The night sang to him.

Pulsing light, color, sound -- all of Toronto glittered and spun, tilting beneath him. It sent forth an endless symphony: idling engines, blaring horns, a train whistle's mournful wail. And everywhere, the chatter and clamor of human voices. They whispered, shouted, laughed, argued, wept. To Nick, they comprised a medley. The songs of mortality.

Even death responded to that song.

Yet of his kind of death -- unlife -- the mortal world knew nothing. Was supposed to know nothing. Vampires existed only in books, movies, and folklore fantasies. No sane mortal thought them real. No sane mortal, save one.

Natalie Lambert knew that vampires were real, and for that, he was entirely to blame. She should have panicked and fled in terror two nights ago, when his reassembled "corpse" had come to life on her examining table. And last night, when he had stalked her down a rain-slick street and confronted her, she should have succumbed to his not-inconsiderable powers of persuasion and forgotten that a vampire -- any vampire -- had ever crossed her path.

But she had not panicked or run away. She hadn't submitted to his mental influence. And she hadn't forgotten.

All of which left him with one hell of a problem.

The green Cadillac waited, parked in an alley behind crumbling brick buildings in a city quarter mortals charitably called the "tenderloin." Nick floated to the rooftop above it, surveying the alley for any signs of life. One heartbeat. But its rapid thrumming belonged to a hungry tomcat hunting for rats between the overflowing dumpster bins.

Nick drifted groundward, landed, fished the keys from his pocket, and unlocked the Caddy's door. A light frost covered the roof and windows. The door hinges squealed. He paid no heed to either, but slid under the steering wheel and pulled the protesting door shut after him. His fingers slipped the key into the ignition, but fell away without turning it.

Mortals who knew that vampires existed must be persuaded to forget what they had learned. Failing that, the Code required one of only two solutions for the problem of resistant humans. They must be brought across -- or killed. There were no exceptions.

A vampire who failed to turn, kill, or report a resister to the Enforcers would be destroyed. The Code made no exceptions to that rule, either.

A rustling sound. A high-pitched squeal curtailed by the clamping of small, sharp teeth. Alley hunter and prey had met at last. Nick envied the tomcat the guiltless ease of his feeding.

For most of his kind, Natalie Lambert would pose no dilemma. But he was not like most of his kind. And the mortal coroner had surprised him in more ways than one. Instead of revulsion, her eyes had held compassion. Instead of fleeing, she had stubbornly stood her ground, and refused to be intimidated. And as though some arcane prescience had revealed his innermost thoughts to her, she had offered him the one and only thing that might assure her safety. She had offered to help him regain his humanity.

An exceptional mortal, this Natalie, this woman the Code would require him to kill. Unless...

Nick glared at the Cadillac's frosted windshield as though seeing it for the first time. Scowling, he reached under the seat, fumbled for that long-handled plastic and metal cleaning contraption, and got out to perform the mundanely human task of scraping off the windows.

The coroner's building stank of formaldehyde, refrigerated steel, and disinfectant, all of it poorly masking the pervasive odor of death. He moved through its halls without being seen, finally selecting a dark alcove off the rear corridor. The hall led to the employee exit and parking lot, and all of them passed by here when their shifts ended. He waited. More than a dozen mortals trooped past him, unaware, until finally...

By now, he knew both the rhythm of her footsteps and the signature throb of her heartbeat. He'd intended to let her go by, to stop her just as she reached the door. But unlike those oblivious others, Natalie Lambert did not walk past the alcove. She stopped dead in her tracks, turned, and stared straight into the darkness that should have obscured him from her eyes.

"Does this mean you've reconsidered my proposition?"

He allowed his eyes to glow for the briefest of moments before stepping only partially out of the shadows. "I'd rather hoped," he said at length, "that you had reconsidered mine."

"Oh." Hesitation. A nervous shake of her head. "You're talking about the mind control thing, right? The Svengali bit that's supposed to make me forget I ever saw you?"

"Not exactly. You'll merely forget certain details of what I am, how we met. In the end, you'll just remember it... differently."

Her eyes narrowed. The blood in her veins rushed faster to a quickening pulse. "No," she said. "No thanks. You tried that last night, remember? And you know what? That little glammy-whammy trick of yours doesn't seem to work on me. Must be all the medical training. Makes it harder for some of us to believe anymore in anything--"

The nervous chatter died abruptly when he took another step toward her, at once capturing both her gaze and the pounding rhythm of her heartbeat. He lowered his voice to a soft bass register. The voice of age-old seduction, persuasion. The vampire's voice.

"Submit your will to me. It will be better -- safer -- for both of us if you forget what happened here two nights ago. Trust me, Natalie. Trust me to keep you safe."

For one fleetingly hopeful moment, she seemed to be going under. She wore the fixed gaze and the blissful expression he'd seen so many times -- on the faces of meek and malleable humans, just before he...

"Stop it!" In a blink, her passive gaze had turned to one of ire. "Didn't I just tell you it wouldn't work on me?"

A door in the hall came open. "Dr. Lambert? That you?"

The mortal who entered the hallway was a young black man in green hospital scrubs. His suspicious gaze darted from Nick's menacing stance to Natalie's angry expression. There was an awkward silence.

"Yeah." She answered the man's question without taking her eyes off of Nick. "Yeah, thanks, Mitch. I'm fine."

Apparently, the lie sounded no more convincing to Mitch than it did to Nick. "You sure, Doc? 'Cause if this guy's giving you a bad time or anything..."

"It's all right." She still didn't turn to look at him. "I can handle it."

Though he still looked unconvinced, Mitch nodded, and jerked a thumb toward the door he'd emerged from. "I'll be right in here if you need me, Doc. You just yell, okay?"

"Thanks, I'll do that." She waited until Mitch had disappeared back through the door, until its latch had clicked shut. Then she lowered her voice to an irritated whisper. "For the record, Nick..." She emphasized his shortened name with deliberately brash familiarity, as though it were an insult, "...this is the twentieth century. Women don't put up with that 'submit' crap anymore. And we're not too keen on having our memories messed with, either."

In a flash of movement no human eye could follow, Nick found himself gripping her wrist with near bone-crushing force. "Do you imagine," he rasped, angry that his own frustration had gotten the better of him, "that either of us has any choice?!"

For the first time, her defiance gave way to full-blown terror. He saw the cry for help forming in her eyes, on her lips. Too roughly, he released her before the scream came to fruition. She snatched her hand back, glaring, and rubbed at the injured wrist.

"There are others like you, aren't there?" Her voice was trembling now. "Of course, there would be. And they get a little upset at the prospect of their secret getting out. That's what you meant when you said it would be better for us both if I forgot."

"Yes."

"And if you can't wipe my memory? Do these others send some sort of vampire hit squad after me?"

If the question had been half-joking, his dead serious reply was not. "After both of us," he said. "That's why you have to let me--"

"No." Temper flaring anew, she wheeled away from him to charge the back door with a vengeance. He caught up to her moments later in the pale yellow light of the parking lot, where she stood holding the open door of a nondescript sedan.

"I don't suppose..." Her voice was an odd mixture of half-laugh, half-sob. "...that running away is a viable option."

"I'm afraid not. And for what it's worth, Dr. Lambert, I'm sorry."

She gave the car door a furious shove. It slammed shut with a loud whump.  "Well, that makes all the difference," she fumed. "After all, what's one more dead mortal to you? In eight centuries, you would have killed thousands!"

His face must have betrayed the fact that she'd just struck a nerve: her fury dissipated as quickly as it had risen. "I was right last night, wasn't I? You intercepted that pipe bomb trying to save mere mortals, not kill them. Which leaves me with just one last question. Why?"

"Why." He echoed the word with all the weight of eight centuries appended. "If I could answer that, Doctor..."

"It's Natalie. And I'm still willing to help you find that answer, if you'll let me try. Who's to say the others ever need to know?"

If only it could be that simple. "They have their ways."

"I'm willing to take that chance," she insisted. "Are you? How badly do you want to be human, Nick? Enough to risk keeping secrets from the others? Enough to trust me?"

Trust. He had encountered precious few mortals over the centuries who had proven worthy of that indulgence.

"You have the courage of your convictions, Natalie Lambert. I'll give you that."

"All right." She tugged the folds of her coat closer together against the night chill. "Well, how about giving me an answer, too?"

He'd also known few mortals to be this tenacious.

"I'll think about it," he told her. "And I'll let you know."

Not surprisingly, that answer failed to satisfy her. But she nodded, reopened the car door, and, casting several nervous glances back toward him, slid inside to start the engine.

Nick watched her drive away, impressed despite himself at her willingness to defy him, the Enforcers, the world itself, should it happen to oppose her. Not many mortals in his very long lifetime had ever dared to do that, either.

The Brabant Foundation's corporate offices were currently housed in a forty-room mansion, the centerpiece of a wooded estate twenty miles north of Toronto. Nick's Caddy slipped into one of its fleet of garages scant seconds before sunrise slanted its first deadly rays through the trees. Stairs down to an underground walkway led him safely across the courtyard to an elevator, which in turn delivered him to the parlor of his private floor in the four-story house. The windows had all been opaqued here, creating a full suite of comfortably sunless rooms. A vampire's safe haven.

Nick had scarcely removed his coat when the security screen beside the elevator door flickered and buzzed for attention.

"Mr. Knight? Are you there yet?"

He pressed a switch, and the anxious figure of his foundation administrator appeared on the tiny screen. "Sandra, you're up early. Or is it late?"

"Late. I saw your car come in. Listen, there's a fax here I think you'll want to see right away. Okay if I bring it up?"

"Yeah. Sure. Just promise me you'll get some sleep afterward, all right?"

"Right."

She stepped out of the elevator less than a minute later to hand him the single sheet of paper. It was a plea from a foundation volunteer in Malawi, requesting urgent aid for nearly six hundred children left to starve by warring tribal factions.

"Thanks, Sandra." He folded the page, handed it back to her. "Give Paul Kandel in Johannesburg a call before you turn in, will you? Tell him to airlift a four-ton food shipment and a medical team in there ASAP?"

Sandra's green eyes danced when she smiled. "Consider it done," she said. "Have a good day's rest, sir."

"Thanks. Same to you."

But when the elevator had once again swept her away, Nick made his way not to bed, but to the library. The fire he methodically built in the brass and marble hearth did nothing at all to warm him. But in the centuries-old familiarity of its flickering, shifting light, he took a crystal decanter from the mantel, filled a stemmed glass with its dark red contents, and settled at last into a heavy leather chair beside the fire.

The first sip of his libation made him wince. Cold, lifeless, and very nearly tasteless, animal blood gave him sustenance -- and the little-eased conscience of his self-imposed penance -- but nothing more. There was no life in it. None of the warm, pulsing, emotion-charged nectar that flowed from human veins.

"Nothing is ever quite so exquisite as the first kill," LaCroix's long-ago voice whispered into his ear. "The thrill. The exhilaration. Her life becoming yours. Do you feel it, Nicholas?"

"Yes," his own voice of centuries past had answered. "Oh yes, I feel it." No ecstasy, no euphoria he had ever known as a mortal could begin to compare.

"With each and every kill to come, you will savor the gift of life, even as you take it for your own. This is the ambrosia that is humanity. And you will drink from this fountain for all of eternity. Tell me, Nicholas. What could be better? What could ever possibly be better?"

What indeed? Except, perhaps, to be mortal again.

"I want to go back."

"It's much too late for that. I've made you a god. I've made you my brother!"

And there was, according to LaCroix, no way to return. No way to regain his lost soul. "We are creatures of another province now. You do not need a soul."

"Then we are damned."

"Yes." The sibilant reply had been followed by a morbid chuckle. "But as we cannot die, I'm afraid that the devil shall never have his proverbial due. A pity. I might rather have enjoyed the meeting."

It was true enough, they could not die by most mortal means. And the only methods by which they could truly die (by sunlight, fire, stake, or decapitation) Nicholas found too horrible ever to contemplate ending his own existence. So he had chosen to pursue what others of his kind called impossible. He sought a way to restore his lost humanity.

LaCroix had not been pleased.

And Nicholas' first pathetic effort to exact a cure had not gone well.

He had gone home to Brabant, to the parish church that bordered his father's lands. A homely affair of mortar and stone, it was a place, nonetheless, in which his titled family had invested much in both alms and indulgences; a place where they had proudly stood upon every sunlit sabbath day for all the years of his mortal life, until he had been squired to Lord Delabarre, sent away to Wales and, ultimately, to Jerusalem. A lifetime ago.

He waited outside until a lone figure emerged from the church door. But for hair that had turned iron gray, Father Martine had changed little in either appearance or demeanor. He showed no emotion at all when the long-missing Nicholas de Brabant waylaid him en route through the graveyard. He listened then, in stern-faced silence, while Lord Gerard's youngest son described, in hideous detail, the evil spell under which he had fallen.

"Please, Father. Tell me you know of some way to end this curse. A way to reclaim the soul I have lost!"

The priest gave no answer at first, but studied Nicholas with measured calm, his gray eyes betraying no sign of the fear that was, nonetheless, quickening his heart. He reached out to grasp Nicholas' arm and at once, the vampire recoiled. Martine's touch had stung like the prick of a thousand needles. Perhaps he had erred in coming here. Perhaps he should leave. He turned away, prepared to go.

"No, young Nicholas. Don't go." Father Martine had found his tongue at last. "There is a way."

He couldn't keep the desperation from his voice. "Tell me. I'll do anything."

"There is a little-known rite of the church. It must be performed on holy ground." Martine swept his hand to indicate the tombstones around them. "A graveyard, for instance."

"And this rite will end my curse?"

"It will." Martine quickly unclasped the large silver crucifix from around his neck. When Nicholas backed away, the priest shook his head in admonishment. "Do not flee the cross. It is to be your salvation. You must hold it, and lie upon the grave of one who has already ascended into heaven." He turned, pointed downward. "Here. My long-departed predecessor, Father Javert."

Suspicion haunted Nicholas' eyes. "This was a mistake," he said, and had been about to take flight when something more fiery than molten lead pressed itself to his chest and bore him earthward. He found himself on his back, not quite on top of Father Javert's grave. Martine's crucifix lay squarely on his chest, searing fire through him,  pressing him down like some great iron weight. He could not move so much as a finger.

"Take it off! The pain..."

"Will last but a short time. Have courage."

Martine disappeared from view. When he returned a short time later, it was to loom over Nicholas with a hammer in one hand, and a sharply-pointed length of wood in the other.

"No..."

"There is but one way to free your soul, young Nicholas." The priest knelt beside him. "A shard of hawthorn is driven through the vampire's heart." He placed the stake with care just above the paralyzing crucifix, and held it in place with a firm hand. "Then its head and heart must be removed, and the body burned with fire." The hammer rose, drawing back to a point high above Martine's head. "Only when that is done will the soul be freed."

"No. No, not that way. Please, don't--"

Martine's arm fell in one swift and deadly stroke. An agony like nothing he had ever known pierced Nicholas' heart, tore a strangled cry from his throat, and continued its hideous journey through him to the ground below. He tried to scream and could not.  He supposed that he would die then, but somehow, even that was denied him. Martine's face seemed to float above him, a grim smile on the pale, thin lips.

"But a moment more, young Nicholas. I must go for my axe and a flint." And he rose to hurry off toward the chapel.

He never reached it.

Something large, black, and terrible flew at him out of the night sky. Martine had no chance to run or cry out. Within minutes, his body had been drained of blood, his neck broken, and his lifeless corpse tossed aside like so much offal. The demon came to stand over Nicholas then, its glowing red eyes cooling rapidly to amber and finally to blue.

"Nicholas, Nicholas. What have you done?"

When the effort to speak failed him, Nicholas tried with all his flagging strength to plead with his sire through the link that bound them together. Please, LaCroix. Don't let me die. Not like this!

Not with the curse unlifted. Not with his eternal soul still damned to the fires of hell.

"Why, Nicholas, is this not the peace you sought in coming here? The sanctuary, the succor of Mother Church? See how very lovingly she does embrace you with her twig of hawthorn and her cross of shining silver."

Please, LaCroix. Please...

A pale hand moved into his rapidly shrinking field of vision, but its fingers closed not around the stake, but upon the crucifix. The silver cross and chain were snatched from his chest, then immediately returned to be angrily shaken in his face.

"Is this the salvation you came here to find?" Smoke curled from the hand that held the crucifix. LaCroix seemed not to notice. "It is no longer your concern, this heaven, this god! I am your salvation now, Nicholas. Your only salvation!"

Hissing his contempt, LaCroix flung the crucifix away. His burned fingers returned then, to at last take hold of the stake.

"I could leave you here," he murmured from somewhere in the darkness. Nicholas could no longer see anything but the impaling length of wood and the hand that grasped it. "Is that what you truly desire? A final death? The opportunity to at last meet that devil you believe in so zealously?"

No. Please, LaCroix!

The wrenching agony of the wood pulling free caught him off guard. He screamed, but no more than a piteous gurgling escaped his throat. Like the cross before it, the bloody stake was hurled away. LaCroix's hand came back a third time then, with its bared wrist cut and bleeding, presented as an offering.

"Drink," his sire commanded. And Nicholas obeyed.

The overwhelming power of twelve long centuries flowed into him, strengthening, healing, revitalizing. For a time, he lost himself in the headiness of feeding from so rich a stream. But all too soon, the sustenance was curtly withdrawn.

"No..." The word came out a hoarse and croaking whisper. "I need..."

"Do you indeed?" The hand that had fed him now gripped and pulled him, trembling, to his feet. "I will tell you what you need, mon fils ingrat. A lesson."

The blow took him completely unawares, and sent him reeling to fall against a carved stone cross that immediately burned him. LaCroix wrenched him away from it, only to strike him again. And again. Nicholas had too little strength to fight back, and so made no effort at all to resist the punishment.

It had been the first -- though far from the last -- beating he would suffer at LaCroix's hands.

His fury spent at last, Nicholas' master had again pulled him to his feet and uttered one final command.

"Come, Nicholas."

And the properly penitent son had obediently followed his sire into flight.

For centuries thereafter, he had tried with all his strength of will to be all that LaCroix wished him to be. He had relished the hunt, gloried in the kill, reveled in the taking of human blood. And he had loathed himself through every one of the endless, blood-drenched years.

In eight centuries, he had found no more than fragile wisps and vague hints of any cure. A lost book called the Abarat. A pair of sacrificial Mayan cups, also lost. There had been charlatans and shamans by the dozen, all promising him redemption. And all of them had failed.

There was no reason to hope that Natalie Lambert might succeed where so many before her had foundered. But his dilemma remained. He would not kill or turn her. She couldn't be made to forget. And if the Enforcers learned of her knowledge...

Somehow, the secret must simply be kept from them. Not an easy task. By avoiding all congress with the others and by drinking only animal blood, he had already weakened the bond that mentally linked his kind to one another. But if LaCroix should follow him to Toronto... If Janette, who was already here, should perceive his intentions... If that happened, there would be little he could do to protect Natalie's life.

Or his own.

He awoke, still seated in the library chair, to the ambient vibrations of sunset occurring just beyond the black-draped walls. The room was cold and in near-total darkness, the fire having long since extinguished itself. Wishing that his problems could do likewise, Nick poured himself a glass of insipid breakfast, and went in search of a shower and a fresh set of clothes.

He'd meant to stop by Sandra's ground floor office on his way out, to check on the food shipment's progress. But as he approached her door, voices reached his sensitive ears from inside the room. One belonged to Sandra, the other to a recently-hired secretary, Melanie Farrell.

"Oh come on," Melanie's high-pitched voice exclaimed. "You mean nobody's ever wondered about it before? I mean, no one's ever seen or talked to Mr. de Brabant, have they? Not even Mr. Knight talks to him. Don't you think maybe that's because Mr. Knight is Mr. de Brabant?"

"The only thing I think," Sandra's calm tones replied, "is that you've been watching way too much Magnum, P.I. And Melanie... It's just a suggestion, but if you want to work here long, you'll do better to keep your questions to yourself. And leave the very private Mr. Knight to himself."

Nick didn't wait to hear more. He escaped down the nearest corridor to a rear door and out into the night. Bypassing the garages, he headed instead into the trees, up a path his feet had trod many times since coming here. The solitude of these woods reminded him of game hunting on his father's estate in Brabant. But it also reminded him of LaCroix and Janette, and an altogether different kind of hunt. He walked. And brooded.

Perhaps it was time that he placed the foundation directorship into Sandra's quite capable hands, and found "the very private Mr. Knight" another, still more private place in which to dwell. Preferably someplace with no mortals in residence.

Tonight, however, there was the dilemma of Natalie Lambert yet to be dealt with. He followed the path to the top of a knoll, where a clearing in the trees formed a wide circle, open to the sky. Bright stars. No moon. No clouds. It was a perfect night for flying.

She was alone when he arrived. She'd just wheeled a sheet-covered corpse into the refrigerated vault.

Nick drifted through the door behind her, grateful for the vault's dimmer lights, and watched as she expertly transferred the body to one of many catacomb-like shelves that lined the metal walls. She hadn't sensed him this time. Not prescient after all?

She turned back, reaching for the gurney's handle -- and started with a small shriek at the sight of him. "I wish you'd stop trying to give me a heart attack," she complained when she'd finally caught her breath.

Nick allowed his feet to touch the floor for the first time. "No assistants on duty this evening, Doctor?"

"Uh... no." She seemed only just to have registered the fact that he had not walked into the vault. "How do you do that?"

"Questions."

"Yeah, well, I have several more where that came from." Her words formed small clouds in the vault's chilled air. "An answer now and then would be nice. Especially if we're going to get anywhere with finding a cure for your... condition."

He studied her at length before saying what had to be said. "Others have attempted to cure my 'condition,' Dr. Lambert. Many of them died trying."

Her eyes flashed, as defiant and angry as before. "If you're still trying to scare me, you can just forget it. I am not submitting to any hypno-whammy stuff, and those bloodthirsty friends of yours just don't need to know that I know, okay?"

She left the gurney behind and stalked past him out of the vault. Nick declined to follow her right away. When he did emerge, he eased the thick door shut behind him. It did little to diminish the room's death stench, but it helped.

She sat on the edge of the paper-littered desk, watching him, waiting.

"They're not my friends," he said. "And it wasn't my intention to scare you. But you have to know the truth -- if we're going to work together." Her eyes widened expectantly, but he went on before she could speak. "You have to know that the others won't be the greatest danger to you. I will."

"You don't want to hurt me. You told me that two nights ago, right here in this room."

"No. But you have to know what you're dealing with: a creature designed to prey on human blood. You said it yourself -- I've killed thousands. A hundred years of restraint may mean nothing at all if I'm too close to you too often. If I lose control..."

"You won't. I trust you."

He shook his head. "In that case, I must ask you your own question back again. Why?"

"Well maybe it's the challenge. Or maybe I'd just like to help someone find what he lost eight hundred years ago. Let me try, Nick. Please, let me help."

He moved within an arm's length of her, gratified that she made no effort to flinch away. "I won't lie to you. There's a great deal we should both fear in taking this on. But if you're willing to accept that risk, then so am I. Whatever happens, I'll do everything in my power to protect you. You have my word on that."

She smiled. "Good. And you have mine that no one will learn anything about you from me. Fair enough?"

He nodded. "Fair enough. What will you need to get started?"

"Ah..." She twisted to pluck a sterile-wrapped hypodermic from a container on the desk. "Actually, the very first thing I'm going to need..." A nervous laugh bisected the sentence. "...is a sample of your blood."

It had been many years since any mortal had been able to make Nick laugh. Yet laugh he did.

And he allowed her to draw the blood.

Later, when he again rode the wind high above Toronto's city lights, the night sang a different melody -- one he had not heard in a very, very long time.

It was a song of hope.
 

--End--