"You're my first dhampir," Ashikawa said judiciously.

Don't trust him, Debra said.

I'm not. "We're known to be unpredictable," Alek admitted. "Unlike Kage."

As Alek had antic.i.p.ated, the declaration surprised Ashikawa. He had not expected Alek would draw Kage into their conversation so quickly or that Alek would be so direct. Ashikawa's mouth ticked up at one corner but there was little humor in the expression. "No one has given Kage a challenge in over a hundred years."

Alek had been trying to sense whether the vampire was near since entering the manor, but so far he had come up with nothing.

"Unfortunately."

"You know," Ashikawa said, setting his tea cup back on the saucer, "if we are both alive when this is through, I will certainly be tempted to try and take you into my employment."

This time Alek was surprised. Raising his eyebrows, he asked, "And what makes you think I'm 'unemployed'?"

"You don't have a master anymore. The slayers want you dead. The Vatican wishes you never existed at all."

"I don't want a master," Alek said, loosing his temper. He fixed Ashikawa with a look. "In any event, I'm a rogue. You don't want me around. It's not healthy."

Ashikawa's eyes narrowed. "That could be conceived as a threat, you realize."

"I don't make threats," Alek said. "I make promises. And I promise you the only way you'll be rid of me is to leave Robyn and her son alone."

"And then...?"

"And then I can stay in my world and you can stay in yours."

"I am afraid, dhampir, that our worlds overlap at the moment." He raised his own eyebrows as if mocking Alek. "In fact, I'm afraid to say our worlds, yours and mine, are more similar than dissimilar. We both live by the sword, do we not?"

"Robyn does not. She has no part in this."

"She has something that belongs to me. I want it back. She gives it back and she can go free."

Alek smiled humorlessly. "We are men of action, Mr. Ashikawa. Lies do not become us."

"Empathy?"

"Among other things."

"Oh yes. I'd nearly forgotten about your voice from beyond the Web."

Alek frowned. "How much do you know about me?"

"Enough."

"Then you know what I'll do if you don't give Robyn up."

"Start a war?"

"I have in the past."

"Is she truly worth it?"

Alek set his teacup clattering down on the saucer and stood up. "I do admire your courage," Ashikawa said. "Other men are mute before me."

Alek looked at him. "I'm not a man."

"And so again I ask you: Is Robyn worth this? She is not like you. She is not part of your world. In fact, you haven't the slightest idea of who or what she is. She may not be what you think, dhampir."

Alek thought about that. "She doesn't belong in your world, either."

He hesitated, and then told the truth. "You're right about one thing.

Men like us live by the sword, and in time we all go down. But that doesn't give us the right to take innocents with us."

Ashikawa's face was a stone. "I only want what's mine."

"If I get the tapes and hand deliver them to you, will you let Robyn go then?"

Edward Ashikawa, Grand Dragon of the Yakuza, frowned and for a moment he looked almost puzzled. Then he smiled and gave Alek an almost imperceptible nod. "Well...I think that's fair."

Alek drew his coat close and turned to leave the garden.

That was when he spotted the mist seeping across the ground. It covered at least half of the courtyard and obliterated the lights. Before he knew what was happening he was standing knee-deep in it. And it was cold. Unnatural. He could feel no vampire-threat from it, yet this was wrong, this mist. He backed up but found the mist would not give.

He might as well be slogged in quicksand. He turned to look at Ashikawa.

The Dragon Lord was on his feet, still holding his teacup in hand. He said, casually. "You were expecting Kage, and that I was expecting. But Kage is a barbarian. Kurayami is much more subtle, don't you agree?"

Kurayami.

Ashikawa saw the question in Alek's eyes. "She is a gaki. A mist vampire that once guarded the temples and gardens of ancient Tibet.

The Shao-Lin monks called her The Floating Dragon. Do you see why?"

Alek spun around just in time to see the mist lift. He unsheathed his sword, but the moment he had it in hand it was wrenched from his grip by powerful invisible hands and he saw it disappear into the dark. What the...? He tried to reach for the sword with his mind, but this time, for the first time ever, it was as if something blocked him from it. He could not feel it.

Slowly, cunningly, the mist began building a wall around him.

Alek backed away from it.

Beloved, behind you!

Again Alek spun around only to spot two great silvery disembodied eyes opening like the irises of the most beautiful and deadly flowers he had ever encountered. He retreated from them, but it was more than fear of the unknown. The longer he looked at those eyes the quicker all the many years of discipline that controlled his fears and hungers came undone by that voracious gaze. He wanted--needed--to run, somewhere, anywhere, but there was nowhere to go, as trapped as he was in the eye of the storm. Kurayami had him fenced in on all sides. He couldn't see a thing through the mist-and he did not want to charge ahead and touch the misty walls the creature had erected around him. There was something so cold and alone about those eyes. Tears like rain. Hunger unfulfilled. Immortal. It was like Kage's power, but more so, because the sorrow came from within himself, called forth by a voice he could not resist.

Kurayami's great unblinking eyes smiled sorrowfully and her suffering hunger drove him to his knees.

"Ashikawa!" Alek cried.

He can hear you not, dhampir, came a voice. It was not Debra's, yet it was every bit as strong and sensual in his head. This one was much younger, the lilting voice of a little girl distorted by the echoes of time and seduction. Only Kurayami can hear you. Now there is nothing.

No, he told her. There is me!

Kurayami laughed as if that meant nothing to her and her laughter was like the sound of evening rain and mourning doves. The sound beat him down. And before Alek had a chance to answer, to even react, the Floating Dragon had swept him up in her iron grasp.

17.

Robyn Wright was awakened by a sound outside the subway car, a screeking noise. Beside her slept her little boy, Danny. For a while she couldn't understand why the sound had awakened her. It wasn't loud.

But it was peculiar, even in a city as peculiar as New York. The sound of nails sc.r.a.ping on a blade. She looked around the car, at all the other pa.s.sengers. The train had an odd mixture of homeless drunks, hip young executive types with portfolios, and teens with drunken, dangerous eyes. When she looked at them they looked back at her with their usual city-reserve of angst. She turned around, simultaneously finding the bra.s.s knuckles in her purse and looking through the hand- smeary window.

But all she saw was the dizzy blur of the tunnel, the dirty steam, the stations and the people with their coats blown by the pa.s.sing line.

Maybe she was dreaming. Nightmaring. Maybe she should have taken a cab and stayed out of the underground. But it wasn't night and the city belonged to the humans. Still...she had an uneasy feeling. Oh what difference did it make? At least she wasn't alone. And the vampires wouldn't attack her during the day. She had thought to take a cab, really she did, but then she remembered a lot of horror movies where the cabbie turned out to be a human familiar or whatever it was and had decided to go this route instead.

For a long time she sat there, watching the line, reasoning, and yet expecting to see someone. But no one was there. Everything was so G.o.dd.a.m.n normal. She wondered briefly where Alek was, what he was doing. She thought about Edward Ashikawa and she shuddered. Finally, she returned back in her seat.

Kage was standing there in his black coat and vampire-white skin, standing amidst the other pa.s.sengers. He had been there the whole time, she supposed, Charlie behind him. It was only now that he chose that she see them. And that was terrifically horrible to see. But was what worse was that he had her sleeping son in his arms, Danny's head cushioned against his inhuman heart. She expected it. She was appalled to see her son lying so still in the vampire's arms and sucking his thumb as if he were safe at home in bed, a victim of Kage's iron will, but she was not afraid. She had seen too much, gone to far, to ever be afraid again.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d...let Danny go!" she cried as she jumped to her feet, surprised by her own rage. The other pa.s.sengers looked her way like she was crazy. Like she was talking to herself. And she probably was, in their perspective. She was crazy, but she was crazy with rage.

Kage stared blankly at her through his black gla.s.ses. She saw herself in them, her own pale, incoherent anger that was nothing but a mask to hide the primal, underlying fear all her kind had for monsters. After a moment he seemed to come to a decision, and without warning he turned in his long coat and grabbed and missed one of a pair of homeless men huddled together on the seat behind him. At least...Robyn thought he missed. Then she saw one of the homeless men seem to fold in on himself, his eyes big and angry and mystified as his head dropped into his hands like a toppling stone. He died clutching it while the other pa.s.sengers jumped away from the spillage of blood like a flock of frightened animals scenting an unseen predator in their midst.

Robyn was numb. Somebody's elbow slammed into her shoulder, knocking her back into her seat. She tried to move, but the press of bodies was too great.

Eruption.

Kage turned back, his black gla.s.ses ribbed with droplets of crimson.

He smiled. Smiled and showed her his tiny yellow cattish teeth.

Robyn screamed, her whole body agonized with the noise. She screamed and twisted against the frightened flock of pa.s.sengers until arms--Charlie's arms-suddenly took her from behind and she folded but was unable to slump to the floor like the dead man. Dead man. She looked again at Kage--really she had never stopped--and the site of him tore a new scream her throat and she began to thrash but the arms around her were too strong and all she managed to do was bash her skull repeatedly against Charlie's chin until he grunted and the rapid impacts began to make darkness leak into her eyes like ink.

"Robyn," said Kage with that cattish smile.

Robyn stopped and tried to kick out, twisting in Charlie's arms, the need to survive so strong she could do nothing to stop herself. Charlie was human. Charlie could be harmed. She thought about that and decided she desperately needed to land the bra.s.s knuckles in a vulnerable spot. SING, she thought. Solo plexus, instep, nose or groin. The streets had taught her well. Yet right now she simply could not think, could not stop twisting and trying to escape.

Still holding her son with practically no effort at all, Kage stepped over the headless dead man and reached for someone in a business suit who had clambered against the sub wall to escape the chaos. Kage grabbed the man by the cheek, racking the man's skull against the wall over and over until the spattered shatterproof gla.s.s broke and the man's head crumpled apart like a relic in Kage's hand. "Robyn," he growled as he continued to pound the remainder of the skull, even as the rest of the body broke away against the dented tin can wall.

Robyn stopped fighting, yet her body continued to vibrate and sweat and heave with the fear and the endless nightmare.

Kage dropped what he held--crushed bone, red tissue, little more than that-and turned his attention fully on her. Shaking the gore off his hands, he peeled off his gla.s.ses. The naked black burning eyes on her were worse than the sight of the mashed head and body of the second man. I won't look, she promised herself, I...will...not...look, G.o.dd.a.m.nit!

And yet she did, drawn as if by a wire to Kage's face, those holes through eternity that pa.s.sed for eyes. She felt the room constrict around her to the size of those eyes, those immortal, utterly alien eyes.

Kage blinked as his concentration was broken by the whimpers ringing out. Robyn had been spared being sucked down that d.a.m.ned black hole by a woman trying to crawl between them to the far side of the train on her hands and knees. She was sloshing through the blood and bodies scattered across the floor. What does she expect to do?

Robyn thought numbly. Escape? She wanted to laugh at the woman and tell her what a d.a.m.ned fool she was.

But then Kage, her Danny still balanced expertly on his shoulder, reached down and grabbed the woman by the spine as if she had a handle, lifted her up, and slammed her down into the muck of the dead men. The woman stopped trying to escape but she didn't stop the whimpering. Again Kage wrenched her up by the cord of her spin. But this time, instead of slamming her into the floor again, he bit through the crazed flay of the woman's hair and into the back of her neck. Robyn heard two things at once: an audible crunch that echoed about the small s.p.a.ce like a thunderclap and a m.u.f.fled "Jesus," in her ear from Charlie.

And then the body of the woman dropped lifelessly to the floor at Kage's feet.

Kage looked up, all b.l.o.o.d.y smiles and hypnotic gaze, but his feral charms were useless against her this time.

Robyn laughed as she felt the room spin out of control and all feeling left her body at once. She heard rather than felt the bra.s.s knuckles clunk to the floor at her feet. She knew Charlie's hands were on her, constricting her, but she couldn't feel them. She couldn't feel anything.

It was as if she were being suspended in the dark from some great far point, unable to touch the ground.

Kage growled as he approached her, his spittle full of blood and bones. And then Robyn's world turned black as she escaped Kage for another place.

18.

She came to very slowly. She was lying on a strange bed in a strange room. There were elephants painted on silk shoji screens and she remembered that was a sign of good luck. Except she had an enormous headache beating at all sides of her skull, as if the elephants had been trotting through her head. Or rather--as if she had had one too many vodkas before going to bed. Except she had not. She had not worked tonight. She had not drunk. She had not slept. She had been on the subway with Danny...and then...

She suddenly sat bolt upright and the motion was too much for her aching head and a wave of nausea overcame her. Robyn turned her head and vomited all over the side of the bed she was lying on. Then she choked and wiped her mouth on the silk spread. The vomiting was terrible but at least it cleared her head somewhat. She could think and she could remember.

She always threw up when Kage turned his will on her like that.

Kage...

Then she recalled everything, the nightmare onboard the subway, the blood-slathered nightmare that walked like a man. She shuddered uncontrollably when she thought about the thing. Thing. It didn't deserve to be called a man, an animal or anything else. It wasn't even a he. Just a thing. An It.

Kage the It. The horrible, immortal It.

She nearly laughed at that musing, then wondered what the f.u.c.k was so funny about death and vampires. She looked around the room, trying to anchor herself in the now, but for a moment she barely recognized her surroundings. She was in a vast bedchamber of the Ryuujuu, the palace of the Dragon King of the Yakuza. She recognized too much of Edward in the furnishings of the place, even in the dark, even in this room she had never slept in before. She studied it, the silk and sapphire bedclothes, the rice paper screens and decorative wall fans and the fragile and heavily veined marble pottery with its a.s.sembly of peac.o.c.k feathers. So much beauty, she reflected, to hide so much ugliness beneath.

She tested herself on her feet. She still felt drunk or sick, like how she felt just before she got a bad case of the flu. Adjoining the room was an elaborate bra.s.s and marble bathroom and--more importantly--a big bottle of painkillers. She took six, then slumped down against the soaking tub, her cheek numbing against the cold bone-white porcelain.

And she wondered. She wondered where Danny was. She wondered if Alek would come for her, trapped as she was in the enemy's camp. She wondered what time it was and how long she had been out. Finally, the wondering was too much and that got her going and creeping to the door to discover what had become of everyone.

The door was unlocked and no one appeared to be in the hall outside.

But Robyn knew she was being watched. Edward was always watching.

He and Kage. They trusted no one. She wandered down a hall. Now she recognized the wing of the house she had been deposited in. Taking a connecting hallway down to a flight of stairs, she wound her way to the ground floor and headed for the study. Along the way she pa.s.sed the foyer and checked the front door. Locked. Unsurprised by that, she went on into Edward's study.