"You were not chosen for this task simply because of your computer skills."

"Wait a minute-didn't Edmonson get carted off because he killed a couple of you people? Isn't that against your laws?" he protested.

"Yes, but you are not, strictly speaking, one of 'our people.'"

Jason folded his arms and leaned back against the railing. His brown eyes took on a decidedly unfriendly gleam. "That's an interesting distinction."

"I'm so gratified to learn we're not boring you," Anselm said coldly. "That will be all."

For a moment Ian thought the young fool would attempt to argue, but he pushed himself away from the rail and stalked off, making no effort to hide his displeasure. It was not particularly judicious behavior, but Ian thought better of him for it.

But not well enough to trust him with Gwen's life.

As soon as Jason was out of hearing range, Ian tried one last time. "Is it really necessary to submit Gwen to such scrutiny?"

For a moment Anselm simply stared at him. "She is a changeling," he said, giving each word exaggerated emphasis to point out that he was stating the obvious.

"She is, yes, but the usual reasoning doesn't apply. There is no question about her bloodlines."

"Nevertheless, she has spent more than three decades denying what she is. Words have power, and denial can leave a taint not easily erased."

"She has come to accept that she is not human," Ian said quickly. "She knows she is a changeling."

"But does she understand what that means?"

Ian hesitated. In truth, Gwen was a long way from an understanding of her newfound heritage. The best he could offer was, "I heard her refer to herself as one of the Elders."

The older man responded with a derisive snort. "At the tender age of thirty-four? She's little more than a child. Teach her what she is, Ian, and quickly, before she's lost to us."

"She'll be fine," Ian a.s.sured him. "In fact, this surveillance strikes me as not only unnecessary, but risky."

That observation seemed to surprise Anselm. "Risky? How so?"

For a moment Ian considered giving his honest opinion: Edmonson had been a s.a.d.i.s.tic fool, and any human who willingly served him was likely to be every bit as twisted. But Anselm's icy gaze warned him not to revisit the Jason Cross argument.

"Relying on humans always holds risks," Ian pointed out, approaching the problem from a broader angle.

"Those who perceive our true nature are usually outside the accepted parameters of normality-someone with a psychic gift, a great hunger for knowledge or power, even, occasionally, an unbalanced mind."

"Whatever the case, they are all tools," Anselm stated. "Of what consequence are a hammer's hopes anddreams, so long as it drives the nail?"

The edge in his voice spoke of flagging patience. He picked up his half-empty winegla.s.s and shifted his gaze to the expanse of open sea.

Ian knew better than to ignore so pointed a dismissal. He rose and inclined his head in deference to Anselm's position, if not to his opinion.

For he was mistaken: Ian was certain of that. Anselm had warned Jason away from Gwen's bed, but that was a routine matter borne more of esthetics than necessity. Bedding humans was usually a harmless enough pastime. But during his long life, Ian had learned that bonds, true bonds, between elves and humans could be dangerous.

Sometimes, they could be deadly.

If Ian was right about Gwen, she might become very important to the exiled elves. They could not afford to lose her, as they had lost so many changelings before.

CHAPTER TWO.

Gwen Gellman walked swiftly through the dark bas.e.m.e.nt, making her way toward the faint red glow of the exit sign. All of her senses were on alert, so she was already turning when she heard the first rubber-soled whisper of footsteps behind her.

The man was close, and moving in fast. His dark face was shadowed by a hooded sweatshirt, but the way he moved told Gwen he was young and reasonably athletic. And he was big-he probably had half a foot and a good sixty pounds on her.

He was there before she could complete the turn, plowing into her like a veteran linebacker. Gwen struggled for balance, but momentum and gravity swiftly decided the outcome. As he rode her to the floor, she threw her left arm straight out in front of her and curved her other arm up to shield her face.

They hit the floor with bone-jarring force. Gwen quickly shook off the impact and took stock of her situation: facedown, no weapons within reach, heavy son of a b.i.t.c.h sprawled on top of her. Not great.

She rolled toward her extended left arm, using her right arm to push their combined weight away from the floor.

For a moment Gwen thought she might roll him off her, but he quickly adjusted, moving with her so that she was still pinned beneath his body. Now they were face to face, with her right arm trapped between them. The wolfish grin on his face made it clear that he considered this situation an improvement.

His next logical move would be to seize her unfettered hand. Gwen offered a distraction: she wriggled her legs out from under his, so that her legs were spread wide and their lower bodies pressed intimately together.

That surprised him into immobility, if only for a moment. Gwen could almost hear the blood rushing from his brain as he started thinking with the other organ men used in decision-making processes. She wrapped her left leg around his right, pulling them even closer. At the same time she moved her trapped arm a little, so she could slide her palm up the side of his face-a movement that read more like a caressthan an attack.

Before he could make sense of all this, Gwen slapped her left palm against the other side of his face and slid both thumbs into position over his eyelids. She pressed in, hard.

A startled curse escaped him, and he reared back-not much, but enough to create some s.p.a.ce between them. Gwen seized his right arm with both hands. At the same time, she raised her opposite knee and planted her foot, then pushed her hips off the floor as hard and as high as she could.

The man lost his balance and started to fall forward. He tried to catch himself with his free hand, but Gwen was already rolling them both toward his trapped right arm and entangled right leg.

In less than a heartbeat, their positions were reversed. Gwen kept rolling and scrambled off him. She came up on one knee, pulled one fist up to shoulder height, and drove it down hard toward his groin.

She pulled up just short of her target, her knuckles brushing the rough fabric of his jeans. Holding that position, she glanced toward the shadowy form standing by the door.

"You can hit the lights now, Stan."

Long fluorescent bulbs flickered and hummed into life. Stan-a painfully thin man clad in a gray janitor's jumpsuit at least two sizes too big for him-yawned and picked up his broom. He drifted off, looking completely unfazed by the fight he'd just witnessed. Business as usual, where he'd come from.

Gwen rose to her feet and extended a hand to her "attacker." He gave it a light slap, turning her offer of a.s.sistance into a low five, then rose on his own and ambled toward a folding chair over by the watercooler.

She turned to the nine women who sat on a semicircle of mats on the floor of the church bas.e.m.e.nt, their faces flushed and damp from the hour of rigorous exercise she'd put them through. They regarded her with wide, uncertain eyes. One woman looked to be minutes away from tears. Even though they all knew the demonstration was coming, it had hit them hard.

It was supposed to.

"Let's thank Officer O'Riley for his help," Gwen said. She began to clap, and the cla.s.s joined in a short-lived, halfliearted bout of applause.

Damian O'Riley lifted one hand in acknowledgement, then went back to his usual demeanor: both hands stuck in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, long legs stretched out in front of him. In that pose, he looked like a bored high-school kid, not a city cop with a college degree and the tenacity of a pit bull.

It was a dichotomy Gwen could appreciate. She'd been the same kind of cop not too long ago, and even though she had a good ten years on Damian, she still looked like a teenager. Only recently had she started to figure out why. And tonight, for the first time, she'd have to explain to someone else a mystery she herself only dimly understood.

She forced that prospect into the back of her mind and focused on the seated women.

"Before the last cla.s.s, all of you will partic.i.p.ate in staged attacks. Not like that one, not at first," she added hastily, seeing panic flash across several faces. "We'll begin with familiar exercises, like breaking holds, only instead of working in pairs, you'll work with a male partner."

One hand went up uncertainly-a soft little hand belonging to a pet.i.te brunette in her mid thirties. In herpastel pink tee shirt and matching yoga pants, her shiny brown hair caught back in a neat ponytail, she looked like someone who'd gotten lost on her way to a Mary Kay Cosmetics home party. Gwen had a pretty good idea what was coming, and she stifled a sigh as she pointed to the woman.

"But some of the techniques we're learning are meant to... hurt people."

"You don't need to worry about that," Gwen said briskly. "All the men I know are used to taking abuse."

Damian let out an emphatic grunt. "She got that right."

This surprised a burst of laughter from the women, and some of the tension slipped from their faces.

Gwen didn't necessarily consider that a good thing.

"You've got to forget all about your nice-girl upbringing. When your life's on the line, there's nothing wrong with inflicting a little pain, and there are a lot of good ways to do it. If you can't go for the groin, you can break his thumbs, crush his windpipe, or rip his ears off. That last thing is a lot easier to do than it sounds, by the way.

"But," she interjected, holding up a cautioning finger, "you can't rely on pain. Over sixty percent of s.e.xual attackers are on some kind of intoxicant. That can take the edge off whatever you dish out."

"Now she tells me," Damian interjected.

Gwen waited for the collective chuckle to die down. "Your best bet is usually to make as much noise as you can, break free as fast as you can, and run like h.e.l.l. But you won't always have that option. What Damian and I demonstrated here was pretty close to worst-case scenario: pinned, facedown, hands trapped."

"Why do we have to act out attacks?" another woman demanded, a shrill, you-can't-make-me edge to her voice. "As long as we learn the techniques, won't the training kick in when it needs to?"

"It might," Gwen allowed, "but one of the main reasons more women don't fight off attackers is that they're frozen with shock. The whole 'this can't be happening to me' thing. It's better to get past that emotional bulls.h.i.t now than in some parking garage the next time you have to work late."

Several heads nodded, and the woman who'd spoken acknowledged the point with a grudging shrug.

"If this cla.s.s is a statistical sample, some of you are here because you've learned it can happen to you.

Some stats say one woman out of ten is s.e.xually a.s.saulted, some say one out of seven. Some go as high as one out of four."

"Twenty-five percent? That seems way too high," objected a reed-thin blonde who'd introduced herself earlier that evening as some sort of state bureaucrat. She hadn't had much to say since, but hey-the woman was in a position to know what lying b.a.s.t.a.r.ds statistics could be.

Gwen nodded. "Yeah, but keep in mind that some women are raped more than once." Because a few of them looked skeptical, she added, "s.e.xual a.s.sault can happen to anyone, anywhere, but all of you in this cla.s.s can take precautions that simply aren't available to some women. It's hard to stay out of a bad neighborhood if you live there. It's tough to avoid a rapist if he's your mother's boyfriend, or even a family member. When I was in juvenile hall, I knew girls who'd been raped three times or more, and one, an incest victim, who'd lost count before she was out of middle school."

Several jaws dropped, and they all stared at her with the glazed eyes of people who'd gone into information overload. Gwen wasn't sure if it was the concept of multiple a.s.saults or her casual referenceto her delinquent past that tipped the scales, but she figured it was time to call it a night.

A glance at the clock confirmed this. "That's all for this cla.s.s. Next week we'll work with legal weapons anyone can carry: keys, key chains, flashlights, hiking sticks, and so on. We'll be working in pairs, so bring safety goggles to protect your eyes. You can pick some up at Home Depot. Bike helmets would be good, too. If that seems extreme to you, keep this in mind: The bad guys take their work seriously."

As the somber-faced women filed out, Gwen walked over to the young cop. He gathered his long legs under him and rose, pushing back the hood of his sweatshirt to reveal close-cropped hair he'd recently dyed a reddish brown. Gwen didn't particularly like this innovation, since the color didn't provide much contrast to the rich brown hue of his skin, but hey-it was his hair.

"That went well, you think?"

"If you meant to scare the s.h.i.t out of everyone, I'd say yeah, it went great," Damian said dryly. "You think any of them will come back for the second cla.s.s?"

Gwen shrugged. "If they're serious about staying alive, sure they will. I'm not getting paid to make them 'feel good about themselves,' or whatever happy horses.h.i.t the community school had in mind when they named this cla.s.s 'Self-Defense: Exercise and Empowerment for Women.' f.u.c.king morons."

"d.a.m.n, Gellman-aren't you the perky little cheerleader tonight." He grinned at her as he thrust his hands into his pockets and rocked back onto his heels. "Now, pay up."

"Yeah, yeah. You want some coffee or something? I'm buying."

"Forget it, white girl-you're not getting off that easy. The deal was quid pro quo: something for something. I let you kick my a.s.s-"

"You let me?"

"Notice me ignoring that. Quid pro quo," he repeated. "One a.s.s-kicking in exchange for a follow-up on that kidnapping case."

Not an appealing scenario, since "that kidnapping case" had changed Gwen's entire concept of reality, but Damian was one of the few people Gwen knew who might be able to hear the story without concluding that she should check herself into a rubber room.

"I'm going to pay up," she grumbled, "but I'm dangerously decaffeinated and really, really hungry. You?"

"Missed supper," he said. "As usual. Yeah, I could eat."

The church janitor ambled back into the room and began to gather up the mats. Gwen had known the man for years: Stan Domanski, an ex-junkie who owed his job, and probably his life, to Gwen's friend Sister Tamar. Despite this common touchstone, Gwen had yet to get more than a word or two out of him. True to form, he returned her thanks with a noncommittal grunt and hoisted a stack of mats, staggering a little under the load.

"Maybe we should help," Damian suggested, his gaze following the janitor's unsteady progress.

"I've offered. He took it as an insult." Even so, Gwen took her time heading for the exit and glanced back twice as she led the way up the back steps. But Stan seemed to be managing okay, and as soon as he dumped the mats into a bin, Gwen shouldered open the heavy door and stepped out into a damp spring evening.A cold, soft mist was falling, and steam rose from the storm drains on the much-patched streets as Gwen and Damian walked to a nearby sports pub.

Damian followed her to a back table, his face dubious as he took in the scattering of patrons staring morosely at the grainy screen of the room's single wall-mounted television. "You sure about this?"

"What? Since I'm buying, you want to hold out for the Cheesecake Factory? This place isn't as bad as it looks."

It was, in fact, one of Gwen's favorite haunts in this part of town. The interior was about as glum as the weather, and the wait-staff were reliably surly. For some reason, the staff all seemed to be in the late stages of a Goth phase. Gwen figured they were offended by the white stripes on the referee shirts they were required to wear. But the food was cheap and reasonably good, and the cook thought "portion control" meant that you stopped piling food on the plates when it started to fall off.

Gwen raised her oversize coffee mug and waved it like a cast-away signaling a pa.s.sing ship. A waitress sporting bottle-black hair and multiple piercings came over with a full pot of coffee. She rolled her eyes when Gwen told her to leave the pot, but she set it down without argument and rattled off the night's specials-no small feat, considering the size of the silver stud in her tongue.

Gwen ordered a burger and fries and Damian said he'd have the same. As the waitress slumped away, Gwen poured coffee for them both and laced hers with five little tubs of cream and two sugars. She stirred it slowly, tasted it, and added another sugar. Achieving the proper balance was an important culinary ritual, also known as "stalling."

During these preparations, a young Black man called Damian's name and came over to the table. They touched fists and exchanged a little small talk, street-style, before the conversation turned to Gwen.

"This your lady, man?"

"She's a PI," Damian said quickly. "I like to pick up some extra work, off duty. Saving for a new car, you understand."

"Uh-huh. About d.a.m.n time." He nodded amiably to Gwen and sauntered off.

An uncomfortable silence settled over the table. After a few moments, Gwen said, "That raises an interesting point."

"I'm sorry, okay?" Damian said quickly. "That was rude, me not introducing you and all. It's just that a lot of people I know don't exactly get behind the interracial thing."

"Yeah, I got that, but it doesn't qualify as an 'interesting point.' The thing is, you helped me with a case, and I usually pay people who do that. If this gets to be a habit, we need to work out rates and so forth."

The chagrin faded from Damian's face. "How about we just keep it off the books? I'll help out when you need me, and you return the favor."