Hunting...

The vampire reveled in pleasures long denied it: the exhilaration of the chase, the pounding of its mortal prey's heart, and most of all, the tantalizing scent of fear.

Racing through back alleys full of smoke and shadow, Nick Knight allowed his Beast free rein to stalk their quarry, and from deep within him, the vampire growled in predatory appreciation.

Not far ahead, a human beast named Ray Cameron pounded over rain-slick asphalt in the futile hope of escaping him. Twelve murders comprised Ray's known legacy: a dozen flawless contract hits in two years in five cities -- three of them here in Toronto.

There would be no more.

Ray Cameron had just been scheduled to retire. Tonight.

Brick walls, steam vents, refuse bins and boarded windows streaked past Nick, a slur of muted colors and pungent scents. He rounded a corner and pulled up short, feet skidding on the wet pavement.

Cameron's heartbeat had changed, slowed. He was no longer running.

The vampire smiled, baring fangs. So the hunted had chosen to turn on its hunter.

Good. Challenge added spice to the chase.

He glanced up at a skeletal fire escape twining down the soiled brick wall above, and willed himself there. At once, his feet left the ground. The alley tilted, became a blur of motion, then righted itself from a new perspective when, air light and noiseless, he touched down on the overhead platform.

Within moments, Cameron appeared below, the muzzle of a .45 automatic preceding him into the alley. Like most mortals, he warily searched his surroundings in every direction but one. Had he looked up, he might have seen the inhuman creature with fangs and flaming eyes -- in the split second before it flew at him, and landing a blow from above, sent him reeling into a concrete wall.

Dazed, the mortal turned back to fire at his attacker, releasing a string of invective from behind the gun's silenced chuffing sound.

The vampire felt only the whisper of five tiny missiles passing through its form and out again.

With a startled cry, Cameron fired again, pressing the trigger until he'd emptied the weapon's clip and it clicked uselessly on an empty chamber.

"What the hell...?"

"Exactly," the vampire hissed.

Nick spun him to face the wall and wrenched the man's hands behind him, slamming him against the concrete in the process. The gun fell, splashing into a rain puddle at their feet, and with the prey now helpless in its grasp, the vampire growled in anticipation.

Cameron let out a strangled yelp. "Please... don't!"

The mortal's terrified plea evoked no sympathy. Why should one killer take pity on another?

"Tell me why you deserve to live," Nick snarled at him, and Cameron's forehead cracked the concrete twice more. "Tell me!"

"Names!" the gunman wailed. "I'll give you names, dates, contracts, anything you want. Just please don't--"

Nick twisted the mortal around again, one hand closing over his throat. The Beast's glowing eyes bore into him.

Abject terror looked back. For a prolonged moment, the vampire exulted in that sensation, in the short, pulsing breaths, the quickening pulse. Then abruptly, the human's eyes lost both their fear and their focus and simply stared into the void, waiting for his directive.

Waiting for death.

The Beast roared in triumph, bared its fangs and prepared to strike. The long-anticipated reward for its hunting prowess coursed through this mortal's veins, pulsed in the arteries of his throat, waited to feed the Hunger.

Denying it had never been so difficult.

Nick held back, fighting to quell the Beast's desire for blood. In answer, it unleashed an internal shriek of agonized rage, and cheated of the prize, clawed at him with phantom talons for release, demanding the freedom he had denied it for more than a century.

Freedom to kill.

"You saw none of this," Nick told the mortal. "I cornered you here, took your gun and arrested you. That was all. Understand?"

Cameron nodded dumbly.

"Good. In that case..." Nick bent to retrieve the fallen .45, unclipped a pair of handcuffs from his belt, and deftly secured the gunman's hands behind him. "...you're under arrest."

Three blocks away, on the roof of a high rise hotel, the click and whir of a shutter and auto-winder repeated their cycle for the twenty-third time. An infrared telephoto lens flawlessly tracked Nick and Cameron's progress from the alley to the street and finally to the '62 Caddy convertible parked in a yellow zone on Richmond.

Bret Hoff snapped a final shot as the Cadillac pulled away, then waited for the camera to hum through its rewind sequence before loosening the wing nuts to remove it from the tripod. He proceeded to dismantle and package the photographic equipment with all the precision and care he'd have given his high-powered rifles, instruments with which he was far more intimately familiar. He preferred gun sights to camera lenses. But if Gareth Branwyn ordered you to take pictures of some cop named Knight collaring a washed-up hit man, you took pictures.

Even if there was something pretty damned strange about this particular cop.

When he handed the finished prints to Branwyn across a marble desktop two hours later, he had trouble keeping the quaver out of his voice.

"What the hell is this guy?"

Stroking absently at an iron-gray beard, Branwyn perused the photos, spreading them out on the desk. He turned piercing green eyes on Bret and asked, in his customary half-whispered tones, "Don't you know?"

Bret swallowed and shook his head. "Uh-uh. I never saw anyone do what he did. Nobody human."

Branwyn steepled his fingers over the photographs and gave vent to a patronizing smile. "An astute observation," he murmured. "And a job well done."

Bret eyed the older man and braved an accusation. "You set Cameron up, didn't you? Fed him to that cop, like bait."

"Aptly put yet again. The only surprise..." Branwyn tapped at the final shot of the Cadillac pulling away. "...is that Mr. Cameron survived to tell the tale. Our tale. We shall have to deal with that."

This, now, was a language Bret understood. "You want him dead?"

Long slender fingers toyed with the photo edges, teasing the corners. "See to it."

Nodding, Bret turned and left the spacious office. Arranging a hit, even inside a police lockup, did not pose a problem.

He just hoped he never had occasion to run into a particular cop named Knight.

Nick had begun to get used to the vision of Natalie Lambert bent over the array of medical paraphernalia spread across his kitchen counters and table. The sun had risen over an hour ago, and after putting in a full shift at the morgue, he knew she had to be tired. But tonight -- this morning, he amended with a glance at his heavily shuttered windows -- her blood samples were exhibiting something she apparently found too fascinating to put down.

She gestured at him with one hand, her eyes still glued to the microscope lenses. "Take a look at this," she said, excitement edging her voice. "Something's definitely happening here."

She slid aside to let him see, brushing a stray wisp of auburn hair off her forehead with one hand as she moved. Watching her, he forgot all about the microscope for a moment -- until she pointed to it and loudly cleared her throat. Taking the hint, he bent over to peer into the instrument's twin eyepieces, and saw a mosaic of red and white blood cells with two oddly shaped, tubular somethings swimming in between. As he watched, one of the fatter tubules collided with a thin, rod-shaped tube, and immediately began to engulf it until it had surrounded the smaller element completely.

Nick looked up at Natalie hopefully. "What does it mean?" he asked.

"Maybe nothing." She flipped rapidly through the pages of a notebook on the table. "Maybe everything. If I can duplicate the formula and then the test results, the next step is to test it in vitro."

"Meaning me."

"Well, I don't think it would do much for my bloodstream, but then I don't have any vampiric elements floating around in mine. And I'd sort of planned to keep it that way." When he failed to respond to her levity in kind, she sobered and looked at him with renewed concern. "What's bothering you, Nick?"

He dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and sighed. "I dunno," he told her honestly. "Maybe it's just the arrest I made tonight. Something about it was... well, wrong."

Natalie shrugged dismissively. "You've made arrests based on anonymous tips before."

"Yeah. But someone went out of his way to make sure Cameron would be right where I found him. And I think I'd like to know why."

Nat closed the notebook, her gaze traveling across the array of test tube racks and equipment littering the table. "Okay. Why do I have the feeling this case isn't all that's bothering you?"

He considered denying that, but decided Nat would know the lie for what it was. She'd learned to read him only too well in the three short years he'd known her.

"Truth?" he queried softly.

"Truth," she repeated.

"I guess I'm still a little gun-shy, after last month."

"The lidovuterine."

He nodded, the memory of Nat's last "cure" still a painful one. While that drug had successfully repressed the vampire, it had also proven increasingly addictive. In the end, his Beast had surfaced to reclaim him with a vengeance.

"This compound is entirely different, Nick. I can't guarantee there won't be side effects, but there's nothing to indicate any addictive properties."

For all that he wanted to grasp at any ray of hope, Nick couldn't stem a concurrent tide of cynicism. After so many years of trying and failing, it had begun to come naturally. "And if we're kidding ourselves?" he asked. "What if there isn't any cure, Nat?"

She wasn't about to accept that. He could read it in her eyes. "You've just seen one attack and begin to absorb the vampiric blood elements," she said with a nod toward the microscope.

He shook his head. "In a test tube, on a slide..."

"Stop it!" She was getting angry, losing patience. "Don't you dare give up on this now."

"I'm not," he denied quickly. "It's just... Sometimes I can't help thinking we've been wasting our time, that's all."

She glowered. "Is that you talking? Or LaCroix?"

Stung by the comparison to his vampiric sire, Nick looked away. Privately, silently, he had to admit that perhaps his pessimism was indeed rooted in LaCroix's influence. In the eight long centuries of their association, LaCroix had made many predictions, including the promise that Nicholas' "futile search for a cure" would come to naught.

He had seldom known LaCroix to be wrong about anything.

"Give me another hour to repeat the test," Natalie implored. "Then work with me on this. After all, the stuff's not exactly apt to kill you, is it?"

Nick smiled in spite of himself. "Okay," he agreed. "Another hour. But then you should get some rest."

Appeased, she went back to her work, and he watched her in silence for a time.

"Nat..." he said at length. "There's something else you should know."

She paused in the midst of scribbling a note and glanced at him. "Hm?"

"About LaCroix." He waited until he had her complete attention, then said what had to be said as calmly as he could. "You already know he'll do anything to keep me this way. Even if we find a cure, he's not going to accept the change. He'll try to stop us. Maybe kill us."

She nodded as though he'd just related something no more arcane than Toronto's morning weather. "I'm willing to take that chance."

Maybe I'm not, he started to say, but knew before he broached it that the argument would not sway Natalie. She didn't know LaCroix. She had no idea what the master vampire could do. Perhaps, if he told her...

"There were others, you know. So many others, over the years who tried to help me. Herbalists, alchemists, holy men, doctors. And one way or another, LaCroix stopped them all."

If she was rattled at all by that revelation, Natalie didn't show it. "I'm not afraid of LaCroix," she said.

"You should be."

This time, the conviction of his words did seem to give her pause, if only for a moment. Then, her jaw stubbornly set, she went back to her task without further comment, and the room fell silent.

Nick left the table in search of something else to do. He wound up at the grand piano, a candle-lit relic that graced its own Persian rug near the loft's elevator door. He closed his eyes, spread his hands across the keys... and in another moment, nothing else existed in his world but the martialing strains of Ludwig von Beethoven's Appassionata.

When the echo of its final chords had faded to the loft's high rafters, Nick looked up to find Natalie standing quietly beside the piano, her eyes glistening in the candlelight.

"That was beautiful, Nick."

He smiled. "It was written by an exceptionally brilliant man... who was also a very good friend."

"Aha." Nat's response was not quite a laugh, but she sobered abruptly. "Are you going to miss that part of it? The longevity, the history..."

"It's my humanity that I miss," he said, and the close proximity of Natalie's humanity teased at the vampire's senses when she sat down on the bench beside him. "That's all I want. All I've ever wanted." My humanity and all that it once entailed. Mortal food. Sunlight. Love...

He made the near-fatal error of looking into her eyes, and knew that his gaze had revealed more of his longing in that moment than he should have allowed her to see. But in that moment, all his very good reasons for avoiding close contact with mortals seemed far away and long forgotten. He brought a finger to her lips, drew a delicate line across their fullness, then opened his hand and lifted her chin toward him...

"Nick..." She broke the moment, pulling away and awkwardly clearing her throat. "I don't think..." The probable reprimand remained unfinished. After an embarrassed length of silence, she lifted a hand and he noticed for the first time that it held a filled hypodermic. "Test phase three," she said. "If you're still willing to try it, anyway."

In answer, he rose from the piano and strode back to the kitchen table, unbuttoning the right cuff of his shirt and rolling up the sleeve. "How long before we'll know?"

"If it's working?" She swabbed his forearm with alcohol (an unnecessary mortal precaution, but he indulged her) and carefully slid the needle in. "Well, as I said, this isn't like the lidovuterine. No addictive properties. Probably no quick fix, either. It may be several hours -- even days -- before we see any results. Just give it time."

The needle slipped free, and in the same moment his telephone rang. Nick considered letting the machine pick it up, but a call at this hour was unlikely to be peddling vacations in sunny Honolulu. He stepped to the small table behind his leather couch and snatched up the receiver.

"Knight," he said.

"Nick..." The voice belonged to Captain Amanda Cohen. "I'm sorry if I woke you."

"Not at all, Cap'n. I wasn't asleep. Is there a problem?"

"You might say that. We don't have a clue how, but I do have a pretty good idea who and why."

Nick wasn't sure he was following this. "Er, why what?" he asked.

Cohen drew in an audible breath before she answered. "Morning shift just found Ray Cameron," she said, "dead in his cell."

Lucien LaCroix seldom entertained visitors. His sound booth at CERK was his private haven, invaded only by the occasional sound tech or delivery person -- though for some reason, most of those fled again as quickly as their mortal legs could carry them. Well, he thought as he snapped off the ON AIR switch to conclude his broadcast, no doubt it's my charming personality.

With sinewed grace, he rose, opened the booth's glass door - and froze in the hallway when a thrumming vibration of vampire senses told him he was no longer alone.

She stepped out of shadow at the hall's end just long enough to let him see her. Then, in a rush of air, she was gone again, the station's back door left swinging open in her wake.

The invitation taken, he followed - out the door to the back street and at once to the rooftop above. She waited there, her white gown fluttering in the night breeze, looking for all the world like the heroine from some wretched gothic horror film. But then, Lysette had always retained a flair for the overly dramatic.

"Lucien."

She spoke his name as though it were an invocation, though to just which gods he did not care to speculate. "And to what," he asked, straight to business, "do I owe the decidedly dubious honor of this visit?"

She smiled at him with blood-red lips. The lights from CERK's transmission rigging dyed her short-cropped raven hair a similar hue. "You've lost none of your particular savoir faire, I see."

He strolled away to the roof's edge and peered over at the teeming flow of mortal "rush hour" traffic. "What's the matter, Lysette? Bored with your Enforcer pets? Tired of 'upholding the Code at any cost for the good of the Community' and so on, and so on?"

Her response ignored his sarcasm. "I never go anywhere without a reason, Lucien."

"Ah." He wheeled on her, permitting the slightest hint of gold to smolder in his eyes. "And what grievous offense, pray tell, have I committed? Did I neglect to file an environmental impact report the last time I disposed of an inconvenient corpse? Or have I merely failed to send the proper tribute to your titanic, albeit somewhat small-minded, minions?"

"You are under injunction," she said, again ignoring his taunt. "But not for anything you have done. The prohibition is against what you would do."

"Then perhaps you'll stop speaking in riddles," he seethed, "and explain what this is all about."

She waited several moments before replying, a ploy deliberately designed to goad him. "We grow tired of your endless promises to return your troublesome fledgling to the fold. It's time he paid the price for his disloyalty."

So this was about Nicholas.

LaCroix suppressed a bitter smile. It was always about Nicholas.

"What has he done?"

She studied one red-taloned hand indifferently. "There is a mortal. Gareth Branwyn. Do you know of him?"

LaCroix scowled at the apparent non sequitur. "Should I?"

"Last night, he obtained photographic proof of Nicholas' true nature."

"Did he?" LaCroix scoffed. "Well, if that is all, it's a simple enough matter to deal with, my dear. You kill the mortal and destroy the photographs. End of problem."

"Not quite. We don't intend to kill this mortal. At least, not yet."

This was becoming tedious. "And why not?"

"He is the head of a powerful crime syndicate. As of last year, when one of the more careless among us killed Branwyn's son and left behind evidence, the man is also a self-styled vampire hunter. We believe he intends to trap your son."

The response came automatically. "I will not permit that."

"You will not interfere."

His eyes flashed instantly from gold to flaming crimson. "I will not stand by and see my child destroyed by a mortal!"

"If we order it, Lucien, you will. But we know Gareth Branwyn. We know that he excels in discovering an enemy's weakest link and then exploiting that link to destroy the entire chain. He will endeavor to use your 'child' to find us."

He snarled at her. "And you intend to allow this?"

That deprecating smile of hers came back again. "Yes," she said smugly. "It is our weakest link which must be tested. If Nicholas keeps to the Code and does not betray his own, then he will live, and Branwyn will die. If he does betray us... both will die."

Through a red haze, LaCroix watched her flex and interlace her long, painted fingers. With every ounce of his being, he wanted to fly at her, to tear her limb from limb with a slow and exquisite vengeance. He swallowed the compulsion with no small difficulty. "Very well," he said at last. "I will not interfere - on one condition."

Her eyes widened, expressing frank surprise at his impudence. "And what is that?"

"Either way," he rasped, "the hunter is mine."

He'd overslept.

More than an hour after sunset, Nick sleepily descended the stairs and by rote, went through the motions of taking his watch from its carved wooden jewelry box and then downing half a bottle of chilled, tasteless steer's blood from the refrigerator. Yawning, he surveyed the kitchen's counters and tables still cluttered with Natalie's equipment, and realized that her latest treatment had indeed produced one result. For the first time in eight hundred years, he had a headache.

The next step in his waking-up routine was to travel downstairs in the loft's creaking elevator to retrieve the day's mail. He returned with a handful of advertising circulars, three bills, and a thick brown envelope suspiciously lacking a return address. His own address, with DET. N. KNIGHT typed neatly in all caps, had been computer printed on a single white label, The package had been hand-delivered by someone -- there was no affixed postage and no postmark.

Well, if it was a bomb, somebody had wasted a lot of time and trouble for nothing.

Nick tossed the rest of the mail on the only empty counter near the sink, and ripped open the brown envelope. A stack of glossy photo prints and a slip of paper fell out into his hand.

"STILLSON-CALDWELL LOADING DOCKS," the note read, again typed all in caps. "7 PM. ALONE." There was no signature.

With a sickening dread, he leafed through twenty-four red-tinged prints of his chase through the alley after Ray Cameron. Though grainy, the photos established his identity clearly enough, by the car, by his clothing, and... Near the bottom of the stack, two shots had captured the vampire in flight - first en route to the fire escape and then in mid-air as, eyes blazing, it had flown down upon its prey. Two more pictures showed him standing, unscathed, while the muzzle flash of Cameron's .45, pointed straight at him, flared yellow. The last frames recorded their march back to the Cadillac on Richmond, and finally, the car with Cameron cuffed in the back seat, pulling away.

Nick checked his watch. 6:15. His shift at the precinct was due to start at 7. He could call in, plead yet another case of the flu... But Natalie would know then, and he couldn't risk getting her involved. Besides, if he should fail to overcome the mortal who had taken these photographs, the Enforcers would see to it that Nicholas Knight, erstwhile Metro Police Detective, simply disappeared.

Perhaps it would be better that way.

The flick of a remote switch brought the fire on his hearth to instant, crackling life. Another button raised the shutters on the panoramic lights of Toronto, though at the moment, Nick had no heart to appreciate the view. He stood at the ornately carved mantel and, one by one, fed the incriminating photographs to the lapping flames.

Stillson-Caldwell was - had once been - a fish cannery located on the lakefront. Nick parked the Caddy a block from the abandoned brick building and approached its darkened loading docks on foot.

Three bays greeted him, two of them sealed, the third with its corrugated steel door pulled halfway up.

No lights. No sign of anyone around.

"Come into my parlor..." Nick muttered to himself, and ducked under the half-open door.

Inside there was nothing but a vast, empty warehouse. Even to his eyes, the darkness here was nearly complete. But other senses told him that the cavernous room harbored no other life. No heartbeats echoed in his ears: no sounds at all but the distant wail of a foghorn and the clanging of a buoy out on the lake. Water lapped against a dock on the other side of the far wall, and his shoes scraped over trash and grime that littered the concrete underfoot. The odors of mold, fish oil and old grease assailed him on his way across the floor. And then...

He turned a full circle, certain now of yet another scent that had teased faintly at the vampire's senses.

Human blood.

He turned again to the east, and saw a broad doorway leading into some sort of storage room.

The blood scent came from there.

He followed it, still puzzled by the lack of any human heartbeats. If this was a trap, where were the mortals who intended to spring it?

The storage room was deep but narrow, no more than twelve feet wide. He found the body on the floor against the back wall. Female, perhaps mid-50s. In the faint light, what little he could see of her tattered, soiled clothing would seem to indicate that she had been a transient. She had been shot, once, through the head.

Nick straightened from inspecting the corpse, started for the door...

There was no warning.

With the swiftness of a guillotine blade, a metal wall dropped from somewhere above to bar the doorway. He flew at it in the pitch blackness, pounded its surface with all his might - to no avail. It was solid, and strong enough to withstand even a vampire's strength.

Some electronic function must have triggered it: a broken infrared beam or a remote signal from some unseen - and unsensed - observer. A better mousetrap?

"Who are you?" he demanded of the dark, but if his captors were listening, they gave no answer.

Silently cursing his own stupidity, he leaned against the newly-formed door of his prison and waited, trying to ignore the blood scent still wafting from the other end of the room. He wondered who the homeless woman had been, and how she'd had the misfortune to become the bait in some sick mortal's snare for a vampire. And for that cruelty, he loathed this unknown human all the more.

Why were they taking so long? They had to know that their trap had been sprung.

His head still hurt.

And now the Hunger had begun to clamor at him with every breath he drew.

Twelve torturous minutes dragged by. Then, a human heartbeat...

Something thumped against the back wall, and he heard the unmistakable sound of a diesel engine starting.

The room around him vibrated, lurched, and began to move.

Nick sank to the floor and cursed his gullibility yet again.

A truck.

The storage room hadn't been a room at all, but a truck backed up to another loading dock on the east side of the building. In the nearly total darkness and with the blood scent serving as a powerful distraction, it had been disguised just well enough to fool him.

Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble for this.

And someone, the vampire seethed as the truck lurched once more and tossed him against the heavy door, might well end up paying for that effort with his life.

Natalie fought panic all the way to the loft. With Schanke chattering non-stop behind the steering wheel, she tried in vain to quell images of Nick lying on the floor, dying from some adverse reaction to the new serum. Her serum.

The elevator took a small eternity to reach the second floor, but when the door finally opened, it was to reveal an unoccupied room. They stepped inside anyway, and Nat headed straight across the floor. "I'll look upstairs," she said.

"I'll check the garage." Nick's partner turned toward the red door leading off the loft's kitchen.

Less than ten minutes later, they'd both returned to the main floor. "Nothing," Nat reported.

"Car's gone," Schanke said. "I'm still not sure there's any cause to overreact here, though. You know how he goes off on tangents sometimes. Maybe he just got a lead on the guy who offed Cameron in the middle of lockup last night."

She shook her head. "No. He's two hours late for shift and he hasn't called in. Something's wrong."

"Yeah, well I hate to break this to you, Nat..." Schanke began prowling the room. "But he's been known to disappear without telling anyone before. He might even-" The sentence broke off abruptly, and she spun to find him lifting Nick's holstered gun and badge from the table behind the sofa. He put both quickly down again when he noticed yet another item lying between Nick's jewelry box and the answering machine. He picked up the palm-sized cell phone, scowling at it as though it were somehow to blame for its owner's negligence. "Well," he sighed, "at least now we know why he's not answering this one, either."

"Damn." Natalie paced, throwing her arms out in exasperation. "Why does he do this?!"

Schanke had opened the cell phone and punched in a number. "Yeah, dispatch, this is Detective Schanke. Can you give me a patch to 81 Kilo? Yeah, sure, I'll wait. Thanks." A full minute crawled by before he said, "Well, keep trying a little while, would you? He might be away from the car." He waited again, tapping one foot impatiently, and finally said, "Yeah. Yeah, okay. Thanks anyway." He pushed the phone's off button and set it back on the table. "Well, so much for that idea."

"There's got to be something else we can try."

Chewing on his lower lip, Schanke checked the answering machine, and apparently finding no clues there, wandered into the kitchen. "What's with all this lab stuff?" he wondered. "Is Nick taking up pharmacology on the side or something?"

"It's a research project of mine, Schank," she answered truthfully. "He agreed to let me work on it here."

"Mm." Nick's partner was busy examining a pile of mail on the kitchen counter, and came up with an empty brown mailer. "Mm," he said again, running one pudgy hand inside the envelope. "What do you suppose was in here?" He began looking around for any sign of the missing contents. Nat took the envelope from him as he moved back toward the living room.

"No return address," she noted. "No postmark, either."

"Hello." Schanke had squatted near the fireplace and plucked something from the ashes there. Natalie bent down to examine the object - there were several identical to it littering the remains of the log fire. It was the curled, blistered corner of a photograph, its emulsion blackened beyond any hope of discerning what the image had been.

"He burned a set of pictures?" Nat straightened again. "Why?"

Schanke poked around in the ashes for a moment before standing as well. "Uh... don't take this the wrong way or anything, but..." Suddenly Schanke was blushing all the way to his receding hairline. "Well, you wouldn't happen to know if Nick was... uh... you know... fooling around or anything? Maybe with somebody he shouldn't be? An alderman's daughter, the police commissioner's wife, something like that?"

She had to squelch the urge to laugh at his earnest but entirely misplaced guesswork, though privately she wondered just what had been on those photographs. "Trust me, Schank, that's probably the last thing anyone would ever be able to blackmail Nick with."

He puzzled over that for a moment, then seemed to decide that it wasn't worth pushing. Nat breathed a quiet sigh of relief. When he headed back toward the phone, she followed, the empty mailer still in hand. "What are you going to do?"

"Well, if he's not in trouble, the least he can do is get mad at us, right?" Schanke picked up the phone. "I'm gonna put an APB out on Nick's car."

The rig had stopped moving well over an hour ago. The driver's heartbeat had receded with the echo of a slammed cab door, and no one had come near the truck in the interim to claim the quarry trapped inside.

Nick sat pressed against the metal door and tried to concentrate on not breathing. Though he needed to draw oxygen in order to speak or to follow a scent, the function wasn't vital to a vampire's survival. Right now, he desperately needed to block its use entirely. The smell of human blood in such close proximity was overwhelming, triggering the Beast within him to clamor for that and more -- for warm blood and live prey. If this went on much longer...

He started when the door vibrated and began to rise. Pale blue light flooded through the opening. On his feet in an instant, he waited for the heavy sheet metal to finish its rumbling ascent. Then he waited for the first sign of movement, the first breath or the whisper of a human heartbeat.

There was nothing.

An octagonal room with high walls lay beyond the opening. Harsh neon lighting tinted gray metal walls blue. Thirty feet up on the facing wall, he could see the wide window of what looked like an observation gallery, but no one sat at the control consoles or in the raised row of theatre-style seats behind them. The concrete floor of the room below was bare of any equipment or furniture.

Nick stepped through into the brighter light -- and immediately a pair of doors -- these set into the small room's back wall - ground shut behind him, cutting off the truck and the blood scent within it. Another moment, and the muffled sound of an engine echoed from the other side, quickly receding.

Then came the faint click of a door opening somewhere, the quiet murmur of a human heart. A shadow moved behind the high window. More neon lights flickered to life inside the booth, illuminating the pale, thin face of a man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and a loose-fitting designer suit. Detective Knight had seen that face before, in Metro's database files on organized crime syndicates.

"Gareth Branwyn."

"You know who I am." The soft-spoken voice came filtered through speakers above the window. "Good. That will save us the trouble of a formal introduction."

Nick elected to dismiss the repartee and went straight to the point. "What do you want with me?"

"Oh, a great many things. Testing. Research. Answers."

Branwyn touched a control, and the wall to Nick's left lit up with an enlarged image of his flight from the alley scaffold toward Ray Cameron. It clearly showed the predator's eyes glowing an unearthly red.

"A most fascinating portrait," the filtered voice crooned. "Tell me, Detective Knight... How many others are there like you?"

For a number of reasons, the Raven had never been Natalie Lambert's favorite night spot. It served as Janette's domain, for one thing, as well as providing a haven for others in Toronto's vampire community. Nick came here more often than she liked to consider, seeking information on a case or simply to talk with Janette. Tonight, Natalie shared the latter goal.

She made her way through the crowd of goth-costumed twenty-somethings gyrating to blaring music on the dance floor, finally reaching the bar and the thin young woman with the shaved head who tended it. She eyed Natalie's out-of-place skirt and dress jacket with undisguised contempt before muttering a single, peremptory syllable. "Yeah?"

Nat had to raise her voice above the din. "I need to see Janette," she said, trying at the same time to convince herself that this was a good idea. She had no way to know whether Nick's former lover could shed any light, so to speak, on his whereabouts. But she knew that they still shared a sort of familial bond, and if anyone would know where to find him, Janette would.

"Try in the back," the bartender shouted, and dismissed her with a wave toward the club's rear wall.

Nodding thanks, Natalie gratefully followed the motion. She walked through a curtained doorway into a semi-private room, passing several entwined couples in various states of undress, and continued through another door into a dimly lit back hallway. She knocked on the first door she found, and called Janette's name, but with the thrumming beat from the front vibrating the walls, she couldn't be certain if anyone had replied. When she turned the knob, the door opened onto a dark room. She'd been about to close it and move on when a voice from inside spoke in tones that sent literal chills up her spine.

"Won't you come in, Doctor Lambert," it said.

Definitely not Janette.

She considered abandoning this whole idea and just getting the heck out of here. How many times had Nick warned her that the Raven could be a dangerous place for mortals -- especially mortals who became too curious, asked too many questions? She'd taken a calculated gamble coming here. This place was part of a milieu most humans never saw: the vampires' secretive, hidden world.

Nick's world.

She kept a comforting hold on the brass doorknob and took two tentative steps into the room. Faint light from the hall bounced off a rack of wine bottles and showed her a tall silhouette standing behind the shadowed outline of a bulky desk. She didn't have to see his eyes to feel them boring into her.

"I... I was looking for Janette," she stammered.

"Away. For a time." That glacial voice dropped the temperature in the already-chill room by several more degrees. "Go home, Doctor. And for your own sake, cease meddling in affairs that do not concern you."

Angered, Natalie impulsively reached for the light switch. Her fingers found it on the wall to her left, but some innate sense -- and Nick's repeated admonitions -- warned her that to antagonize this man could be more than foolish. It could also be lethal. She let her hand fall away from the switch, acutely aware that while she could make out nothing but a faceless shadow with the faintest hint of pale hair, he could probably see her perfectly.

"Nick is my concern." Had those defiant words just come from her mouth? "And I want to know what you've done with him."

Well, there it was. Words spoken, accusation laid bare. So much for not antagonizing him.

"Doctor Lambert..." Uncannily, she felt the shadowed face smile. It was not a pleasant sensation. "Leave our affairs to our own ministrations. Trust me. You would be wiser not to interfere."

Trust him? Maybe on the day the ice cream vendors opened shop in hell.

"I have to find--" she started to say, and jumped when the warble of a cell phone shrilled from her pocket, sounding abnormally loud even over the din from the Raven's front room. Distracted, she looked down at her jacket, intending to slip her hand in to turn the thing off. The sound of rushing air made her look up again.

"Wait!" This time she did hit the light switch. But the shadow that had stood behind Janette's desk was gone.

"Damn..." She yanked the insistent phone from her pocket and impatiently thumbed the answer stud. "Lambert."

"Nat," Schanke's anxious, high-pitched voice said in her ear. "Traffic Division just called in. They found Nick's car."

"There are no others," Nick lied for the dozenth time. "Only me."

"Well now," Branwyn's soft voice purred, a caressing litany from the overhead speakers, "that would be a pity, after I've gone to such a great deal of trouble to find you. And them."

A faint blue light began emanating from a wall segment between the observation windows and the image of the vampire in flight. In a moment it had coalesced into a glowing three-foot cross. Nick turned instinctively away from it, then, hating his own weakness, he forced himself to turn back, Branwyn's mocking laughter ringing in his ears.

"So it is true. Oh, you are indeed the answer to a researcher's prayers, Detective Knight. Capable of spontaneous flight, impervious to bullets, yet repelled by the cross." Behind the window, Branwyn rubbed his hands together in unmitigated glee. "So tell me, what else of the legend is true? Holy water, mirrors, garlic, running water? Can you really become a bat? A fly? A mist? What effect does silver have, or wood? How old are you? And how are you made? I must have answers to all of these questions."

Nick glared up at his captor with eyes that he could not prevent from turning gold. "Why?"

With calm disdain, the syndicate leader took a seat behind the console and folded his hands in front of him. "To destroy an enemy, you must first know all there is to know of him: his desires, his strengths, and most importantly, his weaknesses."

"I've done nothing to you."

"No? If only the same could be said for your... what do you call it? Species? One of them saw fit, not long ago, to murder my son. And unfortunately, that particular murderer met her fate by fire before she could lead me to any of the others. That is the function you will now serve." Branwyn touched a switch, and a panel right of the cross snicked aside to reveal twin pipe-like openings high in the wall. "So," the voice whispered, "I have answered your question. You may now reciprocate. Where are the others?"

Nick glowered stubbornly at the floor and gave no answer.

Immediately, something began hissing from one of the two pipes in a fine white mist. He looked up just as the pungent odor of garlic reached him, and at once the stench made him gag and twist away. Nausea drove him to his knees, made him wretch against an onslaught of noxious fumes that sent red-tinged tears streaming down his face.

"Fascinating," Branwyn's voice gloated from above him. "I thought that particular part of the legend would prove to be myth."

Nick heard the click of a valve shutting off. The toxic spray of garlic ceased, but its aftereffects lingered. He was still doubled over on the floor when the second tube began emitting a different mist, this one odorless, colorless... When the first droplets touched him, he gasped and rolled away, curling up to protect his exposed hands and face from the acid-like burns induced by the spray.

"Ah," was Branwyn's clinical observation. "So, holy water works as well." Again, the soft click of a valve closing, then the noisier grating of the wall panel sliding shut. "You really are a font of information, you know, whether you answer my questions or not. Though I must say, I begin to wonder why the ancients feared your kind so much. You really are the most fragile of creatures, quite easily destroyed once one is aware of the appropriate defenses. I already know, for example, that you are vulnerable to fire. As to testing for wooden stakes, sunlight, decapitation... Well, assuming those are indeed effective, I can try only one on you and I'll have lost my test subject. You see my problem. Where are the others, Detective Knight? How many are there in Toronto?"

The stench of garlic still permeated the small room, and Nick was trying yet again to dissuade his lungs from drawing air. The gag reflex defeated him; he ended up sprawled on the floor in a coughing fit, tortured lungs fighting to expel the herbal toxin. When the spasms finally subsided, he grabbed hold of metal studded ridges on the door to forcibly pull himself upright. Branwyn's voice droned on behind him.

"No doubt they congregate somewhere in the city. Nesting is instinctual, after all. And there is indeed safety in numbers, isn't there?"

Something clicked behind the wall segment to the right of the door. Nick turned toward the sound, and saw a narrow, steel-girded slit running horizontally across the wall at eye level. With an electronic whir, the round tip of something suspiciously like a gun barrel slid into the opening. Even for vampire reflexes, there was no time to react, no cover to dive for. The muzzle flashed once, twice. He felt the familiar tingle of bullets passing through him, heard both strike the wall behind him and embed themselves there with a dull thunk.

"Ah well," Branwyn sighed. "So much for the deleterious effects of silver. A Hollywood misconception, I believe. Perhaps we should try another fabled deterrent?"

With a feral snarl, Nick started toward the gun with the intention of ripping it from its electronic moorings. Another click-whir from behind him made him spin instead. An identical slot in the wall to the door's left had sprouted another gun barrel. This one fired only once, but the bullet struck him just left of his heart and stayed there, burning with a painful familiarity. He reacted with a wince that obviously pleased Gareth Branwyn no end.

"Well now," the racketeer breathed into his microphone. "I can see it might be wise to arm my protectors with wood-tipped bullets on future hunts. I suppose crossbows would be even better, if a tad on the conspicuous side."

To the left of the second gun port, the only wall that had not yet assaulted him shuddered and began to slide open on the shiny surface of a tall, single-paned mirror. Fully revealed, the glass showed Nick a creature with yellow eyes that wore his hair, his face, his clothes.

"A pity," his tormentor's voice opined. "Non-reflecting adversaries would have made my task ever so much easier. Ah well. Another illusion shattered. Now I really will have to insist on an answer to my question. Where do I find the others?"

In response, Branwyn got a low-throated growl and three short, succinct words.

"Go to hell."

"Very probably. But you and every last monster like you will precede me to the gate. Where do the others gather?"

"There are no others."

"How are you made?"

"Leave me alone."

"Who created you?"

"I will tell you nothing."

"How long have you been this way? Were you human once, or is that part of the legend a myth as well? How long can you subsist on one... what shall we call it... meal? And what happens if you are deprived? Is it possible to-"

The vampire's howl of rage cut Branwyn off in mid-sentence. Nick flew at the mirror, scarcely feeling the needle slices of its shattering glass. When nothing but more solid metal appeared behind it, he rebounded and took to the air, launching himself at the observation window and the smug, bearded face that lurked just behind it.

The glass should have exploded into a thousand falling shards and granted him instant, deadly access to his foe. Instead, something incredibly dense struck him hard enough to send him spiraling away, sprawling him unceremoniously against the riveted doors and finally, painfully, onto the floor.

"Most impressive," Branwyn's irritating tones dead panned. "And a terribly clever human invention called Lexan. Apparently it renders the window rather more impervious than you are." As Nick awkwardly picked himself up off the floor, the filtered voice resumed its droning barrage. "Now I suppose we really should get back to business. You were going to tell me about the others..."

LaCroix scowled at the video monitor as though his glare alone could incinerate one of the figures there. Lysette's hidden camera afforded them both sound and a flawless view, from above and behind Gareth Branwyn, of the events occurring a building away. Thus far, he had been neither impressed nor amused with this mortal's pathetic interrogation efforts.

"Nicholas will not betray us," he said with conviction, his gaze never leaving the image of his son on the screen.

Lysette's sculptured features revealed no hint of concern. "We shall see," she said with a noncommittal calm that he found rankling. "We shall see."

She draped her flawless figure over an upholstered chair and folded perfect hands across a silk-clad lap. He remained standing near the desk containing the surveillance equipment, watching next door's sordid little drama continue on the monitor.

"Where are the others?" Branwyn demanded for the nth time, and Nicholas, jaw stubbornly set, once again refused to answer. Like an automaton, Branwyn repeated the question.

For the first time in his very long life, LaCroix coveted a power he did not possess.

He wished for the ability to stop, with a single well-aimed thought, the beating of Gareth Branwyn's cold mortal heart...

Natalie could see the frustration written on Schanke's face long before he reached her car window. She'd been waiting out here for what seemed like hours while floodlights blazed inside the warehouse and the red and blue strobes atop three squad cars flashed kaleidoscope patterns on the walls.

Nick's mute and unrevealing Cadillac sat on the asphalt a few yards in front of Natalie's sedan, two of Toronto's finest still combing its interior with flashlights and evidence bags. Nat didn't need a written proclamation to know that they hadn't found anything helpful. She'd offered to help at first, but had finally opted for simply staying out of the way. Possible crime scenes lacking a corpse were decidedly out of her province.

She rolled down the window as Schanke reached the car, rubbing his hands together to stave off the chill in the night air. "Nothing. Absolutely frigging nothing," he complained, disappointment rife in every syllable. "No trace in the warehouse and nada in the Caddy. It's as if he got here and then just dropped off the face of the Earth."

"It's got something to do with Ray Cameron, Schank. Nick was suspicious of the lead he got on that, he told me so. We've got to find out who his sources were, trace it back."

"Yeah, that's a good place to start. But y'know, with Mister I-Never-Reveal-a-Source Knight, it ain't gonna be that easy." Schanke blew on his fingers again. "What I really want to know is, what were those pictures he burned? If somebody's got something on Nick serious enough to trap him like this... I mean, how bad can it be if he just up and takes the bait without a word to you, me or anyone at the Precinct? Way to go, Knight - what cop doesn't know better than that?"

One with a terrible secret to hide, Natalie thought, and knew as she recalled the curled and blistered photo corners on Nick's hearth that there was only one thing those pictures could have revealed. Only one thing could possibly incite Nick to disappear this way, to walk straight into a blackmailer's trap.

But you could have called *me.* She watched her own hands tighten on the steering wheel until the knuckles went white. I could have helped. Damn it, Nick! Why do you *do* this to me?

She could feel Nicola's anguish.

Sixty miles from Toronto, in a hotel room with heavy black-out curtains blocking the windows, Janette duCharme's pacing was wearing a new pattern in the already-hideous carpet.

LaCroix had decoyed her here. Of that much she was certain. There had been no wine merchant eager to strike a bargain with her for the Raven's supplies, no meeting, no contracts to sign. Obviously, her master had needed her "out of the way" for a time. Just as obviously, that need had something to do with Nicola.

She paced again, cursing the sunlight dawning on the other side of her curtains.

Something was wrong.

Even from this distance, she sensed an odd sort of wrongness in Nicola's link to her. It was like nothing she had sensed in him before. And from her link to LaCroix...

From their Master she was receiving a range of complex and conflicting emotions. Anger and admiration, anxiety and pride, frustration, concern, and perhaps oddest of all (in a thousand years together, she had never known him to possess or express it) -- empathy.

LaCroix was feeling Nicola's pain as well. Which meant that it was not LaCroix who inflicted it. Which meant that he had known what was to happen and had deliberately marooned her here, immobilized by the daylight.

"Damn him!" She lashed out at the nearest object in range of her balled fist. An extremely ugly hotel lamp crashed noisily to the floor, pulling a clock, an ashtray and the telephone all off the bedside table as well. The phone receiver buzzed incessantly at her. Janette pulled back a foot to give it an infuriated kick, thought again and snatched it up from the floor instead.

Perhaps there was a way...

The click of a door and footsteps in the observation booth roused Nick from a fitful sleep. His headache still throbbed, a sharp, insistent ache that dulled the vampire's senses. He knew, just the same, that outside his prison the sun had come up.

He could recall neither his tormentor's departure the night before, nor the point where he had drifted off, but the gnawing Hunger told him that several hours must have passed. He tried to lift his left wrist to check his watch, and gasped when the effort sent stabbing pains radiating through his arm, his shoulder, his chest.

Something was very wrong here...

Branwyn's heartbeat assailed him from behind the Lexan window, and that soft, silken, hated voice whispered from the speakers yet again.

"My dear Detective Knight..." He emphasized the title, mocking it. "You do appear a tad the worse for wear. Tell me, is that due to lack of 'nourishment,' to our garlic and our wooden bullets, or perhaps to all of the above?"

Bullets...

Finding that his right hand did function, Nick pressed it to the spot where Branwyn's wood-tipped bullet had struck him. His fingers came away coated with blood.

He looked down. Blood stained the front of his shirt as well, far more blood than there should have been. Not having pierced his heart, the projectile should be a minor annoyance at most, something his system should rapidly envelop and heal around. He could always ask Natalie to remove it later, if the wood continued to irritate.

Shouldn't hurt like this.

Shouldn't bleed either. Not this long...

"I do so hate to disturb your rest," Branwyn crooned with complete insincerity. "But I'm afraid we have other 'tests' to conduct. And you still haven't answered my most pressing question. I think you know by now what it is."

Far above Nick in the chamber ceiling, something whirred, clicked and whirred again. Then came a loud, metallic thunk, and abruptly, a wide shaft of sunlight -- beautiful, glowing, lethal sunlight -- streamed into the room.

Nick had no time to move. The shaft struck him, surrounded him. He tried to twist away from it, but his unhealed wound screamed a painful protest at the effort. He could feel the horrible sting of his face and hands beginning to blister. Momentarily blinded, he ignored the pain and rolled onto his right side, scrambling out of the light. For one brief, comforting moment, he was free of the fire's sphere. But like some arcane, mirrored searchlight, the pillar swept around the room and returned to follow him, harrying, teasing, burning with every touch of its deadly light.

There was nowhere to hide.

When he could no longer continue his futile attempts to escape the sunlight, he curled into a juncture of floor and wall, covering his head with one arm. His clothing would not protect him from the scorching rays for long, but it would help. A little.

The sun grazed him several more times and then came to rest on him, engulfing him, searing until he was certain that his final, fatal conflagration was at hand.

Instead, the light beam retreated.

And from the speakers, Branwyn's tireless litany resumed. "Where are the others of your kind in Toronto? Tell me where they hide..."

When the lab phone rang at 6:09 a.m., Natalie had been on her way out the door. Fat chance she'd be getting any sleep today even if she did go home, but the day shift was coming in and her presence here was about to become superfluous. She reversed course to pounce on the phone before anyone on the incoming shift could answer it.

"Lambert," she said. Please God, let it be someone with news about Nick.

"Dr. Lambert..." The voice spoke her name with a distinct French inflection.

"Janette? Janette, do you know where Nick--?"

"Please, listen." The softly accented tones held an unmistakable note of desperation. "Nicola needs our help and we may not have much time."

Natalie couldn't contain the question. "Where is he?"

Janette, however, continued as though she'd never interrupted. "I will give you directions to my hotel." Natalie snatched up a pad and pencil and hastily scrawled the instructions, adding the "shopping list" that followed. She was to bring a heavy coat, slacks, boots, a large scarf and wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, and a paneled van or truck with a sun-blocked riding compartment.

Unlike her vampire sibling, apparently, Janette had no particular desire to explore the joys of automotive trunk travel.

The last thing she said was, "Hurry, Natalie. Please hurry." Then the connection went unceremoniously dead.

Two hours after sunrise, LaCroix had had more than enough.

"I am going to end this." He snarled the words at the monitor screen where Nicholas' motionless figure had remained supine on the torture chamber floor for more than an hour. Though Gareth Branwyn continued to drone his endless questions, the victim of his inquisition made no move to answer.

Had it not been for his mental connection, tenuous at the moment but still there, LaCroix might have thought his son long since dead.

Lysette's thoroughly bored response to his outburst was a single syllable. "Soon."

He snarled at her this time. "I am going to end it -- now."

She forbade him with a look. "I have your oath, Lucien. And I expect you to keep it."

He could cheerfully have driven a stake through her in that moment, the consequences be damned. But he held his peace and turned back to watch Gareth Branwyn's grim little shadow play run itself out on the screen. Soon enough, the vampire hunter's blood would be his. And his powerful senses tingled with yet another awareness, another anticipation.

Lysette's order had forced him to send his daughter away, but nothing had stipulated how long she must be exiled.

Janette was coming home.

He hadn't felt this weak in eight hundred years. Not since he had lain wounded on a Saracen battlefield during the Crusades. Not since before he had been brought across.

"You really are proving to be quite a disappointment, Detective Knight."

The grating voice sounded different -- louder and no longer filtered through a speaker.

Nick opened his eyes to the Dantean vision of Gareth Branwyn looking down at him, a cigarette smoldering in one hand and the blinding white pillar standing sentry at his side, a fiery demon at the left hand of Lucifer.

"You're dying," the Devil announced with all the passion of reading a traffic report. "You know that, don't you?" The end of the cigarette glowed red when he drew on it. White tendrils drifted into the waiting light. "Tell me where the others are, Detective Knight, and I'll see to it that you survive."

To do your bidding? Nick thought bitterly. No. I'll not deal with the Devil. I made that fatal mistake already, eight centuries ago.

Outrage overcame prudence then, and from somewhere Nick gathered the strength to force himself up from the floor. Nicholas de Brabant, late knight errant of the Holy See of France, would not face his vanquisher sprawled flat on the cold concrete.

The room tilted and spun madly, as though he had just taken flight instead of merely rising to his feet. Branwyn blurred into a gray haze and slowly solidified once more.

"Most impressive, I'm sure." Smoke streamed from Branwyn's nostrils as he spoke. If he was at all intimidated by standing face-to-face with a wounded vampire, he gave no sign of it. "Now are you finally ready to come to your senses and co-operate?"

Glittering dust motes danced with tobacco smoke in the light. So easy to reach out and touch them from here.

"Talk to me, Detective Knight."

So close. So beautiful.

The cigarette flared red. "Talk to me."

You could deal with the Devil.

"Tell me what I want to know."

Or you could cheat him.

"We can end this."

Yes.

"You're going to tell me where they are. You're going to tell me now."

Nick looked up, meeting Gareth Branwyn's eyes with resolute defiance. He uttered one syllable in reply.

"No," he said.

And with a single, confident step, he walked into the light.

Knight would break. Branwyn had been certain of that from the start. Vampires wanted to live forever, didn't they? Therefore if you threatened that immortality...

The last thing he'd expected was a vampire willing to sacrifice itself to the sun rather than betray its own. The next-to-the-last thing was a vampire who walked into that sun and failed to burst into flames.

Knight was standing in the brilliant light like a statue with his hands held out in front of him, staring down at them as though they couldn't possibly belong to him.

Branwyn flicked his cigarette away and started to take a step in his captive's direction. An odd sound made him turn around instead. The chamber door, which he had not locked behind him, was suddenly flung open with the crashing force of a dynamite blast. Something flew through the opening. Something large and black with eyes like the flames of hell.

The last thing Gareth Branwyn ever saw was the demon's gleaming white fangs bared in a feral snarl. Then incredibly strong hands seized him, bore him to the wall and painfully wrenched his head to one side...

If Natalie had thought her passenger agitated during the drive back to Toronto, it was nothing to the anxiety emanating from Janette when they pulled up to the circular warehouse. The vampire whose instinctual link to Nick had led them here burst from the van before Nat could park beside the semi-covered loading dock. She hadn't even bothered with the coat and hood, but streaked across the concrete to disappear through the open door, out of the light. Natalie wasn't far behind her, but when she stepped into the tall round bunker, the bizarre tableau inside made her freeze in the doorway.

She saw a vampire - one whose tall physique she had encountered once before, in the back room of the Raven - holding the body of a slighter, grey-bearded man pinned to the wall. Blood ran freely down the dead man's neck, disappearing into the collar of his designer shirt.

She saw a distressed Janette whirl toward her from beside a towering shaft of sunlight pouring in from the ceiling above. And in that light...

In the circle of light lay a fetally curled figure that shouldn't -- couldn't -- be there.

"Nick..."

As she rushed across the floor, she felt the faintest touch of Janette's cold hand on her own. A reassurance? When she knelt to examine Nick, three impossible things became immediately apparent. His skin was warm -- sunburned, in fact. He was breathing. And he had a pulse. When she turned him slightly she found that he also had a bullet wound to the chest, and that was bleeding. She automatically reached to apply the necessary pressure, and at once felt a very human heartbeat under her hand.

"Oh God. The serum..."

"One of your 'miracle cures,' Doctor?" If she'd doubted before that the tall man was LaCroix, she knew for certain the moment he spoke. "This one appears to have backfired, wouldn't you say?"

"Bring him to us," Janette pleaded. "Out of the light. We will help him."

"Yes." LaCroix shoved aside the corpse he had been holding as though it were nothing more than an old shoe, and turned glowing eyes on Natalie. "Bring him to me. I will show you a true miracle. A true cure."

Natalie looked back at him from within the glittering beam and wondered just how safe the sunlight really was. LaCroix must have risked full sun to come here. Could one five-foot circle of light be any more deterring?

One way to find out.

With her free hand she pulled the cell phone out of her coat pocket and, unable to hide her trembling, pushed the ON button. LaCroix didn't move. She watched him while she awkwardly pressed number studs with her thumb, then brought the small phone up to her ear. In the same instant the emergency dispatcher answered the call, LaCroix took a single step toward the light, and she felt Nick's heartbeat begin to fibrillate, faltering and then returning to its steady rhythmic beating. Amazed that her voice didn't quaver, she gave the dispatcher her name and the warehouse address. The dispassionate voice on the other end said an ambulance would be there within five minutes.

LaCroix took another step toward her.

Five minutes could be an eternity.

Janette said something in oddly-accented French. When LaCroix growled a reply in the same tongue, Natalie was certain, even without understanding the words, that he meant to kill her and reclaim Nick, sunlight or no sunlight. The ambulance crew would find two bloodless corpses on the warehouse floor, no trace of Detective Knight, and no answers to the mystery of what had happened to any of them.

Brilliant move, Nat. Some rescuer you turned out to be.

She hadn't realized she was still holding the cell phone until it clattered to the concrete and skidded away. LaCroix reached the beam's edge and stood poised for a moment, prepared to thrust one hand into the light. Nat felt her own heart skip a beat, but forced herself to stay put, to keep her hand on Nick's wound and her gaze locked on those terrible, burning eyes.

"LaCroix!"

He spun at Janette's warning cry, looking up and away. Nat followed his gaze to an observation window set high in the chamber wall. Three figures stood behind the glass there; a tall, slender woman and two taller, hulking men, all with glowing yellow eyes. Though they made no move to come through the glass, their effect on LaCroix was one of instantaneous rage. His eyes flaming crimson, he hissed at the trio above them as though that action alone might incinerate them where they stood. Then he turned that same bestial fury on Natalie, and in a voice from the depths of hell, rumbled four words at her.

"This is not over."

He 'vanished' then, moving too fast for mortal eyes to see. The whoosh of displaced air in his wake sent dust flurrying through the light around Natalie and Nick.

Janette wrenched her gaze from the vampire watchers and started after her Master. But she turned back long enough to deliver one brief, sincere entreaty.

"Take care of him, Natalie."

Another rush of air, and in a moment the sound of the van's engine starting echoed into the chamber. It had faded away long before Natalie remembered to breathe again. Still trembling, she glanced back at the observation window.

Nothing was there.

Relief and anxiety both overwhelmed her at once, and professional demeanor be damned, she surrendered and let out the tears.

It seemed a millennium had passed before she finally heard the distant wail of sirens coming toward the warehouse.

A human heartbeat was certainly a curious hallucination for a deceased vampire to experience. Yet Nick had been hearing -- feeling -- a heartbeat for several hours.

Voices had also drifted in and out of his awareness for some time. Some were unfamiliar. Others he knew only too well.

"Wakey wakey! Hey, c'mon Nick, wake up, will ya?"

Somehow, he'd never expected the afterlife to be graced by the dulcet tones of Detective First Class Donald G. Schanke.

"Geez, Nat, it's been over forty-eight hours. Shouldn't he have regained consciousness by now? I mean, that's not a bad sign or anything that he hasn't, is it?"

"He's going to be fine, Schank. It just takes time."

"Yeah. Well, don't get me wrong here, but after two years of partnering with Mr. I-Never-Get-Shot Wonder Boy here, it's almost a relief to know he's only human after all."

There was an unmistakable smile in Natalie's reply. "Yeah, Schank. That's exactly what he is."

"I guess I'm just anxious to talk to him, y'know? Find out what the hell happened in there, and how a high-roller mob don like Gareth Branwyn winds up in there without a drop of blood left in him!"

Nick had been hearing a persistent electronic beeping in the background: it sounded several times before Natalie answered Schanke. "I'm sure he'll tell us everything he can when he can. Right now, though, he needs rest. And peace and quiet."

Schanke took the hint. "Oh. Yeah. I'm late for shift at that, and Cohen's gonna want a progress report. You better get some rest yourself, y'know. You've been here the whole time."

"I'll be fine, too. Now. Thanks for coming, Schank."

Nick waited until his partner's footsteps had receded before he opened his eyes, not entirely surprised to find himself in a hospital room. Well, that would explain the heart monitor. Except that it shouldn't be beeping - not if it was attached to all these things taped to his chest, anyway. More surgical tape and a large swatch of gauze criss-crossed him left of the monitor leads, over an area that ached dully every time he took a breath.

Breath. And a heartbeat. And the light of a setting sun streaming in the hospital window. He remembered standing in a bright shaft of sunlight...

"Hello, Nick."

He turned his head to take in the very welcome vision of Natalie Lambert. Natalie, tired and a little disheveled, but by far the most beautiful 'angel' he'd ever awakened to.

"I get the distinct impression," he said, "that I'm not dead after all."

"Ah... no." Tears glistened in Natalie's eyes. "In fact, Nicholas Knight, welcome back to the world of the living. All the way back."

He listened to the monitor's rhythmic beeping for a moment before he spoke again. "Your cure?"

"M-hm. Though I confess I hadn't really counted on the added complication of a gunshot wound. Wood-tipped bullets may be minor annoyances to vampires, but to us mere mortals..."

Mortal. He remembered the pillar of light again, the step he'd taken into it, and the sun that had burned him scant hours before shining down on him -- and doing absolutely nothing. "The light..." he said. "The light didn't burn."

"Nick..." She moved closer to the bed, deftly navigating past an IV tree. "Do you feel up to telling me what happened?"

"Branwyn..." There was something Schanke had said, about Branwyn being drained of blood. "Nat, did I...?"

She understood the question, even if he couldn't finish it. "No," she said quickly, and her warm hand slipped under the IV tubes to grasp his own. "No, you didn't kill him. By the time LaCroix took care of that, you were past killing anyone that way, ever again."

"LaCroix was there?"

"At least at the end." Her grasp on his hand tightened. "Why don't you start at the beginning and tell me everything you can remember? Because after we piece this together, we're going to need a believable story for Schanke and the Precinct."

"All right. But there's one thing first." When her eyes widened in unspoken query, he used their clasped hands to pull her gently toward him. The kiss was brief, but she returned it with promising enthusiasm.

"I love you, Nat."

Her smile brightened the room. "I know," she said.

The narrow hospital window and its still-narrower concrete ledge afforded Lucien LaCroix a less-than-ideal view of Nicholas and the 'good' Dr. Lambert. But he had seen enough.

"Touching, isn't it?" The acerbic comment came from Lysette, who stood poised beside him on the same ledge. "Why didn't you kill her when you had the chance?"

LaCroix turned scathing eyes on her. "I will deal with this meddlesome coroner in my own good time -- not at your bidding."

Her stern visage mirrored his own. "Don't provoke me, Lucien. The Enforcers are already displeased with your actions in this matter. By the Code, it was your responsibility to destroy not only the hunter, but the incriminating photographs as well, once your son was incapacitated. We have dealt with the evidence. But your failure will now result in indictment and censure."

LaCroix's snort of derision had the desired unnerving effect. "Will it indeed?" He displayed for her his very best feeding-shark smile, and reveled in the hint of fear she tried to hide from him. "What a pity you won't be around to invoke that. It's been a true and absolute horror 'working' with you, but I'm afraid the Elders will shortly be removing you from office."

She bristled at that. "My office is of a permanent status. You know that."

"Not any longer. At least, not since the Elders have learned that your rather frivolous experiment with Nicholas has brought about the very thing for which you sought to punish him in the first place. He is mortal not by my hand, or Branwyn's, or Natalie Lambert's, but by yours."

Her eyes blazed gold, and she bared her fangs at him in a vengeful parting hiss. "You will pay for this, Lucien."

She took flight then, leaving him alone on the ledge.

LaCroix peered once more at the tender scene unfolding inside the hospital room, at his son deep in earnest conversation with the mortal who had somehow wrenched Nicholas from eight long centuries of his sire's embrace.

"It's not that easy, my dear ingenuous Nicholas," he whispered to the glass. "Not that easy at all..."