Abandoned at a young age, John and his younger sister had wandered in and out of foster care, sometimes living on the street between placements, before the church took an interest and arranged their adoption by a moderately wealthy white couple.

Hightower had predicted it as a fortuitous match, although the Kellers, both good Irish Catholics, had needed some convincing. The children's mixed blood and semiferal upbringing presented sizable obstacles, but Hightower had counted on Audra Keller's long-barren womb making her desperate for children. Once Audra had seen how urgently the dear wayward lambs needed a permanent, nurturing home, she softened, and in turn persuaded her reluctant husband. The remaining details-handling the social worker, having the Kellers' adoption papers pushed through the courts-were handled through the usual channels.

It was not the first such arrangement Hightower had made, nor the last. He was very tenacious of his wayward lambs, as John Keller was about to find out.

"Your letter of resignation was forwarded to me from the head of your order," Hightower said without ceremony.

"I was surprised, to say the least, upon reading the contents. What brought this on?"

"I should have called, but I know how busy you are, Your Grace." John quickly related the news about his sister's abduction. "Time is of the essence, and I would ask to be released now so that I can help search for her."

John was using his sister's disappearance as an excuse to leave the priesthood, not a reason. "Have you discussed your plans with the police?" When the young priest shook his head, August sighed. "Frankly, John, I think this is a matter for them to deal with, not you."

"The police receive hundreds of missing-person reports every month. They can't follow up on them all." He rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair and made a weary sound. "She's my sister, Your Grace. She has no one else."

The bishop knew John's desire to search for his missing sister was his way of compensating for the guilt he still carried over abandoning her after their foster parents' deaths. That had always weighed heavily on John, as did other, internal struggles he had endured over the years.

"John, when you entered the priesthood, you understood that you were giving up your worldly life in the service of Christ. As distressing as this situation is for you, your sister is part of that." When the young priest began to speak, the bishop lifted a hand. "This is not about Alexandra. This is about you, and your self-doubt. Now I would like to hear the truth. Why are you turning away from your true calling?"

For a moment August thought that he had lost the boy, until he saw the despair well up in John's dark eyes.

"I'm not fulfilling my promise to G.o.d," the younger man admitted. "I swore I would defend the faith, and I can't do that anymore."

"You told me when you were young that you wanted to be a soldier of G.o.d," August reminded him. "I did. I do."

"You feel now that you can't defend the faith if you're pandering to addicts and wh.o.r.es." John's flinch of surprise pleased him. "I have not been unaware of your frustration here at St. Luke's, my son. In fact, I had hoped you would come to me for rea.s.signment long before this."

"I can't... continue, Your Grace. I have to find my sister. After that..." He paused. "There is always something like the Peace Corps. My sister spent a year overseas working as a doctor for them."

It was obvious that John hadn't devoted a great deal of thought to the after-that portion of his plans.

"Even if your sister has some sway with the Peace Corps, you can't go back to Brazil. The scandal is still too fresh, and the Brazilian government would bar you from entering the country." While the younger man absorbed that shock, he continued. "The church has many different missions, John. What I want you to do is to reconsider your role in the faith. You've tried to follow the standard path set for any priest, but obviously that isn't for you." He paused for a moment. "I came here today to offer you an invitation to join my order."

"Your order, sir?" John sounded dull and defeated. "I thought you were a Franciscan like me."

"I am on paper, for official purposes. My true order is les Freres de la Lumiere." August smiled. "That is the fancy French version of 'the Brethren of Light.' "

Now the young priest frowned. "I've never heard of them."

He made a negligent gesture. "Few have. We are not an order of the Catholic church, but we were created to protect it. We are prohibited from discussing our mission and our activities with anyone a.s.sociated with the church or outside the order, except in cases when a candidate initiate like, you is presented to us."

"I was presented? By whom?"

"By me. I've intended you for the Brethren since I talked you into putting on that collar." The bishop sighed and selected a finger sandwich. "Your Mrs. Murphy will be the death of me." After a nibble, he added, "You do know your history of the church, I hope."

John nodded.

"Three members of the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon founded the Brethren in 1312."

Confusion clouded the young priest's expression. "Your Grace, I wrote a graduate paper on the Templars. Most of them were arrested and executed for heresy in 1307. The pope disbanded the order in 1312."

"You are correct about the order. Most of the Templars were put to death, and rightly so, bloodthirsty avaricious b.a.s.t.a.r.ds that they were." Giving into the growling demand of his distended belly, August popped the remainder of the sandwich into his mouth and selected another. "Three who were spared knew the danger that still existed, and formed the order without the pontiff's knowledge."

John shifted in his seat. "There is no mention in any of the histories I've read of a new order being formed out of the old."

"In those days, protecting the church was more important than serving it. Secrecy was paramount." He drained the last of his tea. "Ah, that woman knows how to make a proper cup, bless her." He set the cup down. "During the Middle Ages, we priests were the only light in many places. We battled plagues, petty tyrants, thief lords, and territorial wars. The pontiff himself tried to control politic elements in a dozen different countries, mainly to keep them from collapsing. Threats sprang up in the most unexpected places. The actual power of the church at the time depended heavily on the stability of sympathetic governments, and they were frantic about these maledicti. The threat of the accursed ones still exists today, so we hunt them."

"Accursed ones?" The side of John's mouth gave a bitter hitch. "Who were they? The Lutherans?"

August refilled his cup. "We hunt vrykolakes."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I see you know your Latin better than your Greek." The bishop gave him a complacent smile. "The maledicti are accursed because they are the evil undead, John. They are vampires."

Chapter Seven.

Michael Cyprien knew the danger of thrall and rapture. He had never made the mistake of thinking himself immune to the dark dance between Darkyn predator and human prey. He merely avoided losing control, in the same way he avoided copper, fire, and anything that would separate his head from his neck.

His mistake was in a.s.suming that control was wholly mental and not physical.

Not feeding before the surgery had been imperative. The only way to submerge into the recesses of his mind and stay there while the doctor operated was to abstain from all forms of nourishment. It was the same discipline that had enabled him to endure his torture at the hands of the Brethren. Yet the effort it took to remain in that semiconscious state until she finished had pushed him into a realm of need he had not experienced after the torture, or in seven centuries since he had risen from his grave.

Seeing Alexandra for the first time brought it all home. How stunned Michael had felt, to open his eyes to the sight of her standing before him in her bloodstained gown. Phillipe had told him that she was small, but he had said nothing about the proportionate perfection of her curves. Not a word about the slender column of her throat, the sweet rise of her full b.r.e.a.s.t.s, or the elegant lyre of her hips. Not a syllable about the grace of her hands with their clever, tapering fingers.

The hands that had given him back his face.

The top of Alexandra's head hardly reached the center of Michael's chest, and as he had looked down on her, the light coaxed a thousand glints of gold and red in the loose crown of her dark spiraling curls. t.i.tian would have adored her hair, and her eyes, although they were so plainly brown that they should have seemed mundane. Perhaps it was seeing in them the calm dignity and dreadful experience that she possessed that so fascinated him. Even her flower of a mouth, with its petal-soft curves that brought the ache of other hungers, could not distract him from her eyes.

That had been another mistake, and he had known it as soon as the scent that induced thrall and rapture began rolling off his skin. No one knew what mysterious bodily process produced the Darkyn's individual, intoxicating scents, but once his body took control, there was little that he or his victim could do to resist it. She had been his before he had risen from the operating table to take her.

Yet by the time Michael realized what was happening, it was too late. She called him, he looked upon her, and the deadly dance had begun.

He had never fought thrall, but he had never realized it brought hungers so exquisitely painful that they all but tore him to pieces.

Feeding on her. The tear of flesh, the gush of blood. Even as he made it happen, he knew it would kill her. Then he was filling himself with her, leading her down into the blood dreams, where the dance would slow and finally end.

Once there, however, guilt and outrage-he had not attacked her voluntarily; he knew that-made the dreams unbearable.

Michael refused to let her die.

Alexandra dwindled, leaving him alone in the dreams. Michael had not lain enthralled since he had first risen as Darkyn, so it took him some time to fight his way out. There was also the fear of what he would find when he awoke.

She saved me. Did I kill her for it?

Michael closed his newly restored eyes as he recalled what he had done to her. Despite his orders, Alexandra had been left alone with him. When Phillipe had wrenched them apart, clarity returned, enough to drive Michael mad. He recalled pouring his blood over the gaping wound in her neck, then ripping into his arm and forcing his blood down her throat.

Why had he done that? Darkyn blood poisoned every human being exposed to it. He had told her that.

I am killing you, Alexandra.

Could you love me a little first? It struck him like a fist. She had asked for love, and he had given her death. And then a new, stronger wave of bloodl.u.s.t had come over him again, and he had struck a second time.

Vivez pour moi, he had shouted at her when Phillipe had pulled him away. Over and over.

Live for me.

In the delusions of thrall, Michael had somehow convinced himself that he could save her with his own blood. That she, unlike all the others, would survive.

Alexandra saved me, and I killed her.

When at last Michael emerged from the blood dreams into the waking world, he opened his eyes for the second time since returning from Rome.

Eyelids. I have eyelids again. He used his restored vision to tear the curtains from his bed before climbing out of it.

"Phillipe?"

"Here, Master." His seneschal held out his robe.

He pulled on his trousers and stalked past him. Colors and shapes whirled around him. "Where is she?" He could still hear her choking, the soft, distressed sound of it hissing in his ears. "Upstairs? How badly did I hurt her?" Perhaps it was not as terrible as he remembered. Thrall played tricks on the mind, turning the real into the surreal.

"She is gone, Master." Phillipe followed him up the stairs. "I sent your tresora away, as well."

Michael halted and turned around. "Why?"

"She fears what you will do to her." He explained what had happened, how eliane had sent him from the room after the surgery, and then locked Alexandra in alone with Michael. "Had I known what she planned, I would have stopped you, or killed her."

Michael dropped into the nearest chair and held his head in his hands. Rage pounded behind his eyes, eyes that Alexandra Keller had reopened with her bright heart as much as her skilled hands. "Is it as I remember? Did I take her?"

"Yes." Phillipe rubbed his temple. "When I came back, you were deep in thrall, and the doctor was..." He shook his head.

Alexandra. Now that he could actually see her face, it would remain only in his memories. Guilt became a raptor, tearing at him with hot, angry claws. "What did you do with the body?"

"She is not dead." Phillipe took a step back. "Not yet."

Michael came out of the delicately carved chair so violently that the scrolled armrest snapped off. "What did you say?"

"She lives." His seneschal produced a fax.

The report, faxed from Chicago by the head of the jardin who had first brought Dr. Alexandra Keller to his attention was succinct but complete. The doctor had been found by the authorities-found alive-in a restroom at O'Hare Airport. She had been transported to a local hospital, where she was admitted to intensive care. Her condition was still listed as serious.

Michael read it three times, but shock made him unable to calculate the time lapse. "This came in today?" His seneschal nodded. "How long have I been in thrall?"

"The operation left you weak, and we thought it necessary-"

"How long?" Michael shouted.

Phillipe ducked his head. "Five days, Master."

Five days. Almost the same amount of time in which G.o.d made the world.

The report crumpled in his fist, and fell in a loose ball to bounce on the floor. "She was dead when she left the dreams. She was not breathing."

"I, too, thought this." His seneschal looked sick. "I had the men take her back to Chicago. I told them to leave her body where it could be found. I thought-for her family's sake. She has a brother, a lover-"

Michael backhanded Phillipe, knocking him into the wall. It was not enough, but he would not allow himself to beat his seneschal unconscious. Instead, he walked through the house and out to his trysting garden. The sun was setting, and the last of its rays delicately gilded hundreds of blooming white roses. He found one of the little wrought iron benches and sat down, staring at nothing as his mind tried to grasp what had happened.

Michael had lived as one of the Darkyn since his human death in the fourteenth century. Human blood was their only nourishment, but over time he and his kind had learned that they did not have to kill. Taking small amounts of blood allowed them to survive, and held off the madness of thrall and the mind-destroying rapture it induced in their victims. It also preserved the lives of the humans upon whom they fed, for one had to drain a body of all its blood to satisfy thrall.

"She should have died five days ago," he told Phillipe, who had followed him out. "I took her. I gave her the rapture and I took her." He could still taste her. "Or was it all an illusion?"

"No, Master."

If his attack had not destroyed her body, then the rapture would erase her mind. He looked at his seneschal, who was wiping the last traces of blood from his nose. "I should not have struck you. Forgive me."

"It is nothing." And it was. Like him, Phillipe healed instantly.

"I don't understand." He regarded his roses, and realized he would be able to paint again. Alexandra had not only restored his vision; she had given him back his hands, his art. "How can she still be alive?"

"I do not know, Master."

A terrible fear rose inside him. If Alexandra survived exposure to Darkyn blood, then she was the first human being in centuries to do so. Whatever had saved her would turn her into a priceless commodity, unless he could lay claim to her first. "Who else knows?"

"Your tresora."

"Say nothing of this to anyone." He rose from the bench. "Bring eliane back to the mansion at once, and watch her." As he strode into the house, he came to a mirror and stopped to look at himself. His nose was longer, and his jaw more defined, but his face exactly matched that of his portrait. She had given him back everything. "Make travel arrangements for me to fly to Chicago at once."

"Master, you cannot go to Chicago."

"I have no choice. It was my blood. Alexandra is my sygkenis." He turned to glare at his seneschal. "I have to get to her before she makes a full change."

Phillipe frowned. "Why?"

His seneschal had never turned a human into a monster, but Michael had. "Because she is still human enough to kill."

John blinked. Either he was having an auditory hallucination, or His Grace the archbishop of Chicago had just told him that his order had been created to protect the Catholic church against the ancient and ongoing threat of vampires.

I'm hallucinating. "Forgive me, Your Grace, did you say the maledicti are-"

"Vampires," Hightower repeated, his expression patient. "Demonic, eternally d.a.m.ned souls who rise from the dead to feed off the blood of the living. My order has hunted and destroyed them since the fifteenth century."