“Then what do we do?” I asked. He laughed, faintly.

  “Do? We wait, Michael. Sooner or later, they will come to us. And when they do, I will kill them.” His teeth flashed, nacreous and sharp, a brief vision that reminded me oddly of the scorpion’s stinger as it rose and fell in madness. “All of them.”

  Sylvia’s head came up, eyes glittering like wet gems. She didn’t say anything at all, just stood and went up the stairs. The blanket swept the wood behind her like a wedding train. Adam never turned to see, but I saw his eyes focus on the reflection in the glass before him.

  Like all glasses, this one did not reflect his body, so he had a clear view of Sylvia’s exit.

  “What about Maggie?” I asked. Adam’s eyes didn’t move. He tracked his lover until she passed out of sight upstairs.

  “What about her?” he asked, falsely mild.

  “I have to make sure she’s safe.”

  He turned, faster than he had on Sylvia, and crossed to me. His hands closed on my shoulders, yanked me to my feet, and shoved me across to the window. I froze, staring, and he stood behind me in silent menace.

  “Don’t you understand anything? Do you really think,” he hissed in my ear, too soft for human ears to hear, “that you can save her from that?”

  In the dimness of the backyard, almost hidden in the trees, something white looked back at me. And smiled. I gasped and stumbled backward, into Adam’s strength. His hands closed over my shoulders again, more gently.

  “You’re poisoned. If you go to her, he’ll know you care for her. He knows how to take things from you, Michael. You can’t afford—”

  His voice failed, abruptly, and his fingers tightened enough to be painful. I looked back out the window, but there was nothing there, just the wind and trees.

  “I can’t afford to love, and neither can you. Take a lesson: let yours go. I wish to God—I pray—that when the time cones, I can.”

  He turned and walked away from me, up the stairs and into the darkness. I stayed at the window, staring blindly out.

  If William was out there, he didn’t show himself again.

  At sunrise, in the safety of the darkened room, I felt the water pour into my lungs again in a black and suffocating rush. I writhed in my haphazard cocoon of blankets on the bare floor, I’d expected this little death to be easier this time. It wasn’t. My last thought before the darkness was that no one, not Adam, not William, was going to take Maggie away from me. Not this time.

  ***

  Three days of unbearable waiting. The tension between Adam and Sylvia was enough to make a dead man sweat, much less a claustrophobic not-so-dead one. Sylvia mentioned, out of Adam’s hearing, that Maggie had been released from the hospital and was home; he hadn’t wanted me to know, because he didn’t want me out of his sight. Me, or Sylvia.

  I could have told him, you don’t always get what you want.

  I palmed the car keys sitting on the marble counter in the kitchen and shoved them in the pocket of Adam’s borrowed jacket. I’d also borrowed a dark shirt and pants; the shirt was long in the shoulders, and I looked as if I’d had my tailoring done at K mart, but I’d pass in the dark.

  On reflection, that sort of described my entire future.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Sylvia asked from the top of the stairs as I quietly slid the deadbolt back on the door. I turned to look at her, and she stopped with one hand on the banister. She looked better today, or at least resigned “Mike, think about what you’re doing. You’re not ready yet.”

  “I’m going to make sure Maggie’s all right,” I said. Her eyebrows came together in a straight black line over worried eyes. “Are you going to tell Adam?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Are you going to try to stop me?”

  “Of course I’m not. I’m not stupid. Go ahead, if you have to. You can’t do a thing for her, all you can do is cause yourself pain, but go ahead.”

  All very easy for her to say, standing there with her own lover somewhere upstairs, waiting for her return. I shook my head.

  “It isn’t that easy. I love her. I—need her. It’s as if I’ve had something ripped out of my body by the roots, and it’s still pumping blood—I can’t go on like this. I have to see her. I just do.”

  Sylvia didn’t say anything, but I saw the softening in her green eyes, the understanding. I opened the door, unlatched the screen, and went out. Her words echoed faintly after me.

  “Be careful.”

  The car started on the first try, and I backed it out of the driveway with cautious speed, in case Adam took a notion to try to stop me. I knew Sylvia wouldn’t try; she probably just noted the time, like a parent whose teenager leaves for a late date. Noting the time until sunrise.

  She was better, but not well. She was clinging to Adam’s love, a spar in the midst of this emotional wreckage. I wondered what Adam had to cling to. Me? God help us.

  I drove with all four windows down, enjoying the city-scented air more than the musty fetid odor of the car. There was a certain visceral joy in driving; it was such an old skill, something that tied me to a life I’d had when I still breathed. God, only days ago? Impossible.

  I kept an eye out for Foster or another tail, then decided it was pointless; William knew where Adam lived, Foster knew about me; between the two of them they’d be able to come up with my old address. Whether they followed me there or not was immaterial. I cranked the little car up to a happy sixty-five and rolled with the night traffic. One advantage to being a vampire—no rush hour. Everything about the evening seemed so normal, so weirdly ordinary, that I put myself in a white-line trance and let my instincts take me—home. Home for real. Instinct led me to the exit, the street, the block.

  I put the brake on and pulled in three houses away. My house. Dear God, dear sweet Jesus, please let me have my life again, the life I never appreciated all those years, let me have my wife and lover in my arms again …

  I shut the engine off and stepped out of the car, keeping to the shadows in case any neighbors decided to go for a late-night ill-fated walk. No problem, really; with my enhanced senses I’d have plenty warning of their approach. Although the extended senses weren’t much of a bargain just now, considering that tomorrow was trash day and the bundles and cans of garbage on the curb melded into a smelly symphony.

  I caught the cool scent of magnolia as I approached the house—the house, the only one that mattered. Maggie’s Bronco wasn’t there, of course, and my car was missing; there were two cars pulled up in the drive, both with rental-agency stickers in the back windows. Out-of-town guests.

  It hit me in a sickening flash what had brought the unexpected guests. My funeral, of course. My mom would have flown in, and my sister Connie—maybe a couple of aunts and uncles, if it wasn’t deer season or they hadn’t already had tickets to a football game.

  I edged around the house to a side window, feeling like a thief and a peeping tom, and yet oddly excited. The sound of voices came to me clearly, and brought a surge of feeling I can only compare to the racing of a mortal heart—even though I had no heartbeat and no rush of blood. It sounded like I was right in the room with them.

  “—plain stupid, Connie. Have you talked to her?”

  “Of course I talked to her, but she’s real firm on it. Closed casket. Don’t know where she got the idea, but she swears she and Mike decided on it years ago.” Connie’s voice was softer than I remembered, maybe because she wasn’t screaming at me at the top of her lungs. I pushed aside the strange and distracting heaviness I felt and searched my memory for any conversations I’d had with Maggie on the subject of caskets, closed or open, but nothing came up. “I think she’s just in shock, Larry, that’s all. Don’t push her.”

  “Push? Would I push?” That was Larry, my first and thoroughly unpleasant cousin. Oh, yes, Larry, you’d push your own mom off a ledge for a buck twenty-five and a good laugh. I’d never been able to stand his nasal whine. The idea of him attending my funeral was hilarious and nauseating. “Look, what about the rest of us who haven’t seen him in years? Don’t we deserve some consideration?”

  Connie’s voice filtered back, distant and cool, and it pleased me to note that she didn’t much care for Larry either. I took in a breath, not for the oxygen, but to draw in the scents of Connie and Larry’s warm rushing blood, mingling with night breeze and magnolia. I stopped. The smell made me feel faint and increasingly disoriented.

  “Not as much as Maggie. Look, Larry, you never liked Mike while he was alive, I don’t understand why you’re so all-fired hot to weep over his body.” My God. Her voice actually cracked. I pressed my hands against the cold brick and edged up until I could see over the edge of the window.

  Larry was sitting at my kitchen table, staring murderously at Connie’s back as she washed a set of coffee cups. He’d put on some weight, which cheered me; he looked as fat and bad-tempered as a rabid beagle, and he still wore that stupid, pinched, disapproving expression he’d been born with. His heartbeat was loud and angry, a drumbeat pounding the blue vein at his throat and my ears.

  Connie rattled the cups in the sink with unnecessary force. It took me a minute before I caught a glimpse of the side of her face and saw the tears trickling down her cheek. She wiped at it viciously with the back of a sudsy hand. I froze, staring, and felt something knot up inside. I’d never seen Connie cry, not since she was ten years old. She’d never even cried at Dad’s funeral, not where I could see her. It probably made her furious to be weeping over me.

  God, Connie, I’m sorry.

  All of that was wiped out of my mind by a white storm of agony as Maggie walked through the doorway and set a load of plates down on the counter next to Connie’s elbow. She looked worn. Her eyes were shadowed as if she hadn’t slept much, and the cut on her forehead looked angry and inflamed. She’d knotted her hair up carelessly at the back of her head, and it looked as if she hadn’t found the time or energy to wash it in days. Ghastly pallor, nervous gestures; she knocked one of the plates to the floor and flinched violently when it broke. Connie bent to pick it up, but Maggie got there first and gathered up the pieces with shaking fingers. She moved like a half-broken mechanical toy rather than the graceful woman I remembered and loved.

  Her eyes swept past the window, unseeing. I felt my heart rip loose at the darkness in them, the haunted emptiness. She dumped the dish fragments in the garbage and left the room without a word. I smelled the remembered scent of her, perfume and sweet warmth, the dark undercurrent of her life running beneath it … I wanted her, worse now than I had in my mortal life, I wanted to hold her and put my lips to hers and draw her into my body …

  “God, she ought to do something with her face, she looks like shit,” Larry said. Ripped out of the seductive power of my own lust, I focused on him in a wrench of fury; I felt my fingers dig into the brick on either side of the window, and it powdered and crumbled under the pressure. Connie turned and pointed one wet, soap-suds-coated finger at him like a loaded gun.

  “Get out. Go watch TV or something. Just stay the hell away from me.”

  Larry evidently knew when to call it quits. He got up and ambled out, leaving Connie alone with the dishes. She bent her head and braced herself with stiffened arms on the counter, fighting back tears.

  My tension faded, replaced with aching grief. Sylvia had been right, after all. I could do no good here, not for Maggie, not even for myself. All I could do was lurk like a ghost, watching without speaking, wanting without touching. The realization was harder to take than I’d expected.

  Connie turned and looked … right … at … me. A cup fell from her nerveless hands and smashed loudly on the tile; she braced herself with one arm on the countertop and stared, eyes wide and so blank they looked like the shallow glass eyes of a doll. The stare seemed to stretch on forever. I could see every fleck of color in her light brown eyes, the pupils expanding at an alarming rate in shock—

  Drop, asshole, drop out of sight—move—

  I threw myself to the cold brittle grass and crawled like a singed beetle into the shadows of the bushes. God damn it, how could I have been so stupid? She’d looked right at me. She couldn’t have missed me.

  The blinds went up in a hiss of metal slats. She stared out at the brick wall of the Aaronsons’ house next door, tears streaming down her pale cheeks, and pressed one shaking hand flat against the glass. After a long, long time, she backed away. The blinds came back down and rolled firmly closed.

  I dropped my forehead to my crossed arms and felt a wave of hot hunger cascade through me, triggered by Connie’s nearness and distress. Jesus. Jesus, God, don’t let this happen to me, not now—

  “Having fun?” a voice asked, very close to my right ear. I rolled away, a panicked convulsive thrash that was instantly stopped by Adam’s hands. He pinned me to the ground in the shadows; I couldn’t see much of him at all but the glint of his glasses and the humorless slice of his smile. “You idiot, what if I’d been William? You’re lucky.”

  Enraged, I struck at him. It was like batting at the wind; Adam stepped gracefully back out of the way without loosening his grip on me in the slightest. “Let me up, you bastard. Now!”

  “Not until you listen to me. Do you know why you came here, Mike? Do you?” He emphasized it with a shake of my shoulders that would have snapped a bone or two if I’d still been mortal. His eyes behind the glasses were wide and, though it was hard to see in the Him reflected light, crimson.

  “I get the feeling you’re going to tell me,” I grated. He smiled, using all of his teeth.

  “Oh, yes. You came here to wallow around in self-pity, to give it the most charitable interpretation. Better listen, Michael, because I’m about to tell you the facts of your life.” Adam held me firmly, even when I threw all my strength against him. He shook me again, to make my position very clear, and this time he looked angry. Bone-white, inhumanly angry. “You’re a predator. You hunt when you’re hungry. You’d better damned well understand why you came here, because until you do you’ll never understand anything. Now, why did you come here? Why?”

  He encouraged me with a blow across the face that should have snapped my neck. It hurt. I bared my fangs at him—that felt right, felt natural, the rage in my system triggering it just as before it would have triggered the balling of a fist—and Adam bared his own. Long, sharp, and glistening.

  “Tell me,” he grated. I clawed at his hands, but he wouldn’t let me go. “All right, listen, you little bastard. You came here because it was easy. Because you knew your way around, you knew you could feed here. Do you understand?”

  “No!”

  “You came to hunt, Michael. And you don’t even know it.”

  “No!” I wanted to scream, but something kept me to a hiss, too soft to be heard in the kitchen even if Connie was still standing at the window. I heard her pulsebeat, a faint metronomic rhythm ringing hot and fast in my ears. I could smell her blood rising from her body like the scent of sex—and Maggie, I’d looked at Maggie and I’d felt—

  “No!” I whispered, and went limp in Adam’s hands. I was shaking all over. The ache just went on and on, hunger and need and horror all mixed together. “Oh, dear God, no.”

  He kept holding me down, but he didn’t look triumphant. How long had it taken him to come to this first revelation? Days? Months? Years?

  You always hurt the ones you love, because they have no defenses against you.

  The back door creaked open and quietly shut. We both froze, and the hunger peaked in me to a frightening crest, like orgasm, threatened to take control of my body and move it independently. Adam’s hands tightened on me, anchoring me.

  I knew who it was even before she came out into the moonlight and leaned against the slanted porch support I’d always intended to fix. I knew by the sound of her footsteps and the distant scent of her body that rushed through the night to fill my soul. She sank down on her knees like a broken puppet, arms around the support, and stared out blindly into the overgrown wilderness of the garden. It was my job to weed the garden, but I’d gotten lazy, and she’d gotten busy, and we’d tacitly agreed to let it go for a while …

  … for a lifetime …

  She didn’t cry. Somehow, like Sylvia’s trembling silence, that was worse. She sat in perfect silence, face set like a plaster mask, and her eyes were feverish and dry. Like mine, as I drank in the sight of her the scent. The ache coming off her was like waves of heat against my skin, and her heart drummed and drummed in the silence of the night.

  Adam sat above me as if he’d been cast from the same plaster as Maggie’s mask. His head was bowed, and he watched my face as I watched hers. When I finally looked at him, he bent closer.

  “How do you fed?” he asked, a bare whisper of sound like the wind turning a leaf. I stared at him with eyes that must have been as crimson as his own, and as anguished.

  “Hungry,” I whispered. It came up harsh and black, dragged from the depths of my throat. Adam’s expression didn’t change. He slowly let go of my shoulders and sat back in the dark embrace of the night shadows, tossing his coppered hair back when the breeze teased it over his face.

  “Now you understand,” he answered, not without pity, and I twisted over to lie on my stomach. I dug my fingers deep into the cold-stiffened grass and loam, and heard Maggie’s heartbeat thud on and on in my temples.

  She slowly lifted her face to the falling moon and moaned, a low tortured sound that didn’t belong in a human throat. I silently clawed at the ground in front of me, fighting back my hunger, my fear, as if I intended to dig my own grave right there under the kitchen window. The sound echoed in my ears, giving tongue to all the anguish and black horror that defined my death—my life—

  The back door opened again, and a man came out in a spill of golden light. Maggie didn’t move, didn’t turn to give any sign of notice. He walked up to her and put his hands gently on my wife’s shoulders, then leaned down and kissed her tangled knotted hair.