"You mean," I said, "we need to go after them."

"Yes and no. From what I can tell they're operating in squads of two to four men. We don't know how many squads there are or where they're based. Best guess is in Opus Dei's headquarters."

"I agree," I said. "The headquarters is also a residential facility. It's the logical site. But we can't make an a.s.sault on the building. It's too well fortified and too public for us to do it without being caught."

"Agreed," Rogue said. "But if we try to go after them one at a time, they still keep the element of surprise. I figure we have to draw them out. Get them to come after a large group of us with all they've got. I have a plan in mind."

He laid it out to us. He intended to move fast on it before any more of our kind got killed. Boiled down to its bare essentials, Rogue wanted a decisive battle between us and them, one that the vampires intended to win. The risk was, we could lose and most of New York's vampires would perish at one time.

We had the rest of tonight to get everything in place for the showdown. After my lesson Rogue said we'd head to Lucifer's Laundromat to bring that bunch into our D-day mission.

But he had something for me to do: I needed to run our scheme past my mother.

Oh, goody.

Benny came back inside the bar. She said she had told J about the Intrepid Intrepid. She added that for J, he sounded excited by the report.

That task done, we all headed to a nearby parking lot. On the sidewalk, out in the dark, Benny was bouncing all over the place with excitement. Rogue told her that her trike had arrived. She was like a kid on Christmas morning.

Sam had come along, but I kept my distance from the laconic, good-looking Texan. He offered to show Benny how to drive her new Harley. Once we got to the parking lot she started whooping. She ran over and got on. She probably shouldn't have worn those white linen pants, but she didn't seem to care.

Soon her head and Sam's were close together. Then he was sitting behind her on the bike. I heard her giggling, clearly enjoying his attention.

I glanced over at them and smiled. I had the feeling that her crush on Martin was about to become a fading memory. And Sam had a more willing companion in Benny than he did in me. There could be a happy ending in the making with those two. I crossed my fingers.

As for myself, I had a lot of fun with Rogue. He showed me the basics of keeping my shovelhead upright and not making a d.a.m.ned fool of myself. Now that I was in the club, he kept his hands to himself and treated me like a sister. Crude and uncouth as he was, I even started to like him a little.

I felt a twinge of regret. I had drunk the Guinness. I had hormones in overdrive. Rogue was the epitome of the male animal. I knew that s.e.x was not love. Men-nearly every single last one of them, human and vampire both-routinely separated the two concepts. Women usually mistook s.e.x and love for the same thing.

I liked to think I knew the difference. At least at the moment, the alcohol in my blood and my inhibitions forgotten, I figured s.e.x, no love involved, might be an okay thing to do.

But the fates were looking out for me, and I didn't fall into sin. I didn't even stumble. So why didn't I feel better about it?

Because I was a vampire, that's why.

The rudiments of operating my Harley learned, I was ready for my maiden voyage. Sam and Benny, Rogue, Cormac, and I took off, engines roaring, through the deserted streets of the city around three a.m. We headed crosstown toward Second Avenue near St. Marks on the Bowery. That was Audrey's usual hangout. Tonight she was otherwise occupied, but Rogue needed to incorporate the Lucifer's Laundromat vampires into his battle plan.

The ride made me euphoric. My blood was high when we parked out front, the club's big neon sign drenching us all in its red glow. Rogue paid the bouncer at the door an extra fifty to watch the bikes. We went inside.

I soon found out our timing was either very good or very bad, depending on one's predilection for debauchery.

The competing blood sports teams, the Chasers and the Racers, had just returned. They had gone out on their nightly hunt right after midnight. Fortunately, no vampire hunters pursued them tonight as they searched the streets of the East Village, the Bowery, Little Italy, Chinatown, and Soho for victims.

According to the rules of their compet.i.tion, the team that brought back the most humans-young and good-looking for the most part-won the race. The winning team got to dine on the blood of the captives in the opulent feeding rooms that had been created beneath the street-level club. If hunting was good, the winners invited the losers to join them. If only a few captives were found, the losers were just that-hungry losers.

Tonight the Racers had won, but both teams had a good night. Almost thirty pretty women and handsome young men had been brought to the feeding room. They offered no resistance. Mesmerized as they were by the vampires, and in the throes of a forgetfulness that would erase their memories, by tomorrow this awful captivity would be for them, at worst, a bad dream.

They would, of course, discover two small puncture wounds on their throats. They would wonder how they got them. They would feel a little weak, hungover; their heads would pound, and they would try to figure out where they had been and how they had gotten so drunk. They would never know.

No harm, no foul. Few of these captives were ever bitten twice. The vampires considered this herding of innocent civilians to be harmless fun and a necessary source of fresh blood. I considered the game to be exploitive and wrong. At least, I did when I was sober.

Flushed with excitement from my first solo ride, I came into the vampire club with the others. I joined them at the bar for a quick drink. In this case it was a Jameson, straight up, no ice. I ordered it from habit and with a certain irony, since it was Fitz's drink of choice.

I poured it down my throat and asked for another. The whiskey's heat coursed through my veins. I scented blood in the air. A hunger deep within me began to rage. I told myself to be strong and to wait until I returned to my apartment. The blood-bank pouches in my refrigerator would sate me.

Then Rogue called everyone in the club together. Although most members were anxious to get below and begin their orgy, two dozen vampires gathered close to us and listened attentively to Rogue's idea.

He told them it would be dangerous. He told them why we had to do it.

To a vampire, they agreed.

The captain of the Chasers, the once-terrified Martin, was still limping a little from his stake in the b.u.t.t. He had avoided looking at Benny since the moment we walked in the door. But this handsome vampire, the one she had mooned over for weeks, was already a thing of the past for her. Sam's arm lay around her shoulders. She was contented as a cat.

Along with pretty red-haired Gerry, captain of the Racers, Martin invited us to join the teams in the lounge below for the feast.

Quickly accepting the dinner invite, Benny, Sam, and Cormac headed for the stairs. Gerry looked meaningfully at Rogue. She'd had s.e.x with him before and she obviously wanted him again.

He shook his head. "I can't stay. I have a date," he told her.

I looked at him with surprised eyes. "A date?" I asked.

He gave me an insouciant wink. "Yeah, a date. That pretty little girl with the long blond hair, the one on the stoop over by Tompkins Square Park-"

I stiffened. My face froze.

"Now, Daphne, don't go all schoolmarmish on me. She liked me. She liked what I did. I liked her. She'll be one of our kind by morning. That's the way of the vampire."

It was. There was nothing I could say to him.

What I did say was yes to Martin's invitation. I should have refused, but I was hungrier now, fairly fainting from lack of blood. The Jameson made my head spin. In the dim recesses of my rational mind, I told myself that in the refurbished s.p.a.ce below the club, elegantly appointed and designed for one purpose, was the vampire life I had fought against. It was the addiction I fought every day. That night I am ashamed to say, I didn't hesitate.

I went with Martin down the stairs.

Once we reached the subterranean rooms I heard groans of delight and moans of ecstasy. I saw naked bodies tangled together in twos and threes and fours. The orgy had begun.

I picked out a young man with long wavy hair. His jeans fit him like a second skin. His shirt was off. He had six-pack abs. He was around twenty-five years old, with soft brown eyes and a fashionable day's growth of beard.

I walked over and smiled at him. He smiled back, although his eyes had a faraway look. He saw me but he didn't see me. I took his hand. I led him to a wide divan and laid him down, silken covers beneath us. He tipped back his throat and turned his head. I felt my fangs grow long.

The skin of his throat tasted clean and fresh. His blood was salty and rich. He made a lovely meal.

To my relief, no remorse followed. I didn't take him s.e.xually, although he was willing. I just drank his blood. I left him to join the others if he wished.

I walked back up the stairs, my dignity untarnished, my vows to Darius unbroken. I felt powerful and strong.

In fact, I felt strong enough to make the call I dreaded: to Mar-Mar.

Chapter 18.

"I have been here before,But when or how I cannot tell."-Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Sudden Light"

Outside the vampire club, beneath the red glow of the neon sign, I called my mother on my cell. She answered on the first ring, sounding rushed, as she always did.

I laid out Rogue's plan to stop the vampire hunters. We needed Mar-Mar's approval. For one thing, she was our boss. For another, she had been a major force in the vampire community for centuries-here in New York and in the entire world.

My mother asked a few questions while I spoke. She seemed to listen carefully to what I said. When I asked her what she thought, she didn't speak for a moment, then replied that she thought the plan had merit.

She realized immediately that we needed her to leak the information to Opus Dei. Those in the Church who were directing the vampire hunters had to fall for the trap that Rogue had concocted. They needed to believe they had uncovered a secret meeting of New York's vampires. It would take place at Strawberry Fields in Central Park tomorrow night at midnight. The witching hour. The hour of their deaths, or ours. My mother's carefully maintained network of informants and double agents could deliver the message; of that I had no doubt.

Just then my cell beeped. I saw that I had a text message waiting. It had to be Darius. My heart lurched with joy. I asked my mother to hold a moment. I accessed the message. It read simply: SOS J 23.

I deciphered the text message from Darius right away. SOS-the cla.s.sic distress signal. J equaled J, my boss; 23-Twenty-third Street In other words, Darius had been grabbed by J and was being held in the Flatiron Building.

I hurriedly got my mother back on the line.

"Where's Darius, Mother? What have you done with him?" I screamed into the phone, then leaned against the building, distraught. My body sagged against the wall.

She denied everything, of course. She said she didn't have Darius. I supposed she thought she wasn't lying. It was a technicality; J did. He had to be following her orders. She was his boss too.

"Why have you taken him, Mother, why?" I cried out, caught between rage and tears.

She was silent for a moment; then she spoke: "You don't have to approve of me. You don't have to like me. But you have to understand that I am your mother. I do have your best interests at heart."

I became cold and brittle like ice. Fear gripped me deep and hard. She would kill Darius as casually as she would swat a fly if she thought she could get away with it. And she would do it believing it was for my own good.

"If you harm him," I said, my voice hard and heavy as rock, "I will no longer be your daughter."

After I ended the phone call, I cursed myself silently. My reflex reaction to confront my mother had given away that I had learned of the abduction. My threat to cut her out of my life might stop her from proceeding with whatever she had in mind. Or she might accelerate her plans, for she knew I would save Darius if I could.

Time had become my enemy. I had to move quickly. I could not transform out here on the street. Even in the depth of night, people walked around the East Village. A half dozen could see me right now.

I had no alternative. I hurried to my motorcycle. The Harley would carry me to Twenty-third Street nearly as fast as flying. I prayed I wouldn't wipe out as I opened the accelerator and raced through the streets at an unsafe speed.

I stayed upright, ran every light, hit eighty miles an hour on the avenue. I reached the Flatiron Building in minutes. I jumped off the bike. I took a chain and padlock from one saddlebag and hurriedly fastened the bike to a no-parking sign. The late hour and lack of pa.s.sersby in this commercial neighborhood would be the greater theft deterrent, but I wouldn't make it easy for anyone to take the bike.

I ran to the lobby doors. My hands pushed against the gla.s.s and met resistance. The building was locked.

I slunk back into the shadows. I didn't dare alert the guard. He might recognize me from the previous night. He would never let me in a second time. Worse, he might call the police. I couldn't afford the time to explain what I was doing or contact Lieutenant Johnson to vouch for me.

I had no other option. I'd have to transform.

I ducked into the nearby subway stairs, hurriedly removed my clothes, and let the change begin. Energy swept me up into a vortex of light. Reason drained away. Animal instinct took over. A moment later I sprang forth as the beast I am beneath my human skin.

Moving awkwardly, my hands now claws, I managed to stash my clothes in the other Harley saddlebag, then leaped up into the air, flapping my great black wings, rising along the stone walls of the building.

The Darkwings' phony offices were on the third floor. J and his people would need to move quickly from one place to another. Chances were they had a private connection between the floors to give them fast access to the dummy facility without using the public elevator or stairs. I guessed that J's real office was either a floor above or below. I looked for lighted windows on the second and fourth floors.

All windows on the second floor were dark and blank like blind eyes.

On the fourth floor several were illuminated. I cautiously approached the closest one. I peered in and saw an empty room. I flew to another and quickly drew back. A young woman sat at a computer monitor, typing on a keyboard. I moved on, my nerves winding ever tighter. I peered into another window, then another. Finally I approached the light emanating from the office occupying the apex of the old building, which was shaped like a wedge of cheese.

I thought this window a too-obvious choice, since it sat directly above J's Darkwing office, the one I had been in frequently on the third floor. I felt little hope that I would find Darius there. But even before I reached the window I heard a moan.

I flew to the fifth floor, and, clinging upside down to the wall, I walked down the rough stones to the fourth so I could look in the top of the window.

Darius sat on a chair, his hands handcuffed, ropes wound around his body. Two men in suits flanked him. One held a wooden stake in his hand. Guarded in this way and securely bound, Darius could neither transform nor escape.

I saw J standing to one side of the room, speaking words I could not hear. Darius did not respond, his head hanging toward his chest. I didn't know if he was conscious. Blood had trickled down from his mouth and stained his shirt.

Then he stirred, his face raising a little. Something subtle in his expression changed. I thought he might somehow have realized I was there.

I had seen enough. In a fluid motion I swung my huge bat body around and kicked through the windowpane with my feet. Gla.s.s shattered and fell to the sidewalk below. I landed on the floor, my wings arched, my fangs showing, my claws extended.

I ignored J and tore the stake from the hands of the startled man who held it. I clubbed him with a vicious blow, and he went down. Urine darkened the pants of the other man. He trembled, then ran from the room before I could grab him.

J stayed where he had been standing, not attempting to move.

"Release him," I hissed.

"I told you not to trust him," J said. "You didn't listen. Now he has betrayed you."

I looked at Darius. He shook his head and said, "No."

J laughed. "So why, Mr. della Chiesa, Mr. Darius of the Church, were you in Murray Hill at Thirty-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue?"

I knew the address immediately, same as J did. We both almost died in that building. "Opus Dei headquarters?" I asked.

J focused his blue marble eyes on me and said, "We've had a tail on him since we released him the other night. We picked him up coming out of the building a short while ago."

"Is this true?" I asked Darius, my voice a growl, the blood beginning to pound in my skull.

"No," he said in a voice barely above a whisper. "It isn't what it looks like. I swear." His mouth was bloodied, his lips barely able to move.

"So why were you there?" I asked him.

Darius shook his head. "Not to betray you."