"Aw, jeez," he muttered under his breath but spent the rest of the walk in the shade, only letting his hand drift out into the sunlight from time to time. Gray watched him, curious, as he turned his hand in the light as if trying to catch it.

"Something new and different, I guess," he ventured, not at all sure how Daniel would respond.

"It's been a long time. I didn't really remember what it was like. I mean, you helped a little, helped me remember some of it, but that was nothing compared to actually being out here in it." He made a face.

"Except Tara wants to keep me in the house all the time."

"It's probably wise," said Gray. "I'm guessing you could sunburn pretty badly, if you don't take it a little at a time."

Daniel shook his head in disgust. "Grownups suck."

Tara led the way into her apartment. "Daniel," she said, giving him a meaningful look.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll be scarce." He went into his room and closed the door.

"How is he doing?" Gray asked. It seemed as good a way as any of avoiding the actual subject.

"He's doing well. He thinks I'm being overprotective, though."

"You probably are." At her arch look, he smiled. "Most good moms are, a little."

Tara settled into the couch, sipping her coffee. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you came here to talk about Daniel."

"No, I didn't."

"I got the impression you really didn't want to see me or my weird vampire friends ever again."

"You, yes. Your weird vampire friends, no."

"We kind of come in a package."

"I worked that out. Among other things I worked out over the past two weeks."

"What things?"

He looked at her, into her eyes, then discovered he couldn't talk at all while he did that, much less say what he had to say. So he looked away, then closed his eyes completely. "I love you. I know it took me way too long to figure it out, but it's true."

"I said it before-I think it's mutual," she said, and when he looked to see her carefully sipping her coffee, he noticed that her hand was shaking. "So what are we going to do about it?"

"I was going to come here and tell you I couldn't be with you if you continued working for vampires." She started to protest, but he raised a hand. "I was going to give you a big ultimatum. Them or me.

Prove you love me by never seeing them again."

"I think you know what I would have said."

He nodded. "You seem to have a certain . . . loyalty to Julian."

"And to Dominic's memory." She paused. "He was a good man.

Vampire or not, he was a good man. I loved him, and I owe him this. If you can't understand that-"

"I said I was going to do that. I changed my mind."

"Why?"

"Because I knew it was the best, fastest way to lose you."

"So . . ." she ventured, "you're willing to accept what I do?"

"I've seen what you've done with Daniel. I assume there are other children who need the same kind of help?"

"Yes, there are."

"And they need the same kind of therapy I gave Daniel?"

"Yes."

"Have you had any luck finding anyone else qualified?"

"Dr. Greene's taking classes. Julian decided not to trust anybody else."

Gray drew a deep breath. "I want to help. And not just because it's the best way to be with you."

"Why, then?"

"I almost killed those children, when I was Liam. The least I can do is help them now."

A smile began to form on her lips. "It seems fair. And the part about you being with me-that works for me."

"I was hoping it would." He bent forward and kissed her gently.

"Because it totally works for me." Julian's Journal Cryptic. I'll bet when these guys wrote this stuff down, they thought it was fun to make it as obscure and cryptic as possible. Or maybe, since it came from dreamtime, it was just hard to translate it into words.

I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I'm starting to get the picture, though. Two litanies, now, plus additional study of the Book, over the past several days, and the theme is beginning to emerge. I don't like where it seems to be going, but it's too much to hope that I am wrong.

There is also still the question of my own memories. Or not so much my own but the Senior's. They become less painful to access as I dig deeper, but there's so much there-places I don't have time to go.

Places I don't want to go. Especially places where memories of William lay buried. It's hard enough to look him in the face as it is, knowing how my possession of the Senior's memories violates him.

We're racing the clock here. I don't know how much time we have left, but it can't be a lot. The latest disappearance was in Jersey City-still far enough away to consider Manhattan safe, but there's no doubt that Ialdaboth's strength is growing. I can feel it. I dream it. I feel it lurking always in the background, stronger every day. He'll be coming for us. Soon.

Julian - Redux All thine enemies have opened their mouth against thee: they hiss and gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up: certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it.

Lamentations 2:16 Ialdaboth's insane. It gives him a bit of an edge.

Email-Julian to Lucien If the darkest of the dark days come, and the Children of the Dark turn the earth to ashes, it will be because one of the Light has not come forth, and offered himself, and said, "Here. I am he who will change the tides of pain."

The Book of Changing Blood

One.

Aanu had skin, and hair. Eyelashes, even, if you looked closely enough. Julian wasn't sure. The glass panel in the hyperbaric chamber distorted his vision so that he couldn't quite tell about the eyelashes. He could see eyebrows, though.

What lay inside that regenerated brain? Could they really expect the man to remember what he'd known four thousand years ago, before he'd been reduced to a bag of bones? Was there anything even remotely realistic about that expectation?

Aanu's eyes moved a little under his lids. The lids still seemed too thin, not quite opaque enough, as if they were missing a layer or two of cells.

Julian sensed rather than heard movement behind him. Without turning, he said, "What does it feel like?"

"The regeneration?" Lucien stepped up beside him. "Hurts like hell."

Julian nodded. "I drowned once. It wasn't like this."

"No. It wouldn't be. Closest I came was the volcano. I lost a good deal of flesh in that one." He tapped the chamber's glass panel absently with a big finger. "Didn't have the benefit of one of these things, though."

"You think it's made a difference?"

"Hell, yes. This would have taken months under open air conditions.

And I'm sure your additional work has helped, too." "Not just mine," said Julian, out of politeness, if not accuracy.

He and Lucien had spent hours with their hands on Aanu's gradually regenerating body, manipulating the warm flow of his life force.

He himself had been experimenting to a great degree, testing and finding the nature and the limits of his power. But it hadn't taken long to discover that his abilities went far beyond Lucien's.

Julian studied Aanu's face, quiet in repose, raw, not quite whole.

"Do you think he'll be able to tell us anything?"

"Maybe not right away. There'll be some disorientation."

"For how long? We don't have a lot of time, here."

Lucien grimaced. "I know. I can probably help with that, or, more likely, you can."

Julian took a long, slow breath. The air tasted different these days-cleaner, sweeter. Strange, he thought, when it seemed as if it should be full of fear. It should, he thought, taste like Ialdaboth.

"He's close," said Lucien. "Not here yet, not ready, but close."

It was hardly worth the effort it took to talk to Lucien, Julian thought, when the Demon could pick thoughts out of the air like that.

Annoying. "I can feel him."

Lucien nodded. "Yes."

"Too bad you didn't kill him in Romania."

"I would have if I could have." Lucien shook his head slowly, his gaze, still seemingly focused on Aanu, going distant. "We're hard to kill. As you can see."

"What does it take?"

"I'm not sure. Two of us together against one, possibly. I remember . . ." He stopped, frowned.

"Remember what?"

"I forget."

"Nice." Julian stepped away from Aanu's silver, coffin-like resting place. More like a womb than a coffin, though, really. "You think on that. I need to see Lorelei."

Lorelei was asleep. She slept a lot these days-day, night, afternoon, it didn't matter. Softly, Julian settled onto the bed next to where she lay curled around herself, one hand cupping her stomach. She'd only barely started to show, even with two babies growing inside her.

They seemed to sap her strength, drain her beyond her ability to recuperate.

Having no experience with any sort of pregnancy, he couldn't help wondering if that was normal or a sign of something very abnormal.

Of course, one could argue that any child of a not-quite-vampire would be strange and abnormal. That didn't matter to him. These children were his, whatever they turned out to be.

He caressed her hair. She shifted a little under his touch but didn't open her eyes. A vague smile curved her lips, and he bent to kiss her forehead. Her skin felt too warm under his lips, but then, it always did.

He could sense the swirling of her energies, moving light of vivid blue and magenta hues, the power that lay there. The babies had an energy, as well, that swirled in soft pastels throughout her body, mingling with her own life force. He had only begun to see the colors recently and assumed it had something to do with his growing powers; but he could tell the colors had changed since her pregnancy-there was more to her than there had been before.

He'd wondered often over the past few months exactly what had changed in her and what power she might have that they had yet to explore. Her power seemed not to have manifested in the same way his had. It was subtle, not there if you looked for it, only there when she needed it. He'd finally figured it out-her power was for this, for the children. Her body had known, even before she had quickened, that it would need to protect her babies.

That answered one question, at least. She would be of little use to him in the final confrontation he knew was coming. Hers was a specific power, defensive, a mother-power. Lorelei could stand against Ialdaboth-she'd proven that when he'd kidnapped her and threatened her life-but she couldn't attack him. He couldn't hurt her, but she couldn't hurt him, either.

Satisfied that she was contentedly asleep and safe, Julian went to his computer. He'd sat in front of it nearly every waking hour of every day since Lucien and the others had returned from Romania, trying to make sense of the pieces of the Book, trying to find the answers. The additional material Rafael had supplied fit with what they already had, but it still wasn't enough for the clues to make sense.

He booted up the computer, reflecting. It was as if there were something missing, as if the Book had a code, and he needed the key to break it. It would make more sense, he thought, than the idea that all these cryptic phrases and convoluted narratives actually meant something practical.

He pulled up a file in which he had concatenated some of the meatier passages. He would figure it out eventually. He would have to.

Otherwise, they were all dead.

He wasn't able to keep at it for long, though. He was tired, exhausted, drained down to his bones. When the words on the screen began to blur into incomprehensible blotches, he shut down the computer, slipped into the bed next to Lorelei, and let the weariness drag him under.

He dreamed. He dreamed a great deal these days, when he took the time to sleep. Floaty, disconnected images, usually, lacking both color and sense. But these dreams were memories.

Not his own memories. The Senior's. He had absorbed every memory the Senior had owned when he'd taken the ancient vampire's blood. The blood had facilitated his transformation, but the memories had plagued him, adding several thousand years to his eight hundred.

In the dream, he saw a face, looking into his own. He'd seen the face before, in attempts to delve through the Senior's past, and he knew it to be Ruha, the fourth of the First Demons. He'd been the Senior's lover for a time before choosing the darker path favored by Ialdaboth.