Such freedom to hunt, to kill, had not been granted it for far too long. Now, with the sunset, it gloried in the first true hunt it had been allowed to relish in decades.

Ecstasy.

No matter at all that the prey it stalked was a wooing pair of its own kind. To do this simply seemed right somehow.

It was justice for a trespass long buried in dim memory.

The other’s memory. The one called LeFebre.

From aloft, it had followed them out of the place called the Raven, tilting through steam-vented alleys and dark corridors until they settled into the shadows beneath a platformed fire escape. There, they began to make love in the vampire’s own unique and timeless fashion – each feeding on the blood of the other.

A silent voyeur with amber eyes, the Beast watched from above, masking its presence until the lovers were sated and rested in each others arms. It struck while they slept, and swiftly drained them both of their recently-exchanged blood feast.
 
Before it departed, the Beast saw to it that neither of these kindred would ever feast again.

*    *    *

“Nat?”

“Hm?”

“Wake up, Nat. We’re almost there.”

Natalie pried her eyes open, more than a little disappointed to find that she’d been sleeping curled up in the Cadillac’s passenger seat instead of in a warm bed. She took note of several things at once: it was dark; the now-covered convertible was still moving; she desperately needed a shower and fresh clothes; and... had they really done what she remembered doing back there at City Hall, or had she dozed off here in the Caddy and dreamed it all?

“I’m sorry about not having a ring,” Nick said, dispelling that last little trepidation in one sentence. “I’ll make it up to you, though. First chance I get.”

“S’all right” she said around a huge yawn. “I’ve never been big on rings anyway. Every time I start work, I just have to take them off.” Belatedly, Nat realized that there were trees – a lot of trees – whizzing past them on the deserted two-lane road. No more city lights.  No more city. “Where are we?”

Wearing a cryptic smile, Nick glanced over at her. “A little hideaway I know of just outside of town. The Foundation’s business administrator usually lives there. But he’s in Japan for the month. And you could say I have carte blanche to use the cottage when he’s away.”

The Caddy slowed, and in another moment Nick had turned off the road onto a private, tree-lined drive. That curved for several hundred yards, finally opening out onto a fountained courtyard. And the “cottage...”

Natalie gaped.

Somebody had plucked a small villa from the shores of the Mediterranean and transplanted it intact to the woods of outer Toronto.

“That’s quite a cottage,” she observed after Nick had helped her from the car. “Your business administrator owns this? You must pay the guy in gold bullion.”

Nick laughed. “Actually, I said he lives here.”

“Oh.” Nat glanced from Nick to the imposing mansion and back again, repeating the “Oh!” with a bit more enthusiasm when the implications of what he’d been saying (without ever saying it) dawned on her. She shouldn’t really have been surprised. She’d known about Nick’s hidden wealth for some time, but seeing proof of its scope still tended to floor her.

He put an arm around her shoulders and guided her to the door. “Come on in. We just happen to have a dinner reservation for two.”

“Dinner?” Well, she supposed that would explain that catering van parked just down the driveway from the Caddy. And it had been a long time since their souvlaki and pita sandwich lunch. “I guess I could do with a snack at that. Is there someplace a lady can... er... freshen up a bit first?”

“Right this way.”

Nick ushered her up the steps and opened an unlocked front door. (Did the catering crew have a key or did Brabant Manor retain a permanent staff?) The door swung open to reveal a rosewood-paneled entry hall and a sweeping staircase overhung by an enormous
crystal chandelier.

“I suppose this is the small villa?” she joked, peering in. “Compared to your winter ‘cottage’?”

“Well, maybe I’ll let you judge for yourself when we get to Paris. In the meantime, Mrs. Knight...”

Ignoring her startled squeal of protest, Nick lifted her into his arms, graced her with a passionate kiss, and carried her across the mansion’s threshold.

 *    *    *

Janette DuCharme listened to the music vibrating from the Raven overhead. She was midway down the long flight of steps leading to her wine cellar, but paused to hear the song’s words. It had always been one of her favorites, and tonight its lyrics gave her special encouragement.

    It can always pull us through
    Help us reach an endless night.⁴

This was proving to be an endless night indeed.

She went on down the steps, cradling the bottle she’d just chosen from her private stock upstairs, and quickly moved past the regular wine racks into the labyrinth of passageways that wound through the cellar beyond. She came at last to a padlocked door at the end of a long and very dark corridor. The key, suspended from a black silk cord around her neck, came forth from its resting place in her décolletage and shortly dispensed with the heavy padlock.

The thick door creaked open with just the right touch of gothic melodrama, revealing a vault-like room alight with tiers of burning candles. They illuminated the room’s only fixture – a gleaming mahogany coffin placed on a marble bier.  She  had  kept the coffin as a
prop for those fetish-prone foundlings in her charge who delighted in playing the part of the vampire’s movie image.

Now, however, it served a much more practical purpose.

Janette closed the heavy door behind her. Then, placing the bottle carefully at the foot of the bier, she lifted the coffin’s hinged lid and propped it carefully open.

“Bon soir, mon amor,” she said.

The thing that lay within the casket could not have answered her. Beyond the vaguely discernible shape of a head, two arms and two legs, its hideously charred flesh resembled nothing that had ever been human. Of course, it had not been human in nearly two millennia. But until Nicolas’ vengeful attack had created this charred travesty eight months ago, it had looked quite human indeed. Within the year, with her help and tender care, it would do so again.

“We have a problem, LaCroix,” she told the motionless corpse. “And I am very much afraid that Nicolas is involved.”

“When there is a problem,” said a soft voice behind her, “Nicholas is always involved.”

Janette turned around to face the insubstantial image of her master that stood, shimmering, against the closed chamber door. “Two of my flock have been slain this night,” she said. “They were decapitated only a few blocks from my back door. We thought it the work of a Hunter – except that they were drained of blood before the deed was done.”

“And somewhere in this treacherous act, you have sensed Nicholas’ delicate hand?”

“Yes.” Janette felt like a traitor for saying it. “Yes, and no as well. I don’t know!” She wanted to scream with the sheer frustration of it. “The vibration is Nicolas’ and yet it is not. Something is... different about it. Wrong somehow.”

“Yes,” LaCroix’s specter agreed, and nodded as though to confirm that it, too, had sensed the wrongness in Nicolas’ vampiric signature, a thing long familiar to both of them. “And you were right. There was a Hunter. One who was already halfway to our fold -- until he crossed paths with Nicholas.”

Janette found herself still more confused. “Do you mean to say that Nicolas has brought this Hunter across?” Surely not! It was a thing he had vowed never to do again, just as he had forsworn the taking of human lives and human blood.

“No,” her maker’s image replied. “The Hunter has become something... other.”

And what did that mean? “Other?” Janette echoed. “There are mortals and there are vampires. What other can there be?”

“It has no name. But it is here. And it remains close by. Gather your flock, mon petit oiseau. Tell them that the Hunter must be found and brought to you at once. And when that is accomplished, here is what you must do...”

*    *    *

Nick had never been happier.

Natalie by daylight he had found intoxicating. Natalie by candlelight, relishing an exquisite dinner,  a vintage wine and his private performance of three Chopin etudes on the villa’s twelve-foot Steinway grand – that was sheer euphoria.

“A very lovely concert,” she whispered sleepily, and nuzzled his ear from her place beside him on the piano bench. “And I really hate to say this, but Cinderella here hasn’t slept in soooooo long that she’s about to turn into a pumpkin.”

“I’m pretty sure it was her coach that turned into the pumpkin.” He moved to draw her closer, savoring the warmth and the comfort of her in his arms. “And besides, before Cinderella becomes Sleeping Beauty, isn’t there one last little thing Prince Charming can do for her tonight?”

With her eyes closed, Nat smiled and rested her head on his shoulder. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Nick helped her to her feet. “Actually,” he admitted, “there might be two last things.”

He escorted the drowsy Mrs. Knight upstairs to the opulently appointed bedroom suite. Momentarily passing up the silk-covered, king size bed, he took her through one more door, and introduced her to the pleasures of luxuriating in a hot swirling spa just large enough for two...

*    *    *

There were two more vampires. And now, they hunted the Hunter.

The Beast snarled in fury at this realization, and fled away from them down the maze of steam-filled alleys, rushing past brick buildings, boarded windows and hulking refuse bins. It flew into a darker, safer realm of grass and trees, determined to find some haven there in which to hide.

But there was none.

It prepared to take flight, only to be hampered by the iron-willed efforts of its host to force it into submission. The one called LeFebre compelled the form they shared to kneel against the redwood slats of a park bench. Then, in some arcane, unearthly tongue, the man began to pray.

Enraged at this betrayal, the vampire silently screamed at him to run, to escape before the hunters found him.

But it was already too late.

They descended from above, falling on him before he had any chance to flee, by mortal or any other means.

The Beast tried to fight, tried to persuade its host to resist, but again LeFebre thwarted its efforts.

The fool continued to pray, in English now, pleading with the Adversary to help him destroy the vampire!

Infuriated by his words and by the two dark lives he had taken earlier this night, the hunters roared in indignation. With both fists and fangs bared, they set about exacting their revenge.

*    *    *

“You will not have her.”

 LaCroix spat the words at him, and though Nick struggled to protect her, the master vampire’s greater strength tore a sobbing Natalie from his arms.

“Nick!”

She screamed his name, reaching frantically back for him, but Nick could do nothing.
 
LaCroix hissed at her, subduing her with a touch. “Be silent,” he said, and at once, Natalie went slack in his grasp.

“Please, LaCroix,” Nick entreated, but his plea met only cold indifference.

“Death does so become her.” Long white fingers turned Natalie’s head to one side, brushed her auburn hair away, revealed the soft, smooth curve of her exposed throat. Stroking the vein beneath that soft flesh, the ancient vampire looked up at Nick with amber eyes, and smiled.

“Please...” Nick couldn’t move. Some unseen force had chained his feet in place. “Don’t hurt her,” he begged with tears threatening to strangle his words. “I’ll do anything you ask. Just please, don’t...”

LaCroix merely laughed at him. “You will not have her,” he repeated. Then, baring the predator’s fangs, the vampire struck.

“No!”

A pounding heartbeat rose up to suffocate Nick, the sound of rushing blood throbbing, pulsating in his ears.

“Natalie!!”

“I’m here. Wake up, Nick, it’s okay, I’m here!”

For several horrible moments, the dream refused to fade. He could still see Natalie’s lifeless body held, limp and bleeding, in LaCroix’s cruel grasp. When reality at last intervened, she was there beside him in the bed, warm and alive, and he pulled her against him, cradling her head beneath his chin. “I thought I’d lost you,” he breathed. “LaCroix...”

“It’s all right.” She drew away just far enough to kiss him, then lovingly stroked his face and hair.  “It was a dream. Just a dream.”

His mortal heart still pounding, Nick clung to her, taking solace in the lifeline that she was. They remained that way, drifting in and out of sleep, for what might have been an hour before the intrusive squall of a cell phone sounded from a chair beside the bed.

According to the bookcase headboard’s LED clock, it was 11:37 p.m.

Nick sat up and reached to wrestle the phone from the pocket of his discarded coat, fumbling for the on-button in the dark. “Knight.”

“Nick!” Shanke’s anxious voice said under the static. “Listen, buddy, I’m sorry to interrupt the romantic weekend, but something just came through here we thought you oughta know about.”

“It’s okay,” Nick told him. “What’ve you got?” In the bed beside him, a drowsing Natalie moaned and turned over. Schanke apparently heard and identified the sound in spite of their poor phone connection.

“Oh geez, I’m sorry, Nick. Donnie of the lousy timing strikes again, huh? You can call me back later if...”

“Now’s fine,” Nick interrupted. “Go ahead, Schank.”

His obviously embarrassed partner sputtered for a moment before getting the words out. “Well, you know that LeFebre guy, the holy roller revival preacher? Missing Persons just got a report that he didn’t turn up for services this evening. He’s not in his hotel room, either. Stonetree’s thinking maybe we closed shop on the Lewis case too soon, that maybe he was involved in something shady after all.”

 Nick felt his mortal heart suddenly skip a beat, then quicken its pace to the rhythm it had reached during his nightmare. He was silent for so long that Schanke clicked the connection switch on his end of the line. “Hello, Nick? You still there?”

“Yeah. Do me a favor? Tell the captain I’ll cover looking into it.”

“Why? You got some idea where LeFebre might’ve disappeared to?”

“No. But I’ll find him. Thanks for letting me know, Schank.”

He rang off and reached to turn on the bedside lamp. Nat was awake now, and looking at him with fearful eyes. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“LeFebre...” he began, but before he could say more, the phone warbled again in his hand. Nick pressed the “on” stud. “Yeah, Schank. Did you forget something?”

“Mon Nicolas,” a familiar, sultry voice said into his ear. “I think you will want to come down here. Right away.”

*    *    *

“An eminently suitable vantage point,” LaCroix opined, settling in beside Nicholas as Mehmet’s cannons and catapults both assaulted Blachernae’s stockade to the north. Once again, they stood atop the parapets of Theodosius’ ancient wall, far from the guard towers yet in full view of the battle raging below.

“I do not recall asking for your approval,” Nicholas told him icily. “Or your company.”

“True.” That single syllable had been LaCroix’s last comment for many hours to come.
 
After heavy stones and cannon shot had splintered the wooden stockade, a new horde of Bashi bazouks stormed the wall, and again, Giustiniani’s soldiers repelled them with culverins, arrows, javelins and hurled rocks. When those apparently expendable souls had been slaughtered almost to a man, Mehmet attacked the wall anew with cannon fire until great craters had begun to appear in its surface. Then the sultan sent forth his favored Anatolian troops to assail the pulverized section of wall.

It remained unbreached, and these legions also began dying under the barrage of missiles rained down on them from above. Nicholas spied the emperor himself high on the defenses, firing arrows along with a dozen bowmen on either side.

The ominous fog had returned, and with the smoke from both musket and cannon also hanging in the still air, a deathly gray shroud had enveloped the city, becoming so thick that it soon obscured large portions of the battle from view.

Over the shouts and the booming of culverin fire, martial drums and strident fifes announced the advance of yet another company. Wave upon wave of brightly-clad Janissaries marched out of the fog, approaching behind the still-battling Anatolians. This time, when their climbing ladders were thrown up, the wearied Greeks could not repulse them all, and fierce fighting began breaking out top of the ramparts.

“Over there.” With the first words he had uttered since the siege began, LaCroix pointed to the Blachernae Gate. “Do you see it?”

Nicholas squinted into the haze, and caught sight of several Anatolians clustered at the kerkoporta – the tiny spy gate where he had earlier captured Gaspar. Somehow, they had pried it open, and with a cry of triumph that went unnoticed in the meleé, their small number charged through it into the inner court between the walls.

“High time they noticed,” LaCroix sniffed. “That gate has stood ajar for hours. Ever since one of your diligent Greek friends failed to latch it properly upon his return from spying out the land!”
 
Nicholas’ reply was curtailed by an anguished cry from the northern parapets. The soldiers were calling out that Giustiniani had been wounded and must be carried off the ramparts.

The Turks heard this as well, and as the word was spread and translated, a loud, undulating war cry echoed through their ranks. They retreated, but only long enough for a mangonel to hurl another massive stone into the already crumbling wall. More Janissaries, led by a giant of a man in saffron clothing, attacked the mortar’s weakest point with battering rams, swords, cudgels and bare hands until at last, the millennium-old bricks gave way.

With their titan leader at the fore, the Janissaries poured through the opening, shouting something that Nicholas needed no translator to interpret.

“The city is ours!”

Their bloody fight now raging on in between the walls, the Janissaries remained all the while oblivious to the fact that, only a short distance away, their stealthier brethren had already raised the Turkish flag above the Blachernae Gate.
 
“And that,” said LaCroix, affecting sudden disinterest, “would appear to be that.”

Nicholas wheeled on him. “The city is protected by three walls,” he seethed. “It is not lost yet.” He stepped to the parapet’s edge and was prepared to take flight into the midst of the battle when LaCroix’s powerful grip detained him.

“And what, pray tell, do you propose to do down there?”

Angrily, Nicholas swept his sire’s hand away.

“To fight,” he said, and flew.