"Had you not noticed the old woman's health beginning to fail?"

"Yes, but..."

"I've only removed the dregs from your band, Sarafina. Those who dearly needed killing, though I should have seen your sister for what she was and taken her long ago. I'm sorry I allowed her to betray you this way."

"What way?"

He lowered his head. "Please-do not pretend you don't know. You know about her and Andre. You must know."

She looked away from him, tears pooling in her eyes as her mind replayed her final conversation with the man she'd thought she would wed. Will ached for her.

"He planned to marry you only because you were the wealthier of the two, and because he knew your gifts far surpa.s.sed those of your sister. Yet by night, he and Katerina slip into the forest, where they copulate on the ground or standing up against the trees, or on hands and knees, like animals. I've watched them. I've seen it all."

"You lie," she whispered, though she could barely speak. Will knew she believed every word the monster said.

"It doesn't matter. You can't go back there."

"I can. I must Let me go." Again she jerked and tugged at the chains.

The vampire leaned over her, stared into her eyes as he lowered his body atop hers and clasped her wrists with his hands. "You can't go back. My life has become unbearably lonely.

You'll only die, Sarafina, unless you accept the gift. And I'm afraid I have no inclination to give you a choice in the matter."

Releasing her hands, he cupped her face, turned her head to one side and moved her hair out of the way. Will attacked him, but his blows were like air. Holding her that way, the vampire pressed his mouth to Sarafina's throat, and bit down hard, without mercy. His fangs stabbed deep into her neck-Will felt the pain she felt-and then the creature suckled her there, drinking her very lifeblood as she slowly faded into him. She felt as if she were hovering outside her body. Looking down at the monster feeding so hungrily at her throat. Then she shifted her gaze to Will's, and he realized she could see him. She was panting, her chest rising and falling, and his was, too, as the two of them gazed down at the vampire feeding from the woman. It was erotic and exquisite and arousing. It shouldn't have been. It should have been horrifying, but somehow, it wasn't.

Then the creature lifted his head away, staring down at her still, pale face.

Has he killed me, then? Sarafina directed the question to Will, looking right at him as she spoke. Are you the spirit who has come for me, to take me to the other side?

I'm not a spirit, he told her. I'm real. I'm a man, and I love you.

She looked down at her body from the place where she hovered. Her eyes were wide and vacant. Her skin was whiter than it had ever been. / will never love anyone again. Anyway, it doesn't matter now. I think I am dead The vampire drew a dagger from a sheath at his side and pressed the very tip of the blade to his own throat. Sarafina watched, amazed at the action, and mesmerized when he drew it away and ruby-red welled up in the puncture wound.

The vampire bent again, cradling her lifeless head, pressing her mouth to his neck.

Suddenly Sarafina was sucked back into her body in one rapid flash that ended with the impact of a fist to the heart. She tasted the first droplet on her tongue, and every nerve ending came to quivering, hungering life. Will felt it. He felt it all. She closed her lips around the wound and sucked the blood from it, feeling stronger with every swallow.

Finally the vampire held Sarafina's forehead with his palm and jerked himself away from her hungry mouth.

"Now," he whispered, breathless, panting, his eyes ablaze, "you rest, here with me. Later, you can visit your clan and see them with clear eyes for the first time."

She looked at the cave around her. "It looks different. I can see every color dancing in the flames of the torch! And I can hear it. The flames have a song all their own."

"Everything is different now," Bartrone said. "You are immortal. You need never die."

"You sound different, too, and you look-by Devel, my senses are heightened to a thousand times what they were before. It's almost unbearable."

"You'll grow used to it in time. You'll have plenty of time. But now you must rest. And when you wake, you will be stronger, and I will explain things to you. You're like me, now, Sarafina.

You're a vampire."

"I'm...a vampire...."

"Now sleep," he whispered. "Sleep."

She slept. 5

Will opened his eyes, and the white sun was gleaming down into them, blinding him, so he closed them again. He tried to sit up.

"Easy, easy now, pal. Don't move too much all at once."

The voice was young, and male, and...and American?

He tried opening his eyes again, just a little. As his vision cleared, he realized the blazing white light overhead was coming from a fluorescent bulb, not the desert sun. And the sand underneath him was a mattress, covered with white sheets that smelled of disinfectant. And the robes he wore were only a hospital gown and bedcovers.

The young man was standing beside the bed. He had dirty-blond hair twisted into dreadlocks, and an eyebrow ring. But he wore the scrubs of a hospital staffer, and the tag pinned to his chest read Danny Miller, R.N.

Will tried to talk but only rasped, so he cleared his throat and tried again. "Where am I?"

"Dude, look around. You're in a hospital." The kid pushed a b.u.t.ton that raised Will's upper body, then he picked up a plastic cup with a straw through the top and held the straw to Will's lips.

Will drank. The ice water felt good going down his parched throat. He noted the IV bags dangling from a pole beside the bed, noticed the tubes leading to his wrists, glanced down at his foot, but it was covered by blankets. h.e.l.l, how bad was it? He couldn't feel much in any of his limbs just yet.

"What hospital?" he asked at length, trying to move the foot but feeling no response.

"Bethesda."

Will closed his eyes, so intensely relieved it was almost painful. He was home. He was in the States.

"The doctor will be in any second now. Look, I'm supposed to let some other guys know when you wake up. You up to talking to some people after the doc gives you the okay?"

"Depends on who it is. Although I'm afraid I can guess."

"Military. Lots of hardware on their chests."

Will nodded. They'd want to debrief him. It was S.O.P. "Yeah, whatever. First, though, I'd like to know about my foot."

The kid reached down to pull the covers away, revealing the well-bandaged foot. "You've still got it. That's good news, right?"

"That depends. Do I get to keep it?" "Looks like. The doc will be able to tell you more."

"The doc" did tell him more. He told him the foot would never be one hundred percent, that he was going to have to bear up to some intense physical therapy, and that he would have a limp for the rest of his life. He would walk, but never run. He would need to use a cane.

He did not accept that prognosis.

He spent the next month in the hospital. The PT was painful, but it was a far cry from the other tortures he'd endured. During that time he was debriefed by the military and declared an American hero by the press. He received a huge cash settlement for the damage done to his foot, and that was in addition to his pension. He was showered in accolades, awarded the medal of honor and a purple heart, and retired with honors, all before he ever got out of the hospital.

He didn't want to retire. He didn't want the d.a.m.n money or the medals or the press. But with the foot the way it was, he didn't have much choice in the matter. So he took the cards he was dealt, and he endured the PT, and he got his a.s.s out of the wheelchair and walked through the hospital corridors at night with the help of a cane, because he couldn't f.u.c.king sleep anyway.

Especially that last night-his final night in the hospital. He'd been there a month, and they would be sending him home the next morning. "Home" was a word that meant nothing to Will.

He'd been a soldier for so long, he didn't have a home. He had nowhere to go. Nothing to do, really. Money? He had plenty of that, the one thing that had never mattered to him.

He felt as if his life had been gutted. And when he tallied the things he had lost, there was one, foolish, ridiculous item that always topped the list. He'd lost his fantasy. That Gypsy camp in some faraway time and place where he used to escape the pain, and the beautiful woman who had inhabited it. He often found himself wondering about her, just as if she were real. "What ever became of Sarafina?'' he would ask himself, before his common sense would kick in to remind him that she was a figment of his imagination, a tool created by his mind to enable him to cope with the torture and imprisonment.

He'd tried like h.e.l.l to conjure her image to mind during the physical therapy sessions, but apparently they hadn't been painful enough to invoke her. He couldn't find that place in his mind anymore, the one where he used to retreat to be with her. And though he knew she wasn't real, he worried about her, what had happened to her, how she had adjusted to the change.

h.e.l.l, when he thought about it, maybe there was a reason his mind had conjured the beautiful Gypsy girl and her tragic tale for him. Maybe he'd known, somehow, deep down, how drastically his own life was about to change, and maybe he'd created her so it wouldn't seem quite as bad in comparison. Sure, he'd lost a lot. Full use of the foot, his career in Special Forces, his entire life's work. But she'd lost more. She'd lost her lover, her family, her tribe-and then her humanity when she'd been transformed into something else. He wondered how she had dealt with that, if becoming a dark creature had changed who she was inside. Had she become evil just because it was expected of her, or was the change purely physical, like the change in him was?

He thought of these things as he limped along the quiet hospital corridors at 3:00 a.m. There were only a handful of nurses on duty at that hour, and they tended to cl.u.s.ter in the break room around the TV, sipping coffee and chatting. At the prescribed intervals they would emerge to check on patients and administer meds. One nurse would emerge every half hour or so to prowl the wing, ensuring that all the patients were all right, and of course they came out if the phone rang, or a patient buzzed, or a monitor sounded an alarm. He liked the nights. They were the only time he could be alone to walk una.s.sisted and unhindered. The nurses knew how painful it was for him to step on the foot, even now that it was healing. So they tended to cheer for him with every inch he gained, as if he were a toddler taking his first steps. He hated it, though he knew they were only trying to encourage him. He far preferred privacy during torture, he decided.

The walking cane was hospital issue: stainless steel, with a rubber-coated crook at the top and a tripod with brown rubber tips at the bottom. He would definitely find something better when he got out of here.

That last night, he was traversing an empty stretch of hallway, where no one was at work.

The hospital lab was in this section, but it was all but abandoned at this hour. A few people came and went, but none from his wing and none who questioned him. It was his favorite place for night walking.

Wearing an expression that said he knew exactly what he was doing was all it took to keep everyone off his back. No patients roomed in this section, so nurses weren't milling around. His own wouldn't be in to check on him for an hour yet, and if they did happen to peek through the door in the meantime, they would see the blanket-covered shape of a man lying sound asleep with his back to them. Because that was what Will wanted them to see.

G.o.d, his skills were going to be utterly wasted in retirement.

There was a sound, a rattling sound, that did not belong. It brought Will's head up slowly and set his juices flowing. It had not been a loud noise or an alarming one-just an out of place one.

And it came from behind the door on his left, from a room that was completely dark beyond the mesh-lined safety gla.s.s.

That told him two things very clearly. Someone was in there, and they were not supposed to be.

It was too much to resist. Will glanced up and down the hallway, saw no one, and quietly put his hand on the doork.n.o.b, then turned it. It was unlocked and gave easily. Pushing the door open, he slipped inside, noting how much more effort it took now to move soundlessly. He used to be able to slide through shadows like a panther. Now his gait was uneven and slow, and he had the d.a.m.n cane to deal with, keeping one hand constantly unavailable.

The front section of the room was empty, but he sensed someone in the rear. He really had no reason to go any farther. Common sense told him to notify security and back off. But he didn't.

He hadn't seen any action in so long that he was aching to know just how good he could be in this state. How effective. Could he handle something as mundane as an employee stealing a little medication for recreational use?

That wasn't what he found, though.

What he found was a man who seemed about to leap out the open window. His back was toward Will. He wore a black cotton shirt and dark blue jeans, and one foot was already up on the sill, hands braced on both sides, a sack slung over his shoulder by a long strap.

"Don't jump," Will said quickly. "There's no need. I'm not security, I'm a patient."

The man stilled, then slowly set his foot down on the floor again and turned to face Will. Will studied him, frowning as a creeping familiarity rinsed through his mind. The man's skin was pale, but not in an unhealthy way. It was luminescent, like a pearl. His eyes, too, held a strange glow, an undeniable power. It was invisible, but palpable. There was something else about him, too. Something that marked him as "different" to Will's trained mind, but he couldn't for the life of him define how. Just that this man was not like others.

And then it hit him. It was the same sort of perception he'd had of Bartrone, the vampire in the fantasy.

The man's eyes widened just a little as he studied Will in return. But he quickly schooled his features. Will could see him trying to hide the startled expression, though he didn't know what had startled the man.

"You look familiar to me. Where have I seen you before?" the man asked.

Will shrugged, then glanced at the bag hanging at the man's side. "So what are you stealing?

Drugs?"

"I have no use for drugs. What happened to your foot?"

"It was injured. How come you're using the window instead of the door?"

"I...opened it for the fresh air. Why are you wandering around the hospital in the dead of night?"

"Couldn't sleep."

The man's mouth pulled a little at one side, as if he were fighting a smile. "You're very good at answering questions without saying a thing."

"So are you. So what's in the bag?"

The man only shook his head and glanced toward the window once more. Will looked around the room now that his eyes were adjusting to the darkness. He saw the refrigerator, the label on the front, the Red Cross logo. "This is where they store the blood." He said it very softly, but the man heard him.

He nodded. "That it is." He got up on the windowsill again, then he paused, turning back.

"Time Magazine," he said.

"What?"

"That's where I've seen you before. You were on the cover of last week's Time Magazine. I read the article, too."

"That's really nice, but it doesn't explain why you're stealing blood from a hospital at 3:00 a.m., pal."

"Oh, let it go already. You guessed what I was the moment you looked at me, though how you knew, I cannot say. Who is this 'Bartrone' you thought I resembled?"

"A figment of my imagination." Will stopped there, lifted his gaze. "I never said that out loud." "Of course you didn't. I'm a vampire. I read your mind."

"Oh yeah? Prove it. What am I thinking right now?"

The other man stared at him, frowned hard. "I don't know. You're blocking."

"I'm blocking?" Will repeated.

"Perhaps subconsciously, but yes. You have a very strong will, don't you?"

Will shrugged. "If you can't read me now, how could you before?''

"How would I know? You're the one who let your guard down, let your thoughts slip out."

He shrugged. "Perhaps you were startled."

Will rolled his eyes and moved closer, using the cane to help him bear the weight, though every step shot bolts of pain through his body. When he got close enough he reached out, tugged the side of the bag open and glanced inside. Plastic bags filled with blood.

"You really are stealing blood."