"Miri, no no!"

"Then help him."

Sarah knelt to the unconscious form, stemmed the bleeding from his jugular with a finger. His eyes were fully rolled back, and he was seizing from blood loss and shock. He had probably five minutes, maybe less.

"We've got to get him downstairs," Miri said. She tossed the gun aside.

Miriam carried his shoulders, Sarah his feet. They took him to the lift in the front hall, squeezed in with him while Leo raced ahead on the stairs. She had the examination table dressed with a sheet by the time they reached the surgery.

He was in deep shock now. "This is going to be a problem," Sarah said. She slapped a pressure bandage on his neck. The flow had dropped by two-thirds. His blood pressure must be almost nothing. "I'm losing him."

Miriam burst into tears, threw herself on him.

"Get her off," Sarah said to Leo.

But when Leo touched her, she threw back her head and howled with an agony beyond anything Sarah had heard from her or anybody ever. She'd never seen her like this, crazy with grief, her emotions like an exploding volcano.

"Leo, have you ever a.s.sisted in a surgery?"

"G.o.d no."

Sarah took Miri's shoulders. "Miri, can you hear me? Miri!"

Slowly, by what looked like tormented inches, a more sane expression returned to her face. "You did not have the right to take him." Her eyes flashed with a ruler's pride. "You did not have the right!"

"Please forgive me," Sarah said.

"Then save him! Save him!"

Sarah stabilized the neck wound, then got them to turn him over on his stomach. The entry point of the bullet was below the heart. If the artery was intact, he might have a chance. She couldn't type his blood, there was no time, so she had to go with O+. She told Leo, "Get me six pints of blood from the fridge. Miri, set him up." While they worked, she went to the cupboard and took out her instruments. She had a complete surgery here, even an extractor for bullets. She had once promised Miri, "If I can get you here, I can fix it, no matter what may befall you."

There was an X-ray machine, but there was no way they could move him to the table now. There was no time. "Scalpel," Sarah said as she swabbed the entry wound with Betadine. A glance told her that Miri had set the blood properly.

If he was really a Keeper of some unknown kind, she was flying almost totally blind. In Sarah's own veins, Miriam's blood functioned like a separate organ. It flowed with Sarah's natural blood, but did not mix with it. It could not. Sarah could not even begin to guess what was going on in this man.

She dissected around the entry wound, opening it wider and wider, snapping orders. "Spreaders!" she called when she reached the rib cage. "Clamp!" she said when she found torn blood vessels.

She could not entirely save the lung, but she managed to isolate the bleeding enough to resect. Time disappeared for her. She concentrated totally, remembering her training and her work experience from so many years ago. Her fingers worked sometimes almost by magic, but for the most part it was her careful training that saw her through this terribly challenging procedure without - she hoped - a serious error.

When she could at last close him up, his blood pressure had risen to 80 over 50 and his pulse was 160. A temperature of just 99 suggested that he was tolerating the transfused blood well. She put him on an electrolyte drip, then got her prescription pad. She wrote for some time, then handed it to Leo. "They'll have all this in the drugstore at Riverside Hospital." "What's the situation?" Miriam asked. Her blood-spattered robe still hung off her naked body. Her face was hollow, her skin gray.

"He's hanging on."

Miriam's face twisted, and she threw herself sobbing into Sarah's arms.

"Oh, baby," Sarah said, "baby, I'm so sorry. I didn't understand. I didn't know . . ."

"There was an attempt to cross the species, recorded in the Books ten conclaves ago. Keepers trying to escape from the need to eat human blood. The result wasn't good. We'd created human beings with the speed and power of Keepers. So we destroyed all the family lines, except one. We found a last survivor about forty years ago. He was destroyed. Apparently he had a son."

"I don't think this is true, Miri. There's no way we could interbreed. We're as different as tigers and cattle, except on the surface."

"You have no idea what our science was capable of - when we had a science."

"What happened to your science?"

Miriam regarded her. She laughed a little, and Sarah sensed a whole hidden history in that laughter, a history of secrets that would never be told. "It was so good to be with him; it was like going back to the one time in all my life that I was truly and deeply happy. Oh, Sarah, I love him so!"

Sarah found herself hoping that the pregnancy was real. Because if this was true, and it was a healthy fetus, then maybe the great hope of Miriam's life was being realized.

But still Sarah saw Paul to be mortal danger, and Leo was stationed to watch his monitors.

"How about your hunger?" Miriam asked her.

"I got some blood," she said. But Leo's hollow expression told them both that it had not been enough.

Sarah took Miriam back upstairs, to their private room. They turned on the video system so she could watch the infirmary every moment.

She lay back on the little sofa where she so often read and worked. Sarah knelt beside it. "Please forgive me, Miri."

Miriam gazed at her. "I forgive you, child," she said. "But you must help me with this."

"Miri, he hates you. And he's a killing machine."

"He has a heart, Sarah, a huge heart. I want my chance to try to reach his heart."

"When he wakes up, Miri, G.o.d knows what'll happen."

"I want you to help me. Both of you."

"Of course we will. That goes without saying."

Miriam went over and picked up the encaustic painting of her lost Eumenes. "I left my happiness in another world."

"We have happiness."

She smiled a little."I'm the last of my kind, you know - the last Keeper."

"There are others."

Miriam looked at her. "Living in holes? That's not being a Keeper - a true ruler of mankind." She gazed at the portrait of the handsome young man in his white toga. "I'm lost in time." She put it down and came back to Sarah. "But I have a baby. I have hope."

Sarah did not know what Miriam had in her belly, and she wasn't sure she wanted to find out. If this much-shattered heart took another blow, it was even possible that Miriam would join her peers in the shadows, living like an animal and waiting - no doubt hoping - to die.

"I want a pregnancy test."

Sarah played for time. "As soon as Paul recovers."

"No, no," Miriam said. "You'll do it immediately."

"I need the resources of the infirmary for him."

Miriam came to her. "You can do the test and we both know it."

Sarah took her in her arms.

"I have to know," Miriam whispered. Sarah hugged her tight.

They stayed like that, in the declining light of the afternoon.

Leo paced to the wall and back to the door, and she remembered chocolate icebox pie and blinis and blintzes and beluga. She went to the back windows and wiped off her sweat and remembered Mommy's chicken fricasee and Aunt Madeline's mola.s.ses cookies. She slapped the wall and hugged herself and sweated rivers and remembered rib eyes at Sparks and smoked salmon at Petrossian.

But all that really mattered was the raw, delicious taste in her mouth and the smell in her nose of blood, blood, blood.

When she'd drunk his blood, she'd drunk his soul, and she was drunk on it and she had to have more of it.

Her jeans were soaked with pee, her underarms and hair were awash, and she felt as if she couldn't breathe and couldn't think because she needed more, she wasn't finished - she wanted a lovely bowl of cherry cobbler, but she needed blood.

She went to the black front door, put her hand on the gleaming bra.s.s handle, and she pushed out into the flaring evening. The city was its ordinary self, humming its indifferent hum, traveling down its million uncaring roads.

She was a hunter now, off to the hills. She ranged down the turning street and to the secret steps that led down to FDR Drive.

A car screamed past three feet away, then another and another. Leo darted out into the roadway. Two more cars came speeding toward her. She leaped forward just as one almost grazed her back. Then she was on the far side of FDR Drive, climbing the iron railing and going along the narrow promenade.

A full moon hung over the surging East River, its glow touching the black, uneasy waves.

She was absolutely frantic; she'd never felt anything remotely like this. By light-years, this clawing, flaming inner agony was the most intense sensation she had ever felt in her life. She ached the way people ache when they can't get enough air.

She dashed along, searching for a derelict like a pig snuffling for truf-fles. She was strung worse than she'd ever known anybody to be strung. This made you wild; it made you want to run and never stop; it seethed like ants under your skin; it pumped pure desperation straight into your brain.

As she ran, she thought of home, the imposing house in Greenwich, her taffeta-and-lace bedroom, her daddy probably right now watching Monday night football, her mom reading.

Home was lost to her, home and all she had known of the peace of life. Her feet throbbed; her heart raced; her skin felt as if it were being sandpapered. The taste of Paul's blood lingered in her mouth, its scent in her nostrils. All she could think about was blood, the way it tasted, the way it felt going down, the way it had cooled the fire that was consuming her from within.

Then she saw a clump of shadow on a moonlit bench. She went up to it. Just a ma.s.s of rags. Good. Man or woman? Man - not so good, they were stronger.

She sat on the end of the bench nearest the head. Her hands almost shook too much, but she managed to get a cigarette lit. She'd quit two months ago, but that was before she met Miriam. Miriam smoked all the time. She didn't care. Why should she? Keepers were immune to cancer.

She dragged hard, wishing that the smoke was stronger. You could get a nice hit smoking horse in a cigarette, but she didn't have any horse. She had to calm down on her own.

She had the fleam and she had the victim. All she needed now was the guts. She looked down at a shock of dark, oily, lice-ridden hair. She knew he was dirty and that he probably stank to high heaven, but all she could smell was the blood, which was so good that she kept sucking in air and leaning closer.

She took the fleam out, fumbled the blade open - giving herself a nasty little nick in the process. Before she had even sucked it, the wound closed.

A d.a.m.n miracle.

Stealthily, she shuffled the rags aside. There was the neck. Not an old neck. She knew she was supposed to take them back to the house, burn the remnant in the furnace and all. But how could she get some drunk back across FDR Drive and up the narrow steps that led to their property? The business with the lady, whom she'd found on Fifty-fifth Street and First Avenue, had been difficult enough.

She held the fleam close to the neck. She couldn't see any veins. She dared not touch the guy. She tightened her grip on the instrument. Then she plunged it down. There was resistance; then it went sliding in - way deeper than it should. In fact, she almost plunged it all the way in.

She was s.n.a.t.c.hing for it as he rose screaming through clenched teeth out of his pile of newspapers and rags. He was face-to-face with her, his teeth bared.

He was a kid. Maybe younger than she was. He had long eyelashes, and the moonlight shone in his dark eyes. His hands went to his neck, his head c.o.c.ked - and a flood of blood came out of his mouth.

Instinct made Leo go for it, but it was all over the ground already, splattering and splashing like spilled milk on the kitchen floor. He went to his feet, still screaming behind his clenched teeth, and began jerking and staggering, his b.l.o.o.d.y fingers slipping on the b.l.o.o.d.y hilt of the fleam.

And then, incredibly, she recognized him. Not from the club, not from her present life at all. She recognized him from prep school, from Andover. It was Benno Jones. He'd been a performance artist. His family was wealthy but very conservative. Obviously, there'd been an estrangement.

She was confused. But also now, desperate. She lunged at him; she got her fingers around the fleam and yanked it as hard as she could. It came partially out, dragging red gristle, followed by a gurgling black flow of blood.

She latched on like a starving jungle leech. The blood seemed to flow into her almost automatically, pouring down her throat into her belly. Benno staggered along, his back bent, his hands made into fists, his barely-remembered acquaintance inexplicably sucking the life out of him.

He went down like a staggered bull, to his knees. She pushed him over and dragged his head into her lap, bending the neck to give herself the best possible angle. Then she put her lips around the bubbling gouge and sucked as hard as it was possible for her to suck. She got lots more blood, and from his lips a gentle question, "Leo?"

She did it again and it worked again. A third time and it worked, but less well. The fourth time, it hardly worked at all.

But he wasn't getting any thinner or lighter. He was still normal looking, except he was very dead. She tried again, sucking with all her might.

Nothing happened. She sat back on her haunches. Only Miriam could dry them out. He was way too heavy to carry. He felt like a sack of lead.

Then she saw, some distance down the promenade, a man walking about ten dogs. They were coming toward her and the dogs were going completely berserk. You couldn't hear the man, but you could see him yelling at them. Their voices were a riot of barking and howling, and they were struggling so furiously to reach the kill that their paws were digging dust up off the pavement. They looked as if they had exhaust.

She managed to get Benno to the railing and, with a ma.s.sive, grunting effort, to roll him over and into the East River. Then she ran like h.e.l.l, and as she ran, she began also to feel wonderful.

Behind her, the dogs quickly consumed any small trace of Benno that she had left behind. She could hear the dog walker now, still screaming himself hoa.r.s.e.

Her body seemed almost ready to lift off. She could run and run without even getting tired. Incredibly, it felt as if there were somebody inside her, a living presence that was not her but was friendly to her and part of her. It was a grand way to feel as if you had your own angel in you.

She did not see the solitary figure on the high cliff that separated Miriam's neighborhood from the Drive, who had been watching her from the beginning. She did not see it put a small instrument away, perhaps a set of binoculars, perhaps a camera.

She did not see it as it got into a car, nor did she see the car drive swiftly away.

NINETEEN.

Trapped Miriam raced through the house screaming for Leo, her voice shrill and shattering. Sarah was terrified. She'd never seen her like this. She was crazed with fury; there was no other way to describe her. Then those awful, inhuman eyes were suddenly glaring at Sarah.

"Miri, calm down. Please, Miri!"

Miriam shot across the sitting room and grabbed her and slammed her against the wall. "Where in h.e.l.l were you?"

"I was with you, Miri!"

"You let her out, G.o.dd.a.m.n you! You careless, foolish - "