They came to a pair of stained-glass doors. McDonnell, after a quick glance inside, pushed them open and dragged her in. It was the chapel—deserted. They sat down in one of the pews. Maggie shrugged his coat off and handed it across to him; he put it on without comment.

  “Look, Maggie, you know I like you, but I’m not going into the soup with you, you know what I mean? I’ve got other people to think about. Frank. Linda.” McDonnell avoided her eyes. She kept staring at him. “IAD’s asking questions about Nick. About you. The lieutenant’s getting pretty damn nervous, and I don’t blame him; one of us goes down, a lot of us usually go down with him.”

  Maggie felt a shiver run up her spine. Without really meaning to, she reached out and took his hand. He looked up, green eyes weary and guarded.

  “Look, Frank’s young, he’s new, he’ll get french-fried by these guys. I can’t take that chance. If they come to me, I’m going to tell them everything I know,” McDonnell finished. His fingers were tense in hers.

  “Jesus,” Maggie whispered. She couldn’t even think anymore. Too much, too fast … “Andy, I thought you said Nick was putting pressure out to stop it.”

  “He’d better work faster, Bowman. Look, I know Nick’s not the best cop in the world; you don’t have to go down with him, not if you go to them first.”

  “To IAD? I can’t do that.”

  “You told me you wanted to.” He frowned. She wiped at her sore forehead with a damp sleeve.

  “Yeah, that was—” Another lifetime ago. “Earlier. Now I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “Then you’ve got to get the hell out of here and let things cool off.” He stopped working his hands together and looked directly at her; McDonnell’s full attention was unsettling even when you were innocent, and Maggie knew she wasn’t. “You’re going to forget about what you said about Angelo Santos?”

  She didn’t answer. McDonnell got up and started pacing, hands jammed in the pockets of his raincoat. He kept shaking his head, not denying it so much as emphasizing it.

  “What do you want me to say, Andy? That I’m putting a price on Nick’s life? Maybe I am, shit, maybe Michael’s life was worth more than just an ‘I’m sorry,’ it was a terrible accident, we should have pulled that drunk driver over.’ He was my husband. He was my—” Her voice suddenly went strange and thin. She couldn’t get the last word out. The sobs seemed to push up from the base of her breasts, a dull liquid ache like soured milk. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth.

  McDonnell put his hand on her back and rubbed it gently, like a father soothing a restless baby. Oh, God, she’d wanted Mike’s baby. And somehow she knew already that even if he really was walking again, it was too late for thinking about babies. All their time had run out.

  “I want somebody to pay,” Maggie whispered. She sounded like a little girl. “For something. And I can’t even have that.”

  She could fed him at her back, solid and alive, tense as a watchspring. He bent. She felt the pressure of his lips against her hair.

  “No,” he said, just as softly. Just as emptily. “There isn’t much justice left in the world. Be careful. There aren’t enough people left who want it, either.”

  By the time Maggie controlled her tears McDonnell had drawn back, warmth gone. He stood in the aisle in awkward silence and watched her while she wiped her face.

  “You okay?” he asked—a stupid question, and they both knew it. She managed to smile.

  “Oh, sure. Fine.” The humor fell flat. She scrubbed at her face again. She was sick of crying, sick of grieving, sick to death of being scared. No more. There was a certain point where you just got numb, and she felt herself sliding into that blessed little death. “I’ll be okay.”

  He didn’t look convinced. He didn’t have to. Maggie wasn’t going to make it easier on him, and she guessed he knew that; he took it with his usual strength, only the green eyes betraying how painful it was. They stared at each other without saying anything else, and then he turned and walked toward the chapel doors. She wanted to scream at him, but it wouldn’t have done anything. And it wouldn’t have been respectful.

  “Good-bye,” he said from the door. She nodded.

  Now she was absolutely alone.

  When the cab arrived, Maggie gave him the address of Sylvia Reilly’s house. She was tired, so tired that the whine of the tires kept pulling her eyes shut; the radio was playing a soft Latino beat that the driver syncopated with little finger-pops and pats on the steering wheel. There was a sharp odor of grass in the cab that got stronger by the minute. She opened her eyes just enough to see through her lashes; the cabbie took a big toke and ground the tiny little stub out in an overflowing ashtray.

  Wonderful. She’d end up getting busted on top of everything else. Come to think of it, though, a cell might be a safe place just now—secure, surrounded by cops …

  Angelo had been surrounded by cops, too. To protect and to serve, oh, God damn you, Nicky. Nicky with the quick clever hands and the devil’s smile, Nicky who almost—almost—made her forget why she got married. She’d forgotten about a lot of things, and then everything had become so clear in that one second when the truck tilted over the rail and fell. She remembered every fleck of paint, every square of shattered safety glass, as if Norman Rockwell had put it on canvas. Mike’s eyes were so deep, so blue—

  Oh, Mike, how have you managed to stay sane with all this? How am I going to make it? she wondered. The grief suddenly came back full strength, as if she stood there by his fake grave again, burying the wedding ring that hadn’t meant so much to her until it meant nothing at all. Maggie fought back a sudden surge of tears.

  “Hey! You getting out?” the cabbie asked suddenly. She opened her eyes and realized that they’d arrived, the big Victorian blazing with lights and good cheer in the dark night. She slipped him a twenty for a fifteen-dollar fare and watched the car drive off, trailing sweet expensive smoke as the driver lit up another joint.

  Maggie turned and looked at the house. It took her a minute before she recognized the woman who came out the front door, because she just flat didn’t expect to see her.

  Rebecca Foster raised McDonnell’s gun on her. And giggled.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sunrise

  I couldn’t stand to watch Adam grieve. It was like watching him slice himself open with a butter knife, slow and agonizing and, ultimately, useless. I walked out into the hall and leaned against the cool white plaster; the smell of Sylvia’s blood stayed with me as if I’d perfumed myself with it. It crept through the open door and slid down the baseboards; it was redly real, even invisible, and it kept me from believing that what I’d seen had been some terrible daysleep dream.

  The bed continued to creak as Adam rocked his lover to an endless, eternal sleep.

  I went down the stairs and sat down on the bottom step. I couldn’t decide what to do with my hands; they weren’t comfortable on my knees, they dangled awkwardly when I angled them in, they seemed to ache with phantom pains. I rubbed them together and remembered the silky texture of blood along my skin. I had consumed enough blood to keep myself going for quite a while, but that didn’t take away the fascination, the longing. I didn’t need it. I wasn’t even faintly hungry—and yet …

  I’d been on the point of touching the red liquid strands of Sylvia’s blood and tasting it when Adam had found us in the bedroom. I wondered what he would have done to me if he’d caught me. Taken off the offending fingers, probably. I wouldn’t have blamed him.

  The doorbell rang. I got up in a complete mindless trance and swung the door open; I expected Maggie, but the woman who stood there shocked me into complete numbness.

  “Hello, Doctor,” Rebecca Foster said smoothly, and fired the gun she held. The impact knocked me backward like a punch, but when I grabbed at my stomach I realized that it hadn’t left a wound. The bullet had gone completely through me without the slightest visible sign. “How are you?”

  She fired again, and again, smoke rising up like fog between us. I kept getting knocked back until I tripped over a chair and fell. She leaned forward, put the muzzle of the gun against my forehead, and giggled. Her eyes were wide and completely unfocused.

  “Adam!” I screamed.

  She pulled the trigger.

  It hurt. A lot. I lay there like a corpse while my strength slowly gathered; when I rolled over on my side I saw a splintered hole in the wood floor where my head had been. The flesh of my forehead felt slightly warm, and ached.

  Rebecca Foster sat there in a chair and watched me, gun still pointed in my direction. There was someone standing behind her; for the briefest second I thought it was Adam, until my eyes focused and I saw him smile. No, not Adam. Not nearly.

  “Want to see a good trick, Miss Rebecca?” William asked mildly, and stepped around to where I was laboriously balancing myself on hands and knees. I saw what was coming, but I couldn’t stop it. His foot swept out in one of those spider-quick disjointed movements and took my arms out from under me.

  My chin hit the smooth wood floor several inches from the splintered hole. I went totally limp with pain; when I raised trembling fingers to my chin, they came away slick with blood.

  My blood. Stolen blood.

  Wood. It hurt, and it damaged. Like the thorns on the rose I’d picked up at my grave.

  William exchanged a look and a high, thin giggle with Rebecca Foster. She stood up, reversed her hold on the gun, and hit me with the wooden grip. I felt the skin tear on the ride of my head, and blood sheeted coolly down my cheek and drizzled on the floor.

  “Adam,” I whispered again, hopelessly. Foster giggled. There was a crazy viciousness in her eyes that went beyond anything I’d ever seen apart from William. He, by contrast, seemed only academically interested. It was all just a scientific experiment. He reached down and put his fingertips in the little growing pool of my blood, sniffed it, licked it with a gray tongue.

  “You’ve been a bad boy, Mr. Michael. You’ve been huntin’.” His tongue explored the red in gentle, delicate swipes. “A woman and a man. You have been busy.”

  “You ought to get into forensics,” I gasped. William smiled, my blood pink on his teeth.

  “Why, I already am.”

  I didn’t see him move. He slammed my head back against the wooden post of a table, adding more blood to the spatters, and what strength I had left disappeared. I was just a corpse with a brain still awake and screaming, unable to move, unable to fight. William’s face loomed over me, fangs distended and unreal.

  “Secondhand is better than none,” he murmured, and his fangs sliced into the flesh of my neck with a sound like rice paper tearing. I couldn’t feel any pain, not past the overwhelming agony of my head injury, but I could feel the strength bleeding out of me. There was a dull pressure where his lips clung to my neck like the embrace of a leech.

  His fangs came free of my flesh. I felt it, heard it from a long dark distance. He was a tiny malevolent shadow in front of my unfocused eyes.

  “Get the car started.”

  “Aren’t we going to kill him?” Foster asked, pouting.

  “Oh, eventually. But he ought to suffer first, oughtn’t he? For your dear mother’s sake?”

  She hissed and hit me again with the butt of the gun. Something snapped in my collarbone. I saw William reach out and grab her arm on the way down again, an effortless, thoughtless catch.

  “Not yet, Miss Rebecca. I got me better ways to take care of the doctor. Go get the car, now.”

  Her shadow disappeared. William’s head tilted back as he surveyed the stairs and the second floor. I thought he smiled.

  “She died whining and crying,” William murmured, soft as a lover’s whisper. “You hear me, boy? And I took everything she had. Blood, body, heart. I took more of her than you ever did.” I thought I heard something, over the disorienting waves of pain and lethargy. William waited, but the sound faded and died. He shook his head and reached down, slung me over his shoulder in one careless, one-handed motion, and walked toward the back door. He paused there, one hand on the knob, waiting. Nothing. Waves of pain shattered over me, peaking and falling, never less than paralyzing.

  “You come before sunrise and I’ll let him go, Adam. You come tomorrow night and you can pick up his pieces.” William went out into the darkened backyard and drifted toward the side gate. A loud pop froze him for a second, and at the other corner of the house I saw a woman’s body roll to a crouch, hands fumbling at her back. She pulled out a gun at the same time I focused enough to identify the disarranged blond hair, the torn black shirt.

  “Maggie-Mae,” William murmured, just loud enough for me to hear him. “Well, it is family night, ain’t it? I could snap her spine, you know. As fast as that.”

  He snapped his fingers and broke one of the chain links of the fence with a soft metallic pop. I felt panic gag me and tried to move. Nothing. The agony still pulsed through me like an electric current, fading but nowhere near gone. William eased the gate open and walked toward my unsuspecting wife as a car engine roared to life and tires squealed.

  He hit Maggie with the heel of his hand at the base of her neck, hard enough to throw her forward with stunning force but not enough to kill her. She opened her eyes and blinked dazedly up at us as he carried me past; she rolled clumsily on her side as William tossed me in the passenger side of the car. I couldn’t even turn my head to look at her as Foster gunned the car away with another screech of tires. All I could see from my position was the torn, sagging roof of the car. Sylvia’s car.

  Oh, God, I was in trouble. Bad trouble.

  Control didn’t return for what seemed like hours, and when it did, it came all at once, a rush that contracted every muscle in my body and jackknifed me into a fetal curl with my knees against my bloody chin. I was as weak as a child. A cold hand trailed over my forehead and ran down my arm; it paused at my broken collarbone and poked experimentally. I gasped.

  “We’re home, Doc Mike,” William said. The engine shut off. I lay very still and tried to conserve what there was of my strength for one last struggle. When the door at my feet opened, I lashed out desperately. I hit nothing at all. William and Foster giggled again, sounding weirdly connected. Her hands were almost as cold as his where they touched me in dragging me out. I managed to grab hold of one of her wrists and yanked, hard; bones grated and snapped. Foster screamed and hit me with the butt of her gun. That stopped that.

  I had the eerie impression that William could have stopped me from hurting her, if he’d wanted. He hadn’t bothered. It had interested him, seeing Foster hurt; I remembered the macabre care he’d taken with Rebecca’s mother and Sylvia’s body, and matched that against what remained in his eyes. My guts quivered. Vampires were plenty frightening enough without being psychopathic in the bargain.

  They dragged me between them up a cracked sidewalk. My head had fallen backward, so I could look up and see that the building, whatever it was, was at least three stories. The architecture was strangely inappropriate. It reminded me of Italy, not Texas. There were lots of windows—but they were all dark. Completely dark.

  We came to a barred gate set in an archway; beyond that there was a courtyard filled with winter-killed plants and a fountain that didn’t fount. There was trash floating in the stagnant water below the cracked plaster statue; I caught the sour smell of rot and mold. I was wrong about the lights; there were. few lights, clustered to one side of a set of buildings behind us. The quadrangle of buildings we faced was totally deserted; a few windows were covered with fading, sagging curtains, but there was no other sign they’d ever been tenanted. There wasn’t a single sound of human presence anywhere around.

  William and Foster dragged me up a crumbling stair to the third-story landing. There was a glass door there, locked; William had it open inside of thirty seconds and shoved me inside. There was another door beyond it, heavily baroque, with a tarnished brass knocker of a gargoyle’s head.

  William turned the knob and dragged me in. He dropped me on the musty thick carpet and walked over to one of the windows to look out. The only thing I could see from where I lay was the top of a faux-European tower, complete with greenish clock permanently stuck at five till midnight. The moonlight bathed William in silver, and for just a moment he looked oddly normal.

  “This is my favorite place,” he said. “How d’you like it? The man who built it must have been crazy, or a genius; it never did catch on. Was supposed to be the big shopping craze. It just turned into a gothic ghost town.”

  He turned around and flung his arms out wide, turning in slow dreamy circles. His eyes were closed. I blinked and tried moving my fingers; they twitched and spasmed, but at least it was movement. The agony threatened to take my head off completely, but that didn’t matter nearly as much as somehow getting my body to obey me and get me the hell out of here. Where the hell was Foster?

  The gun barrel touched the side of my ear. I closed my eyes. Before I could open them again, William grabbed me and hauled me up; he set me down on soft cushions that sank so far I felt as if I would fall right through. The musty scent of decay and damp rose up around me—like a tomb, I thought, and wished I hadn’t.

  “The man who built this was goin’ to live here, right here in these rooms. He had them all finished and then he just up and died. Can you believe that? They never did take the furniture out. Guess they were sentimental.” William slapped my cheek gently. “Wake up, Michael. Sun ain’t up yet.”

  “You said I could kill him,” Foster said from behind me. William’s silvery eyes focused on her, then back on me. He smiled, but those eyes never moved.

  “I hate to break a promise,” he said to me. “Purely do. ’Specially when it’s a pretty lady like Miss Rebecca who’s done so much for me already.”

  Control came back. I felt it slide down my body like warm water, and the pain receded. Slowly. I managed to get my mouth open.

  “Becky, he killed your mother,” I whispered. William smiled.