I collapsed into a rocking chair in the corner, determined to stay with them until they were all asleep again. The little light glowed like it did the last night I read Renee a bedtime story. It just so happened that it had been Alice in Wonderland. Renee loved that one, although she found it scary at the same time.

I shivered, fighting an uneasy feeling. I was struck with the irrational need to get far away from this cozy little bedroom.

Melaphia still fretted. The twins were trying to snuggle with her, trying to make her feel warm and secure, but it wasn't working.

I remembered my "talent" for bewitching humans-the one I'd only used a handful of times-and figured now was as good a reason to use it as I was ever likely to see.

I concentrated on making Melaphia calm and sleepy. Go back to sleep, I murmured to her mind. She quieted gradually, and after a few minutes she was completely still. It even seemed to be working on Reyha and Deylaud. A few seconds after the rhythm of Mel's breathing told me she was asleep, the twins' eyelids began to flutter closed.

As I watched them sleep, I didn't think I'd ever felt like more of an outsider, more of a cold-blooded imposter in the land of the living. It was clear that I was a demon even to the ones I loved the most. There was a built -in wall between us. The wall between the living and the dead. Between the good and pure and the ones who preyed on them. And those predators were me and my kind.

Looking at the three of them, I wanted nothing more than to curl up on the bed at their feet until the sunbeams came through the gap in the curtains and burned me to a cinder. Mel had said it, after all. I was better off dead. But my humans still needed me, and as long as they did, I guessed I might as well stick around, or try to anyway.

I went back outside to my Corvette and hopped in. There was nothing like a little physical work to get your mind off things, so I decided to head back to the garage since there was plenty of dark left. As I drove I wondered why I tried so hard to hang on to my humanity after all these years. I was a monster, a demon, but whenever I was reminded of that fact, it always came as some kind of surprise. And it always hurt. It was about d.a.m.ned time that I accepted what I was. Fangs and all.

Maybe accepting yourself as the evil dead would mean never having to say you're sorry.

Ten.

William "Will," I said, "you told me earlier that you could feel Renee's presence but that she was not there in the room where you overheard Diana and Ulrich. You said she was somewhere deeper. Did the pa.s.sage continue past the room they were in?"

"The room was more of a cavern," he said. "I believe that if you kept on climbing down you'd eventually reach her. And them.

I could feel them, too."

"The Council?" Olivia asked.

"Yeah. They smell like...h.e.l.l," Will said. Then he looked at me a little doubtfully. "So, what's the plan?"

"I'm going there tomorrow night," I said. "You can take me as far as the room you spoke of. Beyond that I go alone. I don't want Diana and Ulrich to know you're working with me. If I find Renee and can't get her out myself, we'll make another attempt and you can come along. If necessary, all of you should be prepared to go with me that time. But tomorrow I will try to discover where they're keeping her and what their numbers are. If Ulrich has already delivered her to the Council, there may be many. If they're hiding her away from the Council until two nights hence, fortune may smile on me, and I might find her only lightly guarded."

"All right then," Will said. "Until tomorrow night." He turned to go; Olivia and I followed him to the foyer.

"Will you have any trouble slipping away from Diana and Hugo tomorrow night?" I asked.

"No problem," Will said. "I do have one question for blondie here before I go." He turned to Olivia. "You didn't trust me when I first came here tonight, and yet you spilled a lot of your secrets while I was around. Why is that?"

Olivia grabbed the front of his long leather coat, reached into the inside pocket, and brought out a bibelot that had been on the entry table when Will arrived, but which I now saw was missing from its place. I had been watching him the whole time, and I hadn't seen him pocket the trinket.

She set it back on the table. "I'll tell you why," she said, roughly letting go of the coat and shoving him a little at the same time.

"You just don't look that hard to kill. And make no mistake: I will kill you if you double-cross us, William's son or no."

Will looked surprised but covered quickly with a laugh. He was still laughing when he closed the door behind him.

Olivia and I heard a hubbub from the other vampires and turned around. A ghostly pale Donovan stood in the entrance to the parlor, leaning heavily on the doorframe. "Who was that?" he asked.

"My son, Will," I said.

"Oh. His voice sounded so familiar, but I can't place it. I didn't get a look at him tonight or the night I followed him and the others. No matter. It will come to me."

Olivia rushed to him and put her arm under his shoulders. "You shouldn't be up yet. You need more sleep to recover."

"I can sleep when I'm dead," he said, and laughed at his own joke. Olivia and Andrew walked him to a sofa and gently helped him sit. "Isn't someone going to pop the obvious question?" he asked. His face reminded me of marble, with blood vessels showing through like the matrix in the stone. But there was still a twinkle in his pale blue eyes.

"Who staked you?" I asked.

"Your lady wife, Diana," he said, and slumped forward in a faint.

Donovan came around well enough to feed off the other vampires and was put back into his coffin, but he wouldn 't stay. As soon as the other vampires went to their own coffins, he crawled back out of his and insisted on joining Olivia and me. We helped him walk to the long table in the coffin room.

"Blood sustains me, but I was dying for tea," he said, and sipped the strong brew Olivia had just made.

"So what happened the night Diana staked you?" Olivia asked.

As if kidnapping wasn't enough evidence of Diana's evil, I winced at the thought of her unprovoked attack on a peaceful vampire.

"I was following the three of them," Donovan said. "And they slipped into an unused underground rail tunnel, then turned into the sewers. I lost sight of them around a bend, and the stench was so strong, I couldn't follow them by odor either. And then I got lost. Diana must have doubled back and come for me, because before I knew it, I heard a seductive voice behind me. When I turned around, she staked me in the chest."

"If it weren't for the G.o.ddess, you'd be dust right now," Olivia mused.

"As you say," Donovan said, raising his cup in tribute. "Praise Brigid."

"I shouldn't have let you go," Olivia fretted. "I keep forgetting you don't know the sewers like the rest of us do. We use them to get around the city when we need to move in the daytime or take shortcuts at night. When bodies started turning up there not long ago, we figured there was some rogue vamp activity in the area. It 's not like a human serial killer could have been dumping bodies there. Any human without bulky oxygen equipment would have died of asphyxia going into those tunnels. Then we realized it was Hugo and the others. It's how we figured out where they were."

"All's well that ends well," Donovan said. "So what's been going on since I pulled a Rip van Winkle?"

Olivia filled him in: Will had agreed to cooperate, we'd discussed the vampire council, and our plan for rescuing Renee.

"What do you know of the Council of dark lords?" I asked him.

"What does anyone know of them?" he answered cryptically. I wondered if he was being evasive or just philosophical. "I had heard the same as you, that they're learning to wield elemental power. But that's a tricky business and hard to control. The first time they tried to wield this power, they had some unintended consequences."

"What kind of unintended consequences?" I asked.

"n.o.body I ever spoke to was ever able to say. But it did some damage to the Council as individuals and as an organization.

They've been all this time repairing themselves, sleeping in the earth for rejuvenation, being fed from the blood of their minions.

And now they seem ready to strike again, or try to."

"Strike how?" Olivia asked. "Isn't their goal still the same? To force all of us into making vampires and feeding off humans?" "Yes, but I think they have a show of force in mind. Some way of flexing their collective muscle."

"Does anyone know exactly what they intend?" I asked.

"No, n.o.body I've talked to knows for sure. But many of the old vampires I've run across in my travels think that they planned this grand gesture as a way of getting our attention and making us afraid of standing up to them."

"Have you met this Ulrich?" I asked.

"No, but I've heard of him. The word is that he is trying to become the next dark lord. There are two vacancies on the Council, and he wants one of the seats."

"I've tried to remember everything I ever heard about the dark lords in my existence, " I said. "Most vampires are ignorant, even some of the old ones. Reedrek himself told me what little I know, but I never heard him say what it takes to be included in their ranks. Do you know?"

Donovan shook his head. "All I know is that it takes a gesture so evil it would make Satan himself sit up and take notice. And from what I hear of Ulrich, he's the essence of evil. He's been the hidden force behind some of the most gruesome chapters of history. I've heard it said he was the one who gave Caligula his ideas."

Olivia shuddered and glanced my way. "And now Ulrich wants to make an uber-evil gesture. Like sacrificing an innocent child?"

"Not just any innocent child," I said. "But a child with a power that they fear but do not understand." My gut was churning at the thought of it.

Donovan reached across the table and took my hand. His grip was as cold as the grave, but I knew his heart was sincere. "I give you my word, William, if there's anything I can do to help you find Renee, you can count on me."

"Me too, but you know that," Olivia said, and put her hand over mine and Donovan's. To my surprise I found that I was touched by their words.

"I thank you, my friends," I said. I just hoped it would be enough.

Jack Back at the garage, I walked in to find an extra player at the card table, a woman of all things, and a werewolf woman at that.

As soon as he saw me, Jerry stood up. "Jack, this here's Wanda. Wanda, this is Jack McShane, the guy I was telling you about."

Wanda shifted her cards to her left hand and extended her right. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. McShane." She had a slight but pleasing Cajun accent.

"Call me Jack," I said, and shook her hand. It wasn't as soft as most women's, but that's to be expected from a shape-shifter.

After all, when you spent part of your time running on all fours, well, you get my drift.

I looked at Jerry. "Does Wanda have a last name?"

"Uh, Thrasher," he said, and looked at the floor.

"I call," Huey said, throwing two quarters into the kitty. Everyone showed their cards. Huey, who only had one pair, lost again and was as surprised as ever, even though he lost every hand. "Durn," he said.

"Ms. Thrasher, why don't you and Jerry sit out this next hand?" I looked at Jerry and jerked my chin in the direction of the office. He took the hand of the lovely Wanda and followed me there.

"Don't tell me. Let me guess," I said when I was seated behind my desk. "You are Nate Thrasher's wife, right?"

"Estranged wife," Wanda corrected. "How'd you know?" She sat on the sofa across from the desk and Jerry sat down next to her.

"Just call it a hunch."

Wanda patted her hair and gave me a flirtatious look. "Are you really a-a vampire?"

Keeping my face as expressionless as possible, I looked to Jerry for an explanation. As I've said before, I'm no Emily Post, but Wanda's statement was a real breach of the unwritten code of unhuman etiquette. Besides Connie and Seth, The V word was never spoken in my presence by anyone outside William's household who was not another vampire. I didn't want to come off as a nervous Nellie, but it just wouldn't do.

"Uh, honey pie," Jerry said, addressing Wanda, I hoped. "We don't call a v-a-m-p-i-r-e a v-a-m-p-i-r-e; it's not nice."

"Jerry," I pointed out, "I'm sitting right here. And I can spell."

"Oh," Wanda said, putting her hand against her vermilion lips. "I'm sorry. It's just that I've never met one before. A v-a-m-p-i- r-e, that is."

"Good. We can all spell," I said.

"She's a little nervous is all, Jack," Jerry hastened to explain.

She didn't look nervous. She looked hot to trot. In fact, she was looking at me like I was a big slab of rare sirloin on the hoof.

"Miss Wanda, for safety's sake we don't talk about our nonhuman tendencies around here. Most of my customers are human, and we don't want to scare them off. You understand, don't you?"

Wanda nodded vigorously enough to make her blond curls bounce. She made the sign of a zipper across her lips and gave me a wink.

"Won't you excuse Jerry and me for a minute, darlin'?" I got up and took Jerry by the arm.

"Back in a minute, sweet cheeks," Jerry called as he followed me to the coffee area.

"Sweet cheeks?"

Jerry shrugged and I handed him a Styrofoam cup. "Aw, Jack, you know how it is."

I sighed, thinking of my last run-in with Connie. I wished. "What are you doing here with Nate Thrasher's wife?"

"I had to get her away from there. He was beating up on her all the time."

Jerry held out the cup and I poured him some of Huey's finest brew, that is to say, coffee that tasted like tar -colored bog water. Or maybe bong water. I was beginning to wonder if he didn't use his zombie-flavored sweat socks as filters. I was also beginning towonder if Wanda hadn't triggered the famous Thrasher temper by presenting for every swamp dog that came within sniffing distance. But all the flirting in the world didn't justify abuse. I just didn't want to see Jerry get hurt by a conniving woman or by a cuckolded werewolf.

"I heard she's been missing for a while. Where have you been hiding her?"

"We've been staying at a friend's trailer, but the friend got nervous when he found out we were on the wrong side of the Thrashers, so we had to run," Jerry said. "How did you know she was missing?"

"Because Connie-Detective Jones-has done everything but drag the swamp looking for her. She suspected foul play. I 've got to call her and tell her Wanda's alive."

"No, Jack, you can't! n.o.body can know who Wanda is and where she's run off from...or who with."

"What about all your card-playing buddies out there?" I asked.

"They won't tell anybody."

"Look, Jerry," I said. "Connie infiltrated the pack, undercover. She even went out with Samson Thrasher. She's risked her life to find Wanda. I've got to tell her."

Jerry took a sip of the coffee and made a face. "All right, but I have to ask you a favor in return."

"Oh, okay. What is it?"