Start out easy, then get to the tough stuff.

"Yes," said Daniel.

"What did you think of her?"

"I thought she was pretty. But too young to be of much use to me."

The doctor's eyebrows compressed a bit. Tara bit her lip. Daniel didn't sound like a ten-year-old boy at all. "What do you mean by that?" the doctor went on.

"I mean that she didn't seem like she knew much of anything.

She was twenty-something, just a kid I guess. She hadn't been around."

"And you had?"

"A hell of a lot more than she had."

"But you grew to like her."

"I don't know. Maybe. She's done some good stuff since then.

She's smarter than she looks."

The doctor steepled his fingers, leaning his elbows on his knees.

"What do you remember about the people you were with before?"

"A little. No one really watched out for me before."

"Do you remember the first person who loved you?"

There was a long pause. Tara held her breath, wondering how many centuries Daniel was sifting through to find the answer to that question. The plight of child vampires was often an unpleasant one, and she tried not to think about all the people who might have used, hurt or abused him through his long lifetime.

Finally he said, in a small voice, "My mother."

That startled Tara, but of course it seemed a perfectly normal answer to the doctor, who continued with his questions.

"You remember your real mother?"

"Yes. She was gentle. She had a soft voice. We used to go . . .

outside. Into the sun."

The doctor nodded. "I see. This was before you were diagnosed with porphyria?"

"It was when I could still go into the sun." Daniel's voice held a reverent tone. "It was bright and warm, and it didn't hurt. And I could eat. Meat and fruit and-" He broke off, and when he spoke again, it was no longer in English.

The doctor exchanged glances with Tara, then returned his attention to Daniel. He let the boy talk for a while, in an odd language unlike anything Tara had ever heard before. Finally, when Daniel paused, a rapturous expression on his face, Dr. DeAngelo said gently, "Daniel, it's time to come back. I'll count backwards from ten "

When Daniel had returned to the present, the doctor discussed what had happened, asked him a few questions, then asked him to sit in the lobby while he talked to Tara. Daniel gave her a weighted look as he walked out. She nodded encouragement.

"That was weird," she said to the doctor when Daniel was gone.

"Do you think he was having a past-life regression or something?"

"It's possible, but I wouldn't rush to that conclusion. Do you know anything about his biological mother? Maybe she spoke another language at home."

Tara shrugged. "I don't know. I'll see if I can find out."

"Great. That'll be your assignment for next time, then. That and the dream journal."

She gave him a narrow look. "Daniel's or mine?"

He grinned. "Both, if you like." He stood, effectively ending their heart-to-heart. "I'll see you tomorrow night, then."

The whole situation was eating at Gray. Something just didn't seem right to him. About Daniel spouting strange languages, about Tara and her blue eyes that should have been green. As he talked to Daniel, it had suddenly occurred to him that he knew where he might be able to find answers.

He wasn't sure why he hadn't thought of it before. It seemed obvious, once the idea popped into his head. Maybe he'd been repressing.

He should talk to a professional about that.

At home, he went to his bookshelves and reached for a set of hardback journals on the top shelf. He wasn't sure which one he was after, and the dates weren't a great deal of help. There wasn't much for it but to skim through the books until he found what he was looking for.

The books were diaries recording his own experiences with regression hypnosis. He'd gone through several sessions with a trained hypnotist, exploring his own past, and eventually discovering a sequence of previous lives. Unfortunately, he didn't recall the details of the sessions.

He'd been a difficult hypnosis subject, able to remember details immediately after the sessions but unable to retain them for very long.

The journals had been written mostly by his therapist, but he himself had scribbled frantically, post-session, in many of them. Between the therapist's handwriting and his own hurried scrawls, reading the journals proved more of a chore than he'd anticipated.

The first two volumes yielded nothing. He moved on to the third.

Daniel was quieter than usual, barely speaking on the way home.

He took the time to get a jacket, then headed out with little more than a farewell grunt.

Tara sighed, tossing her purse on the couch. Obviously today's session had disturbed him. She just wished he would open up to her.

It would be another long night spent with the television, falling asleep in front of late-night talk shows. Parenting was hard. Especially parenting a vampire.

Exhausted from dealing with Daniel's erratic schedule, she'd hoped to fall asleep quickly, but the buzzing in her brain kept her awake. She kept thinking about the evening's session, about Daniel's strange lapse into that strange language and the way he'd closed up after the session.

He'd returned to where they'd wanted him to be, to the days before he'd been made into a vampire. He'd remembered the sun.

Doubtless, Julian would be pleased, but Tara thought it was probably too much for Daniel to deal with all at once.

Or maybe his moodiness was due to hunger. On reflection, she'd scheduled his sessions a little too early in the evening. There wasn't time for him to get a significant meal before he went to the doctor.

Maybe she should call in the morning and change the appointment. She flipped channels for a time, finally settling on an infomercial.

She finally drifted off to the over-excited tones of men raving about spray-on hair.

Gray found volume three of his journals more interesting. Skimming through the pages, he found the descriptions he'd been looking for-the green-eyed woman with pale hair, the man who'd been himself but wasn't. And, reading on, he remembered why he'd forgotten.

"Hell," he said to himself. "This can't be it."

She was certain the dark, narrow alley would mean their deaths. Their pursuers had deliberately driven them here. There was no escape.

Liam set himself in front of her, placing his body between her and the dark shadows approaching them. She clutched at his coat, fear bitter in her throat.

"Do we have anything left?" she asked. "Crosses, garlic, holy water?"

"I have garlic, but it doesn't seem to do any good."

"Nothing seems to work. I don't understand. We've followed the legends-"

"I think the legends are wrong." He drew his pistol. "This isn't supposed to work, but I'm going to try it. If nothing else, maybe it will slow them down."

"Trying is better than dying." She took a moment to appreciate her own unintentional cleverness, then grabbed the other pistol from under his coat. "This one's loaded, as well, I hope?"

"Yes."

So they stood their ground together. The shadows drew closer, intent, growling, the faint moonlight glinting off long, feral fangs.

Vampires. She hadn't believed in them until Liam had shown her. There were times when she'd regretted letting herself be pulled into his dark world. This was not one of those times. If there was anyone in the world she was willing to die with, or for, it was Liam.

And the vampires advanced "'We're in the alleyway,'" Gray read aloud to himself. "'The vampires are coming closer. Our only defense is two pistols. Everything that's supposed to work on vampires doesn't work. Felicity is behind me, holding onto my coat. We fire.'" Shaking his head, he turned the page. "What a bunch of nonsense. 'I put a bullet between the eyes of the first one. Felicity fires with equal success. They stagger back, wounded more than I thought possible. Maybe, just maybe, there's enough space to slide by, to get out '"

He dropped the book and shoved back in his chair, letting his head bang against the wall behind him. No wonder he'd forgotten this. It hadn't been a genuine past-life experience-couldn't have been, with vampires crawling through it. As he recalled, he and his therapist had never quite figured out what this series of visions had represented.

The accounts he was looking for had to be somewhere else, he thought, eyeing the book he'd let fall on the desk. Volume four, maybe.

But this one, with its convoluted fantasy about vampires, was the one that felt in sync with the deja vu memories he'd been having.

Besides, he wanted to see what happened next.

There was enough room, barely, to slide past the staggering vampires and out of the alley. She took her chance, following Liam, clinging to his coat. A rush went through her, of excitement more than fear, making her heart beat hard and her breath come fast.

And they almost made it. Steps before freedom, a hand clamped onto her skirts, yanking her back.

"Felicity!" Liam's voice roared in her ears as she was dragged around to face the snarl of a vampire. A vampire with a bullet hole right between his eyes.

It bent its head toward her throat "'Suddenly there's another vampire. It's as if he's come out of nowhere. He grabs the vampire who has Felicity and flings him down the street. 'Go!' he shouts to us, and, God help me, I'm too frightened, too bloody scared, even to think about killing him. We run. We just run.

But I look at him over my shoulder at him, trying to see what he looks like. He is a vampire and, therefore, a demon, and despite that he helped us escape, he still must die.'"

Gray vaguely recalled his therapist pausing there, asking him for a description. He'd done his best to provide one, but the figure in the dream had been shadowy, vague. A man of medium height and build, with dark hair. He could have been anyone.

"This is pointless," Gray muttered, slamming the journal shut.

The teeth were almost at her throat when hands jerked the vampire away, freeing her. She ran, following Liam, but took one last look over her shoulder, to see the face of the creature who had saved her.

Tara jerked awake, sitting straight up on the couch. "Julian."

Four.

There was no getting back to sleep after that. Tara paced the floor for an hour, looking at her watch and muttering to herself about Daniel's continued absence. Sunrise wasn't that far away, after all.

Yes, he'd done fine for himself for five centuries, but that hadn't involved her waiting up for him, worrying that he'd been abducted or killed by the Dark Children. Was he staying close to home, as she'd told him to do? Was he even staying in Manhattan, where it was supposed to be safe?

When he finally did come home, he looked so forlorn that she couldn't bring herself to chastise him. Instead she went straight to him and knelt in front of him, holding out her arms. "Oh, honey, are you all right?"

A moment after she'd made the move, a moment after the saccharine words had come out of her mouth, she cringed. Daniel hated that stuff, the Mommy stuff, the nurturing stuff. But he stepped right into her arms and let her hold him.

He said nothing for several long seconds, and she didn't break the silence. Finally he took a step back, looking sheepishly at the floor.

"I'm sorry."

"No, it's okay, Daniel." Sensing the "Mom" moment had passed, Tara pushed herself to her feet. But she couldn't resist a last caress of his head, an almost-tousle of his hair. "Whatever's wrong, you can talk to me about it."

"Yeah." He went to the couch and sank into it. For once he didn't turn the TV on right away. "How come you're up?"

She shrugged. "I had a bad dream. It woke me up, and I couldn't get back to sleep."

He peered cautiously up at her. "About me?"

"No. Not about you." She frowned. "Why would you think I'd have a bad dream about you?"

"Because I'm a monster." He stopped, pressed his lips together, scrubbed angrily at his eyes. "You should be afraid of me. You should run and run and never stop running."

She'd heard a lot of strange things come out of Daniel's mouth, but never once had she felt threatened by him. And she didn't then.

She sat next to him on the couch and slipped an arm around his thin shoulders. "You mean like this?" He blinked rapidly, then buried his face in her chest and wept.

She let him cry, patting his back and stroking his hair. "There, there," she murmured. "It's okay."

"No, it's not okay." He sniffled, then suddenly gulped and pushed away from her. "Are you sure I can talk to you? Are you sure you can handle it?"

She wasn't sure at all. But she figured, after seeing her boyfriend staked through the heart, she could handle whatever Daniel had to say.

"Just tell me. I'm a big girl."

"I'm a vampire," he said. "Vampires drink human blood."