He'd kissed her.

Nick had no idea what had possessed him to take Natalie in his arms that way, when only minutes before, the vampire had very nearly killed her. When he'd escaped to the loft's roof, she'd followed, and despite the danger he posed to her, she'd stayed with him until the serum-induced seizures had abated. That's when he'd kissed her. As though they were no more than two mortal lovers. As though he were no more than a mortal man.

If only it were true.

He could hear her upstairs in the lab, making small sounds, her heart beating a faint but steady rhythm. He couldn't go to her: his hasty exit from the lab had broken the window, and the sun had risen forty minutes ago. So he waited, toying with the carved dragon-rampant on his mantel, until she finally came downstairs.

She carried a clipboard, and at her throat, where the vampire had inflicted two small wounds, she'd taped a scrap of white gauze. The sight of it made him wince. He opened his mouth to say that she could stop the experiment, leave now and go on with her life, but she overran him, pointing with enthusiasm to something on the clipboard.

"The pseudo-viral factors are being suppressed. I just have to find a way to tweak the formula enough to eliminate the seizures, if they persist. That should also help with your lack of..." She stopped a few feet away, reacting to the look on his face. "...control," she finished, and dropped the clipboard onto the back of his leather couch. "Can we please not have this argument again? I told you, I'm not giving up. Not when we're this close."

"Natalie..."

"Nothing happened. Why can't we drop it and move on?"

"Natalie, please. Will you just listen?"

The urgency in his voice caught her attention, though her jaw remained stubbornly set. "All right," she said, mildly exasperated. "I'm listening."

"What happened up there... It's important that you not get the wrong impression. I can't... we can't have..." He stumbled on the word. "...sexual relations with mortals without..." Damn. This shouldn't be so difficult to say.

"Sexual?" She looked confused. "Nick, it was only a kiss."

"No. It was a mistake. One I never should have allowed. And in light of what happened before that--"

"Okay." She held up a hand to stop him, then nervously dropped it again. "Okay, we've been over that. And it's all right. I'm all right."

He shook his head. "There's more you have to understand. It's rare for a mortal to survive the taking of blood. Those who do..." He turned away, gripping the dragon's snout once more. "Those who do are changed."

He definitely had her full attention now. Her voice trembled, a barely-perceptible vibrato. "Changed how?"

He gave his answer to the gargoyles carved into the fireplace facade."They're enthralled, drawn back to the vampire until the taking -- of both blood and life -- is complete. It's meant to be complete," he said, and turned sharply back to look at her. "We're not supposed to stop."

He wasn't sure how to interpret the look on her face. Shock? Revulsion?

"Well," she said, and there was a long, awkward silence before she went on. "I don't feel enthralled. And damn it, Nick, you did stop. Whatever the reason, the serum, guilt, a moral conviction, all of the above -- you did stop."

"Yes. This time. This taking. Do you really want to risk experiencing another?"

She didn't answer right away. He searched her eyes for any sign of an enthrallment, and found none. She was a resister. Perhaps that would mitigate the taking's effect.

"All I want," she finally said, "is to find a cure. I'm a scientist, not some lovesick little girl. I don't believe in charms, enthrallments -- or curses."

"Then this experiment is going to reach an impasse in short order," he told her. "Because there's a great deal more to this curse than the physical."

Curiosity glinted in her eyes, but the scientist in her quickly overcame it. "Yeah, well, I'd love to hear more about your metaphysical theories, but I can only deal with what I can see. And I can see results." She picked up the clipboard again. "This formula suppresses the blood hunger. Now, it may be a long way from a cure, but it's a result. A positive one. Your system has rejected blood and accepted mortal food. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"Not," he said honestly, "if it endangers your life."

"It's been an hour and a half since the second injection. No more seizures, no more loss of control. I'd say the next test is up to you." He watched her march back across his kitchen floor and remove two items from his refrigerator. One was a glass measuring cup full of something milky white, the other one of his green bottles of bovine blood. She placed both on the table, then went to retrieve her coat and purse from the rack near the door. "Call me when you're ready for the next phase. Right now, I need to go home and get some sleep."

He could hear the hurt and disappointment edging her voice, and he felt the very human urge to go to her, take her in his arms again, and say anything to make it right. But he remained at the mantel, as frozen in place as the wooden dragon, and never turned around until the elevator had rumbled open and shut, finally carrying her away.

He brooded for a time before approaching the table. He snatched up the green bottle, yanked out the cork, and started to tip the neck into his mouth. The gag reflex kicked in with the first drop to reach his tongue. Nick slammed the bottle down again, fell into one of the chairs and doubled over, waiting for the nausea to subside. When it didn't, he grabbed the cup of milky liquid and forced himself to down first one swallow, then another. She'd called it an anti-emetic protein shake. It tasted like stagnating pond water, but at the moment, he didn't care.. Three more swallows, and the nausea had begun to retreat. The shake didn't taste quite as vile, either. In fact...

He finished it, left the unwashed glass in the sink, and trudged upstairs to bed. He still felt vaguely dizzy -- and hungry. Maybe a good day's sleep would help.

But sleep eluded him. He lay awake, remembering a time when the hunger had become so all-consuming that it had driven him to madness, into true undeath.

With Joan's wooden cross a crushing weight over his heart, LaCroix had imprisoned him in a crude pine coffin, a punishment for the sin of longing to regain his mortal soul. He'd lost count of the rising and falling suns, sensed only dimly through the darkness that confined him. Along with the clawing, clamoring hunger, blood-drenched visions had assailed him, tempted and tortured him, until his soundless screams had become his only world, and the deafening silence his own private hell.

In lucid moments, he remembered hearing voices. Janette, sobbing and pleading with an unforgiving LaCroix, who had refused her entreaties to release him. Another time, he'd awakened briefly to the sound of a hushed conversation.

"What would you have me do, Lucius?"

It was a woman's voice, one Nicholas did not recognize and could not even be certain was real. But he did feel the dimmed vibrations of LaCroix's presence, and that of another.

"If all you wish to do," the new voice went on, "is to imprison him in true undeath... well, you could send him to Castile, to Valerian, for that. He deals most efficiently with such things."

"No." LaCroix's refusal was as adamant as his answer to Janette had been. "That is not to be his fate."

"Well then, what am I to accomplish with him that you, in two centuries, have not?"

Nicholas both heard and felt his master's hands come to rest on the coffin's lid, though they made no move to pry it open. "Teach him," he heard LaCroix breathe. "It is a failing I am loathe to confess, even to you, that in two-hundred years I have taught him nothing, that he has learned nothing. Yet, apparently, that is the case. Perhaps you, with a far more ancient wisdom, shall be able to ascertain why." Nicholas had never before heard such deference in his sire's voice. "I would be grateful for that."

"Leave him to me, then," the woman had said, "for a time. If it is possible to discern the answer you seek, then I will send for you."

Whatever else they might have discussed had been lost then, in a renewed flood of bloodstained images welling from the hunger, and from the ravening madness it had spawned.

Nicholas had never heard them leave.

For an interminable time, hunger and madness had been all that he knew. His agonies had stretched into an endless tedium of silent, suffocating darkness, an eternity of pain and utterly mind-numbing emptiness. True undeath.

He had only a vague recollection of nails being wrenched from the wood around him, of torchlight hurting his eyes, and of a slender hand casually brushing aside the immobilizing cross before strong arms embraced and lifted him out of the coffin. His next conscious memory had been of a warm, life-giving flow of human blood, fed to him from a wineskin. For a time, his world had consisted of nothing but that welcome, revitalizing stream. When the wineskin was emptied and withdrawn, another replaced it, until finally, his hunger at long last satisfied, he opened his eyes to look upon his benefactor.

She'd been brought across somewhere in her fifth decade of mortal life, an age far more advanced than that of most who chose the darkness. Gray had invaded her raven hair, and fine lines edged her near-black eyes. But her bearing and the powerful signature she emanated spoke eloquently of great age and vast knowledge.

The first words Nicholas had spoken in a very long time came out as a stumbling, confused rasp. "Who... who are you? Why did he leave me here... with you?"

"I have many names. The first was Ahzme. And you are here at your sire's behest. He seems to think I might teach you -- show you -- what you truly are."

"I know what I am."

An enigmatic smile played across her face. "No," she said. "But you shall know." She touched him. It was only the faintest brush of her fingertips to his forehead, yet Nicholas immediately recoiled from it, overcome with the sudden, dizzying sensation of falling. He closed his eyes against the room's spinning tilt. When he opened them again, the walls had vanished. Ahzme stood beside him under a star-swept sky, between the boulders of a broad stone circle.

"What place is this? By what magic have you brought us here?"

"It is a memory of the blood," she said. "And we are but spirits here." She seized his hand and compelled him further into the circle, where two lovers embraced before the granite altar and the heelstone that rose behind it. The woman had a familiar face.

"You," Nicholas whispered. "As a mortal?"

"Yes. In Sumeria, nearly three millennia before your Christ was born. This Ahzme was a slave who kept the temple of the mother goddess Innin, and of Innin's son, Tammuz. Until the incarnate Tammuz became her lover."

Like ghosts, they drifted closer to the altar. The lovers paid them no heed. But when he saw Tammuz open eyes that burned a bright, glowing amber, Nicholas understood, of a sudden, how he might be mistaken for a god. To humans of this era, a vampire's powers must have seemed very godlike indeed. Nicholas watched his lovemaking with the mortal Ahzme progress to the taking, and even as he drank from her, the vampire lifted and placed her gently upon the altar. Before he could possibly have taken all her blood, he drew away from her, stood, and faced the heelstone, thrusting his arms toward it. He began chanting in a strange tongue. His fingers traced patterns in the air.

"What is he doing?"

"A summoning," Ahzme replied. "From the dawn of time until this night, Nicholas, there existed only two of our kind. Tammuz was one. And the other..."

The heelstone shimmered with an arcane green light -- and began to move. Tammuz ceased his chant, and from the stone emerged a young woman with deepset eyes and auburn hair that cascaded to the ground.

"She is the other?" Nicholas watched in awe as the seductively beautiful creature linked hands with Tammuz across the altar and the enthralled mortal upon it. "Innin?"

Beside him, Ahzme smiled. "She has known many names as well. To my people, she was Innin. To the Hebrews, she was not a god, but the first mortal woman, Lilith. It was said she would not obey her creator or her mate, and so was made a vampire and imprisoned in the stone."

The scene playing out on the altar had become a macabre mirror of Nicholas' own introduction to the darkness. Tammuz, having seduced his mortal lover, now gave her over to his master, who took the remainder of her life's blood, then fed her her own, until the dead awoke to feed in her own rite, from Tammuz's veins.

"She is our mother," Ahzme said. "While another became mother to the human race, ours languished here for millennia in true undeath. The mortal Tammuz awakened her, became her son, and built this temple around her stone. But in time, she tired, and returned to her state of undeath."

Nicholas shuddered to think that any vampire would willingly undergo the horror he had just, however briefly, endured. He wondered if Innin would return now to her granite prison. But she remained, finally taking the hands of her children and flying with them from the temple.

"This was our beginning," Ahzme told him, and at once, the standing stones dissolved around them and again became the torch-lit crypt in which Nicholas had awakened. She moved from his side, turning back to face him. "Our race is, in truth, as old as humankind. The Hebrew god cursed and imprisoned our mother, but our father Tammuz freed her. He freed us all from Yahweh's tyranny, so that we may serve another power. Another master."

Nicholas' incipient revulsion for his own kind surged anew. He backed away from her. "No. I will not serve that power. Not ever."

A puzzled look crossed her face, as though this response had not been at all what she'd expected. "We are creatures of the darkness. Surely you know that we are subject to the prince of that realm?"

"No. I won't--" The crypt wall halted both Nicholas' retreat and his sentence. He pressed himself to the damp stones, shaking his head. "I won't," he repeated. "Not ever."

Ahzme's puzzled expression deepened. "Has Lucius truly taught you so little? We are a race superior to those who serve as our prey. In the end, our master shall rule their realm as well as his own."

"You speak blasphemy," Nicholas murmured.

He hadn't expected her to laugh, and her mockery made him angry. "The crusader evermore seeks redemption," she said. Then, in far more serious tones, "You must learn that we are beyond that reach, young Nicholas. When we become immortal, we deliver our mortal souls to the master of darkness."

"No!" He shouted the word at her, turned, and swept out of the room -- only to halt in the next, confronted with the sight of an open pine coffin resting on a limestone bier. He felt her enter through the door behind him, approaching on his left. Nicholas looked up at the vaulted ceiling -- anywhere to avert his eyes from the crude wooden box that had imprisoned him for so long. "Where are we?" he demanded. "What is this place?"

"A Norman crypt," she replied, moving to face him once again. "It lies beneath the ruins of a Norman abbey. It is unconsecrated, and sealed with a decidedly ineffective ward against evil."

The shadowed walls beyond the coffin gaped with burial niches, long since emptied of mortal remains. But the torchlight also revealed a stairway leading up to an iron-barred door. Nicholas flew to that, put his hands to the bar -- and immediately retreated from the deadly warmth of sunlight radiating from the other side. He turned back to glare sullenly at Ahzme, who stood beside the coffin, watching him.

"If you still wish to leave when the sun has gone," she said, "I will do nothing to stop you." Her fingers traced the edges of the wooden box. "Lucius, on the other hand, will only bring you back again. So if you please, young Nicholas, humor me. There are still many things that you and I must learn from one another."

For one horrible moment, Nicholas considered throwing open the door and walking out into the sun. Instead, he slowly descended the stairs, and reluctant but resigned, submitted himself to Ahzme's instruction.

"Never heard of anybody allergic to the sun before," he grumbled as he flipped through the pages of Nick's carefully-fabricated employment history.

"It's a minor inconvenience, really," Nick lied. "As long as I stay on the night shift, I'm fine."

"And what's this you're saying about only working alone? You don't like working with other cops?"

"It's not that. I just do a better job on my own, that's all."

Stonetree grunted, a sound Nick hoped was more contemplative than derogatory. "Well, it's a good, solid record you've got," the captain conceded. "And Central was impressed with your initial interview, or they wouldn't've sent you down here. How soon could you start?"

The man's directness caught Nick momentarily off guard. "Tomorrow night?"

"Done. Wait here a minute." Stonetree got up from the desk and crossed to open his office door, where he motioned to someone in the squad room. When a man approached the door, Nick stood -- and barely concealed a startled reaction.

"Detective Don Schanke, meet Nick Knight, newest detective on the night shift. Schanke's a day guy here on OT," Stonetree said while they assessed one another. "But he'll show you around before he books off."

"Hiya." The balding detective extended a hand, which Nick shook. "Welcome to the loony bin. Come on out, I'll give you the Don Schanke deluxe grand tour."

"Yeah. Sure." Nick managed a weak smile, and turned to shake Stonetree's hand as well. "Thanks, Captain. See you tomorrow night, then."

"Mm." Stonetree's grunts spoke volumes. "Shift starts at seven. Don't be late."

With an acquiescing nod, Nick turned to follow Schanke out of the office. For the next twenty minutes, he was ushered through two computer labs, a holding cell block, four interrogation units and a locker room before being introduced, one by one, to all the night shift detectives and office personnel. Through it all, Schanke had kept up an incessant stream of chatter so inane that Nick found himself wishing in vain for a pair of earplugs. They probably wouldn't have helped.

"And now, the pièce de résistance!" Schanke's French was as abominable as his haircut. "Behold, the indispensable coffee niche." He hefted a grease-stained box of donuts, wafting it under Nick's nose. "Ahhhhh, the life blood of cops everywhere."

Natalie Lambert's voice came suddenly from behind them. "For you, Schanke, that would have to include souvlaki and two packs of cigarettes a day. Lethal combo."

When both men turned, she quickly covered her surprise on sight of Schanke's companion, and politely took Nick's hand when Schanke introduced them -- around a mouthful of chocolate donut. "Natalie's our district ME," he explained, smacking loudly. "And Nick here is the 27th's newest homicide gumshoe. Hell, he has no idea what he's getting into, but wish him luck anyway. Speaking of which, I'm gonna be out of luck if I don't get my backside out of here before midnight. Myra's gonna kill me. Listen, Nick, it's been real." He pumped Nick's hand with chocolate-coated fingers, plucked a coat from the back of a nearby chair, and gave Natalie a friendly "G'night!" on his way to the door.

Nick was left in the decidedly awkward position of trying to read Natalie's feelings from her facial expression. If she was still disappointed in him, he couldn't see it in her eyes. Better yet, he still saw no sign of enthrallment, either.

"I'm glad the job worked out for you," she said. "I guess that means we'll be working together, at least some of the time." There was a cautionary edge to her voice, but the sentiment sounded genuine.

"I guess it does," he said, and had to turn aside in search of a paper towel to excise Schanke's donut residue from his fingers.

Natalie was laughing when he looked up again. "Donut Don strikes again." She glanced around the bustling squad room, as though making certain that her next words would not be overheard. "I'm on my way back to my office. Would the 27th's newest detective care to walk me to my car?"

He did. But when they reached the parking lot, she stopped under the blue glow of a lamp post near her car. "Your color looks better, Nick. A lot better. Milk shake diet agreeing with you?"

He grimaced. "Not exactly. I mean, I can keep it down, but..."

"But nectar of the gods it isn't?" She laughed again. "Okay. I can work on that. Assuming..." She hesitated, watching him intently now. "Assuming you still want me to."

He had to suppress the resurgent inclination to tell her no, to frighten her away from this thing any way that he could. But he'd already learned that Natalie didn't frighten that easily. He gave her a thin smile and said honestly, "I'd like that."

"Well, in that case..." She unlocked the passenger door of her car and opened it. "Lunch is on me. Oh, come on, get in. I know a great place that's open all night."

Which turned out to be a storefront cafe on Grenville, sporting a green-and-white awning emblazoned with the name VEGGIE HAVEN. Nick found himself staring at a plate full of bright orange, green and yellow somethings nestled in a bed of steaming white rice, with a hot cup of herbal tea alongside.

"Okay," Natalie said, tucking into an identical repast. "So we tried the carnivore fast food route. Probably not the best thing to start you on, in hindsight. So tonight, some disgustingly healthy vegetarian cuisine. Try it. It's a lot easier on the digestion."

She waited while he poked a tentative fork into a corrugated slice of something that might once have been a carrot, transported it to his mouth, chewed and swallowed. "Well?" she asked when she could apparently stand the suspense no longer. "How's it taste?"

Nick tried another, amazed that the thing hadn't tried to make an immediate return appearance. "Truth?" he said. "It doesn't taste like much of anything."

"Oh." She looked disappointed. "Well, does it taste the way you remember carrots tasting -- before?"

"Er..." He chased something green and flowery -- broccoli? -- around the plate with his fork. "We didn't exactly have what you'd call a healthy diet in the thirteenth--" He glanced nervously toward the other patrons in the cafe. "Back then," he amended, and finally got the green thing onto the fork and into his mouth. That one nearly did come immediately back up. He had to grab the glass of ice water their waitress had just placed on the table and take several gulps before the broccoli decided to stay put.

Natalie was still watching him as though she were taking mental notes of all of this for her journal. "Soooooo, you didn't have carrots, broccoli, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. What did you eat, anyway?"

"Game," he said. "A lot of game. Bread, turnips, wine. Occasional fruit. Apples, mostly."

"Great." She made a face. "Ninety-nine percent fat and carbohydrates. "How anybody ever lived past thirty is beyond me!"

Nick tried the rice, the tea, and a few more veggies, finding none of it particularly appetizing, but gratified that his system tolerated the food (with the possible exception of broccoli). Equally pleased that Natalie hadn't insisted he clean his plate, he marveled all the way back to the station house that sitting this close to her in the car had triggered nothing of the blood lust. He could still hear her heart beating. But that was all.

"You're making good progress, Nick," he heard her say, and realized that they'd pulled into a parking space head-to-head with his Caddy in the precinct lot. "If we keep on with this formula, who knows? Could be the key to it all. If the blood intake is what keeps you from coming back across..." She trailed off, aware suddenly that he was only half listening. "Something on your mind?"

He didn't answer right away, listening instead to her heart's steady, comforting rhythm. "Answer a question for me?" he finally asked. She nodded, waiting. "How do you separate the natural from the supernatural? How can you accept only one, when proof of the other is, literally, sitting in front of you?"

"Proof?" Her doubt of that showed clearly in her eyes. "And what proof would that be, exactly?"

"Have you found a scientific explanation for a vampire's ability to fly? To hypnotize and enthrall a victim? To come back from the dead in the first place? I haven't. Not in eight-hundred years. Because there isn't one."

"There's a scientific explanation for everything, Nick," she insisted. "Even you."

"What about evil, then? What does your scientific world view do with that?"

"You're not--" She stopped herself, holding up a hand. "All right, all right. What am I supposed to say, that I don't believe evil exists? How can I? I've spent my life dissecting the results of it."

"The results, yes. Not the cause. There's a source of evil, Natalie. An author."

Her laughter this time was nervous, uncertain. "What, the Devil? Oh, come on."

"It's true." He wasn't joking, and that seemed to unnerve her. "There's also a hell."

"How?" Skepticism permeated her voice. "How could you possibly know?"

She was mocking him now. And if he answered, if he told her the whole truth, she would invariably conclude that even vampires could succumb to mental aberration. So he settled for meeting her eyes and simply saying, "Good night, Natalie."

"Nick..." She looked and sounded exasperated. "I'll be by after my shift, for the next injection."

"Yeah." He got out of the car, and when she'd backed out and driven away, he opened his own door and slid into the Caddy's much roomier front seat. The rearview mirror showed him pale blue eyes flecked with the faintest traces of fiery gold. Remnants of evil. The mark of the beast.

"I know," he said, answering Natalie's question with the cold truth long after she had gone, "because I've been there."
A week in Ahzme's company had scarcely begun to teach Nicholas the vast history of their kind. To share the knowledge of one so ancient was a privilege he had never hoped to attain. But despite growing accustomed to the blood memories she permitted him to see, there was one aspect of her teaching that he had stubbornly rejected.

"Nicholas, Nicholas, how are you possible?" she had said on their last night together. "You know what you are, and yet you do not. How does a vampire not know of the realm to which we belong? Has LaCroix's instruction really been so remiss as to leave out this fundamental aspect?"

Nicholas stared with longing at the barred door. After a week spent feeding only from wineskins, he longed for flight and the chance to hunt, and the crypt had come to feel nearly as close and confining as the coffin had been. "LaCroix serves no master," he told her, "no god and no devil greater than himself. If you know him, then you know this."

"Yes. But in the past millennia, I have also known a host of his progeny. And none, save you, has ever clung to his mortality -- and his mortal god -- so tenaciously as you have done. Why, Nicholas? Can you answer that question?"

He had no answer. If he had, he might never have incurred the wrath that had sent him here in the first place.

"Well then," Ahzme said, apparently taking his silence for a negative response, "we shall simply have to divine the reason, you and I." His trepidation at this must have shown, because she smiled and said, "It is the last task I shall require of you."

She made a sweeping gesture at the wall, and at once, where empty tombs had been, a gaping black passageway appeared. No light came from it at all; not even the crypt's burning torches penetrated its depths.

Nicholas stared. "What is this?"

Again, she wore a puzzled expression. "Surely you have seen it before, when Lucius brought you across?"

"I saw a... a portal, yes. But it was filled with light. A brilliant light."

"That was the realm from which you turned away. This is the one you embraced. The door you did enter."

She was wrong. There had been no such doorway in his dying vision, only the portal of light and the being that had beckoned to him from it. He'd turned away, true enough, and in the next instant he had awakened to the iron taste of LaCroix's blood, and to Janette's impassioned kiss.

There had been no second portal.

"Come," Ahzme said, and before he could protest, she had grasped his hand and propelled him with her through the pitch black corridor. A moment later, they stood upon a gray, desolate plain, lit only by the dim glow of an unseen moon. A frost-chilled wind whispered over them, its soft moan the only sound. Ahzme released his hand. "Do you not know this place?" she asked.

He did not. The landscape of his dying vision had been drenched in sunlight, and nothing at all like this featureless, bleak expanse. "How could I?" he said. "I have never been here."

Her eyes reflected the briefest hint of alarm at this reply, but she said nothing more. She seemed, rather, to be waiting for something -- or someone. In the distance, on the flat horizon, something bright appeared and drifted rapidly toward them. It had the semblance of a man, yet it radiated a light so brilliant that Nicholas had to squint to keep his eyes on it. With the face of an angel and the countenance of a god, it was without question the most beautiful creature Nicholas had ever seen. And yet...

It emanated both a sense of immense power -- and an immeasurable evil. Nicholas wanted to turn and fly out of this place, but his feet remained rooted to the ashen ground beneath him.

"My lord," Ahzme said, and bowed her head once in deference. Nicholas did not emulate the action. "I bring a son of your realm, Nicholas de Brabant, who strangely does not recall coming before you when he was brought across. I would ask my lord how this is possible."

Her lord? It couldn't be true. An illusion, an aftereffect of his madness, it must be. Surely a creature as breathtaking as this could not possibly be the master of Ahzme's much-vaunted realm of darkness!

"You are our daughter Ahzme," the being said, and its voice shook the ground beneath them. It then turned burning eyes upon Nicholas. "But this one, while one of our blood, is not yet our son. His sire called him back too soon from the brink. He did not come to us."

Nicholas started when Ahzme again seized his hand, thrusting it toward the light. "Then we would ask that you take now the mortal aspect that hinders this servant on your Earth. Accept his soul, that he may at last belong among his own kind."

His soul...

"Come to us, then," the voice boomed. "I will take that which is mine." It stretched forth a brightly-glowing hand, beckoning, demanding that he approach.

"No!" A panicked Nicholas pulled free of Ahzme's grasp and twisted away. Desperate to escape this horror at any cost, he turned and flew at the black aperture that still loomed on the gray expanse behind them. Its dark maw swallowed him once again, and moments later, the crypt's solid wall arrested his flight and sent him crashing to the cold slate floor. He scarcely noticed. His soul. He still possessed his soul!

The touch of a cold hand startled him. He looked up into Ahzme's matronly gaze. "Our poor, tormented Nicholas," she soothed, and stroked his hair as though he were some lost mortal child. "No wonder you have suffered the tortures of guilt, the longing to regain your mortality. You never left it properly behind. Only mortals have souls, Nicholas." Her hand moved to hold firmly to his shoulder. "Come back with me. Complete what your sire's haste did not allow you to finish."

With a strength born of indignation, he swept her hand away. "Never," he hissed, and pushed himself up and away from her. "My soul is my own. I'm not damned after all. And I don't belong to you, or to LaCroix, or to any of your kind!"

"No." Pity now clouded her dark eyes. "No, you will belong to no one. Is that what you wish? To exist in such a limbo, suspended between two realms, never to be part of either? That is a loneliness no creature, mortal or vampire, may endure."

"I can. And I will. Until I find a way back across."

She started to say something more, then glanced suddenly up at the vaulting overhead. Nicholas felt the vibration stir within him, and knew at the same time that he was lost after all. LaCroix was up there, waiting. For him. And the moment Ahzme revealed his newfound secret, there would be, in LaCroix's eyes, only one solution. His sire dealt with all things considered weak, malformed or defective in the same way. He destroyed them.

Ahzme had turned and ascended the stairs, with the obvious expectation that he would follow. But a terrified Nicholas lingered, fiercely gripping the edge of the pine coffin that had brought him here. Joan's cross still lay inside, as did the scrap of white linen in which she had wrapped it on that night, an eternity ago. On an impulse, he snatched up the cloth, bundled it hastily around the cross and tucked it under his belted tunic, out of sight. There was no hope of dissuading LaCroix with it, he knew. But if he was to die a final death this night, he wanted Joan's sigil at his side.

"Nicholas." Ahzme waited at the top of the stairs. The door stood open, allowing a fragrant night breeze to flow into the crypt. At any other time, he would have welcomed this release. Now, he dreaded passing through that door more than returning through Ahzme's conjured portal to the depths of hell. He followed, nonetheless, in Ahzme's wake, emerging onto moss-covered stones that had once formed the abbey's chapel floor. Three of its walls remained, the charred and broken remnants of some long-forgotten holocaust. And beneath the rounded stone archway of the apse stood a figure altogether out of keeping with a house of God.

"Lucius," Ahzme said.

LaCroix returned her greeting nod with a sidelong glance at Nicholas, and went straight to business. "What have you found?" There was an eagerness in his tone, but Nicholas heard a hint of fear in it as well. Did he dread being forced to destroy his most prized creation? Was it possible for LaCroix to fear anything?

"Why does it surprise you," Ahzme asked, "that your son should reflect so much of yourself? His disobedience, obstinacy, ill temper and arrogance -- all of these are yours, Lucius."

Some of that ill temper flared in LaCroix's eyes now. "Yes," he rasped. "And fine they are. But I am not responsible for his incessant malady of guilt." His accusing gaze fell then on Nicholas, who longed to take flight over the abbey's ruined walls and soar away into the night. A forlorn hope. Both elder vampires could easily have overtaken him. So he remained at Ahzme's side, as still and silent as Lilith's heelstone, and fixed LaCroix with an openly resentful glare.

"In fact," Ahzme was saying, "you are. It is your own disbelief, your own refusal to acknowledge the master of us all, which has brought about his guilt and his lack of control."

Nicholas held his breath. So now would come the truth, and with it, his death sentence.

"I will accept no blame for that," LaCroix snarled. "I may have no choice but to destroy him. But I will pay homage to no deity, dark or light, that presumes to hold power over me. They do not!"

"Ah, Lucius." She took a single step toward him. "Only you would dare usurp our master's supreme sin of pride. Nicholas is what you have made him. Would you destroy him for that?"

LaCroix gave no answer, which in itself astounded Nicholas. He waited, then, for Ahzme to reveal the rest, to bare his secret and give his sire a sound reason for killing him. But she turned her back on LaCroix and spoke to Nicholas instead. "We have both learned a great deal," she said. "But I am finished here. May you live long, young Nicholas." She reached out to stroke his face, again the maternal gesture. "I dare say you will come to teach even your master a few lessons in humility." She turned back just long enough to give LaCroix a parting nod. And then she had flown, vanishing in a soft rush of air. Without revealing the truth of Nicholas' intact soul.

"Do tell me..." LaCroix's harsh whisper carried on the wind to the abbey's crumbling stones. "...what great truths the two of you have learned."

"Only one." Nicholas dared to give him half the truth. "I am not damned. And I may yet redeem my soul -- in spite of you."

LaCroix's ridiculing laughter echoed resoundingly off the stones, and for once, Nicholas welcomed it. If his belief in a soul was deemed a fantasy, then LaCroix might not destroy him for it. "Your soul? Oh, you do amuse me. Vampires, my lamentably wishful offspring, do not have souls." He stalked past Nicholas to the center of the moss-covered floor, where he waited for his rebellious progeny to join him in preparing for flight.

Before he followed, Nicholas slipped a hand beneath his cloak to touch the cloth that swathed Joan's cross. Even through the fabric, he could feel its heat against his cold fingers. But this time, it was a warmth that he welcomed.

"Yeah. In a minute." When she'd come close enough to see it, he extended one hand into the shaft of sunlight flooding through the window. "Wait," he said when she started to protest. "Just watch." He counted a full thirty-seven seconds before white smoke began rising from his fingers, and he withdrew from the light. "That's a full thirteen seconds longer than it took before. Something's definitely changing."

"Good." She checked her watch. "Forty minutes since the injection. How's your appetite?"

"The same, I guess. The food's stayed down, and I haven't had any cravings for blood since..." Since the vampire had attacked her last night. Nick left the sentence unfinished, hunted down the remote and pressed it to close the automated shutters. "Tell me something?" he asked after a lengthy silence.

She was on her way back from turning on the overhead lights. "Sure. What?"

"Do you really only believe in what you can see? Only in what science can prove?"

She shrugged. "Well, I can't completely discount the unknown, but yes, I guess you could say I'm a born skeptic." She paused to draw a breath, meeting his eyes. "And that bothers you, doesn't it?"

Nick conceded that point with a nod. "I guess I just need someone to believe me when I say that there is such a thing as a soul. A vampire is supposed to lose it when he comes across. My 'defect' is that I didn't. Which means that I still have a chance to redeem it."

"Actually," she said, and the doubt in her eyes finally seemed to melt, if only a little, "it means we still have a chance. G'night, Nick. Keep working at it. You'll get there."

When the elevator had once again taken her away, Nick turned to open the hinged lid of a plain wooden box that graced his lamp table. He reached in to stroke the smooth, carved surface of Joan's cross, and for the first time, felt no heat, only the cool, solid wood beneath his fingers.

"With God's help and yours," he said to a Natalie no longer there, "I will."
 

--End--