Dr. Greene had leftover pizza, too, and Rafael, not thinking of the possible consequences, chose that over the chicken soup.

"Maybe not the best idea," the doctor commented, but as Rafael had already stuffed half a slice down his throat, it was too late to do anything about it.

The flavors were incredible. He hadn't tasted anything in four years. Tomatoes, pepperoni, bread, cheese, garlic . . . he had just enough time to be swept up in the incredible richness before the pizza came back up.

He heaved it into Dr. Greene's toilet, then rinsed out his mouth and washed his face. When he returned to the small kitchenette, the doctor was holding up a can of chicken noodle soup.

"Are you ready to listen to your doctor now?" he said.

Rafael winced. "Yeah, I guess so."

So he had chicken soup. As he sipped the broth he found the same kind of intensity of flavor he'd found in the pizza, even though the soup was bland and unexciting. At least it would have been to a mortal.

To his reawakened taste buds it had layers and depths he'd never imagined. Colors, even. He tried a noodle and the starchy thickness lingered on his tongue, too heavy for now. He left the rest of the noodles in the bowl.

The broth stayed down, though it was iffy for a time. He drank water with it, suddenly discovering he was unbelievably thirsty. One careful sip at a time, he drank nearly a quart of Evian out of Dr. Greene's fridge.

"Don't give any of the kids pizza," Rafael suggested.

"Yeah," said the doctor. "You should have thought of that."

"Yeah, I guess I should have." He finished off his last water bottle, looking longingly at the pizza. "Maybe tomorrow. It tasted damned good for about five seconds, there."

"Maybe rice tomorrow," said the doctor. "I don't think pizza would be a good idea for at least a week."

The quirk of his eyebrow told Rafael that a week was probably a generous estimate. "Well, hell, what's the point of being mortal if you can't eat pizza?"

Dr. Greene smiled. "It's two hours until daylight. Care to go for a walk?"

Again, Rafael found his throat full of unexpected tears. "Yes.

Yes, I would."

The beautiful night colors were gone, but of course he'd known they would be. In their place was just darkness. The night seemed too quiet, as well. It took him some time to realize what was missing. There'd always been a sort of whispering undercurrent of thought, nothing discernible, but a sort of half-sensed, white noise that was as close as he'd ever come to telepathy. He'd barely realized it was there last night, but now he noticed its absence.

And the blood lust was gone. He could walk among the people on the streets without thinking of them as a potential meal. He couldn't hear their hearts beating or see their heat in a nimbus around them.

They were only people. For the first time in a long time the odors of skin and perfumes, soap, cotton, wool, and leather, were not drowned out by the smell of blood.

"It's incredible," he breathed.

"You're okay?" the doctor asked.

"Yes. It's even better than I remembered it."

Dr. Greene nodded. "I thought it might be overwhelming at first."

"No. It's just . . ." He trailed off. "I don't know how to describe it." He sniffed, feeling tears gather yet again. Maybe the doctor could give him something for that.

Dr. Greene clapped him gently on the shoulder. "It's all right."

"So," Rafael ventured, "where's a good place to see the sunrise?"

Sasha careered blindly through the night, anger and despair searing her throat. She didn't know how to make them go away. She didn't know why they were there. She thought about Brendan and Vince, who had never come back from Atlantic City, but it was only a fleeting thought. Manhattan reeked of Julian's wards. She was surprised the humans couldn't smell it, the air was so thick.

Besides, at that moment, she didn't give a shit about Ialdaboth's minions. Let them come. She would rip them to pieces with her bare hands.

Darkness was her realm. She knew how to move silently through it but didn't bother to try, half-running through the crowds with no awareness of where she was going. Mortals bounced off her, swearing. She made no effort to hide herself.

Finally she stopped, in a dark place not far from Central Park.

She could see the park, the people in it even in the night, most of them not on honest business. Not at two a.m. She looked at her watch.

Make that four a.m. She'd have to be careful. Dawn was far too close, and she wasn't sure where the nearest entrance to the Underground was.

Clumsy. Why had she let herself get so distracted that she'd lost her bearings? She wasn't even sure why the rage of emotion had overtaken her.

Or maybe she was sure. Maybe she was damned sure but refused to admit it, even to herself.

He had done it. The stupid bastard. He was mortal now, and there was no turning back for either of them. He certainly couldn't become a vampire again-or could he? Dr. Greene hadn't addressed that question.

Did it matter? Would it matter to Rafael?

Probably it wouldn't. He simply had no desire to be anything other than a boring, ridiculous, fragile, death-doomed mortal.

And she still loved him.

There was no getting around that, no matter how hard she tried.

She loved the pathetic bastard, and he'd made it impossible for either of them to do anything about it.

If she didn't love him, if she just enjoyed rolling around naked with him once in a while, it wouldn't be such a problem. She could have dealt with his mortality, somehow managed that scenario. They would have seen each other now and then, enjoyed the sex. And one day she would have come by and found he was too old. She would have sat next to him and chatted, perhaps, and that would have been the last time she saw him. Or perhaps she would have come by his house, looking for him, only to find it empty of all but his spirit, knocking around inside the four walls, waiting for her to come say goodbye.

But even that was overly romantic. Even when she tried to summon the image of an intermittent relationship based solely on lust, her true emotions leaked through. She loved him, and there was no way she could stay with him, now that he'd given up his immortality.

Except it was beginning to look as if there was no way she could go on without him.

How many times had she been in love in her life? She couldn't remember. Not because her memory had gone bad, like Lucien's, but because, in most cases, she'd simply chosen to forget. But each carefully constructed hole in her memory masked a hole in her heart that had never been allowed to heal. She was riddled with them.

A person could fall in love any number of times in three hundred years. A heart could be shattered to pieces equally as many times.

She couldn't let it happen again. She couldn't bear it. Not with Rafael.

Yet, she thought as she curled up next to a brick wall in the alley, there seemed to be no way around it. No matter what she did, she was doomed to hurt over this one.

She sat there for a long time, head pillowed on her knees, trying not to think but thinking anyway, about Rafael-and about Gaelin and Alexei and Walks-with-the-Wind-at-his-Back. The memories were too much to handle all at once-too much even one at a time-and she wept into her folded arms. No one noticed her, as she huddled in a shadow. People walked by her on the sidewalk, many of them two-by- two. She couldn't bear to look.

Much later, when she did finally lift her head, her heartache was swallowed by cold fear.

The sky was blue.

Not cerulean, but indigo. Not quite daylight but so close it made her breath come fast. Lost in the awful surge of her emotions, she'd also lost her awareness of the creeping nearness of the Sleep. She could feel it now, dragging at her eyelids, slowing her limbs. She forced herself onto the sidewalk, forced herself to run.

But she couldn't remember where to find the nearest entrance to the Underground. It had to be close-in that alley? Or that one?-but her frantic search seemed to take her in circles.

Finally, as the shadows around her began to fade, she felt it. The crazed hammering of her heart slowed and she honed her senses toward the soft hum. The doorway wasn't far.

And then she sensed something else. Mortals. They were following her. At least it wasn't vampires, Dark Children come to follow her to the Underground or torture the knowledge of its whereabouts out of her.

She had been so careless. Where had her three hundred years of experience gotten her tonight?

Into deep shit, apparently.

A group of five mortals passed and surrounded her. It was too late to slip by them in the near-invisibility she could have mustered had she been paying attention. There were too many to put compulsion on.

She could have overpowered them one by one, but she simply didn't have time.

She ran. Preternatural speed gave her an advantage, and she reached the door to the Underground before they did. But the light was coming too fast. She could feel it on her skin. A hot itch had begun on the back of her hands.

She found the door and pulled at it. It wouldn't open.

"No," she breathed, too shocked to produce much more than a whisper. She grabbed the handle, jerked it, hauled against it with her full weight, but it wouldn't budge. Had she come too late? Had they locked this access door already? Or was it an abandoned entrance, no longer accessible?

Breathing fast and hard with panic, she turned, putting her back to the door. Her five would-be assailants made a line in front of her. Kids.

Stinking asshole kids. Why couldn't the damned humans raise their offspring better? These little shits should have been home eating oatmeal or something, not lurking in the alleys trying to mug vampires.

One of them drew a knife and held it up, letting the pale dawn glint off the silver blade. A beam of light had entered the alley and lay on the ground at her feet. She stared at it, barely interested in the punk and his knife. Her skin was burning.

The kid with the knife took a step toward her. "You got a purse, bitch?"

"Do I look like I got a fucking purse?" Sasha spat back.

"That's too bad for you." He took another step forward, reaching for her. His friends, laughing, egged him on. Her face hurt. She was going to die. Railing against the inevitable, she lashed out, hissing, spittle flying. In a snarl worthy of the most vicious of carnivores, she let them watch her fangs spring free.

"Beat it, you little punk," she said, her voice thin and laced with compulsion. "I'll rip your throat out."

The boy's expression changed from haughty to frightened in the space of a breath. He took a step back, the knife lowering.

"Shit," said one of the other kids. "She's got fangs!"

"Forget that," one of the others put in, also stepping away from Sasha. "Look at her face."

The kid with the knife squinted at her. Sasha could feel the heat on her face, the sun touching her even though she stood in a shadow.

"Shit!" said the kid, stumbling backward, his eyes now round with terror. "Is that smallpox?"

The kid scrubbed his hand on his jacket, then turned and ran, his cohorts pounding after him. Sasha let her head loll against the wall. A sign of the times, she thought, that her fangs only startled them a little, while the threat of biological havoc sent them running to their mommies.

She closed her eyes. The sun was almost up. Just a few more minutes and she would go up like a torch. She tried the door handle again, thinking perhaps she'd been unable to open it out of sheer panic.

It still refused to budge.

Her fear had fled, leaving behind a stoic, resolute calm. She looked around for possible shelter. Had she not been facing the daylight, she could have kicked the door down, but without full dark around her she lacked the strength.

She saw another door. Not a door to the Underground but to a deserted warehouse. It was open. She staggered that way, keeping to the shrinking border of shadow along the sides of the buildings. She made her way through the doorway, into a dark corner, where she pulled slabs of abandoned plywood over her head. An instant later, Sleep swallowed her.

Six.

The doctor took Rafael to Central Park. He'd never been there before-had, in fact, never been to New York City at all. The place intrigued him, once he got over his fascination with the changes in his vision, his hearing, his sense of smell. It was a great deal to assimilate.

They sat together on a park bench waiting for the sun to come up.

Here, in the middle of the city, it was nearly impossible to see the stars, but he could see the slight changes in the color of the sky. The black became paler, then took on a blue tinge. He felt his heart speed up, felt a surge of panic. He took a deep, quick breath to quell it.

"It's okay," said Dr. Greene, his voice soothing.

"Are you sure?"

"I hope so."

Rafael shook his head, scowling. "You really need to work on that confident bedside manner, Doc."

Dr. Greene only chuckled.

But he stayed right there next to him. Under normal conditions Rafael would have felt the older man was too close, their thighs and shoulders brushing, but at that moment, the contact steadied him. He watched the sky turn from blue-black to indigo, from indigo to purple, from purple to deep blue.

"Getting close," Dr. Greene said quietly.

Rafael could only nod. He was too busy fighting the urge to run, to find a darkened house or at least a shadow of some kind. Every previously dead molecule in his body told him it was time to get up off his sorry ass and run like hell. Then another aspect of the situation struck him. He wasn't sleepy.

In his vampiric state, he would have been dragging with exhaustion right now, barely able to keep his eyes open as the Sleep overtook him.

But he was awake and alert, full of adrenaline and ready to jump up and greet his first sunrise in four years. Actually, he couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd seen a sunrise. As a mortal teenager he'd rarely gotten up early enough to see it.

And it came. Slowly, then faster, until suddenly the sky was blue with pink clouds streaking through it. Beams of sunlight laid golden stripes across the grass in front of him. Birds sang in the trees. The park's sidewalks began to fill with people.

He could only stare, marveling at the beauty. The doctor had picked a bench that proved to be in the shadow of a large oak tree, so the sun didn't quite fall on his face, but the light filled his eyes with beauty the likes of which he had forgotten existed.

"You gonna cry again?" Dr. Greene asked.