rate was in Seattle and what effect Purlis's activities were having on the local Grey power grid. "Are you certain that he's responsible for the disappearance of the demi-vampires and others like that?" I didn't want to overlook some factor, though I also thought that Purlis was behind the changes Carlos was describing. It fit with what I knew of his project through Quinton.