Beneath the blood, her scratches disappeared.

"f.u.c.k." She paused long enough to put on her leather gloves before she wrenched at the brick around the edges of the hole, pushing it away and widening the s.p.a.ce. A strange urgency hammered inside her head, as if an invisible alarm clock had gone off on the other side of the wall. I have to get him the h.e.l.l out of here before they come for both of us.

The hole was finally large enough for Nick to squeeze through. "Here we go." She poked her head and then her shoulders inside.

The evergreen scent on the other side of the wall didn't cover the other, awful smell-as if someone had emptied a couple of trash cans in the hidden room-but she'd smelled worse. She climbed in, groping for a handhold, but her fingers found nothing but floor. More brick collapsed under her weight, and she fell on her face. Something long and hard bruised her thigh.

Flashlight. She pulled it out and switched it on.

The tiny room still held the empty racks where some long-dead aristocrat had kept his best bottles of wine and brandy. From all the tangled, dusty cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, it appeared as if no one had entered the s.p.a.ce for years. Nick stood up and swept the flashlight slowly around her. A rickety-looking table and two scarred old chairs waited empty in front of a dead fireplace overflowing with ancient ash.

No sign of life, however. "Where are you?"

Chains rattled behind her.

She turned around and pointed the flashlight toward the sound, and saw him. The light wavered before she controlled her hand.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

They'd crucified this one.

Nick saw she was partially wrong-chains had been wrapped around his neck, arms, waist, and legs-but two huge copper bolts had been hammered through his wrists.

He'd worked at one, apparently, and could move it enough to rattle the chains around that arm. A black rag had been tied over his eyes, and a wide band of welded copper covered the lower half of his face. Dark green tattoos mottled his naked body, along with dried blood, open wounds, and filth.

Despite his sad condition, he still looked beautiful, the way they all did. This one resembled a green G.o.d, carved from dark jade.

Nailed to a cross.

The holy freaks had done this to him. Nick had never seen one this bad, but the deliberate, mocking crucifixion had the same feel as the others she had found. The question was, why? If they wanted them dead, why not just kill them? Why the torture and humiliation?

The prisoner turned his head slightly and moved his hand, disturbing the chains again.

Nick lowered the flashlight as she walked to him. "Sorry." She didn't know why she was apologizing. None of this was her doing, and if she had an ounce of brains left she'd run out of here before the old man found her s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with this thing. Lucky for this one she was an idiot. "How do I get you off this without tearing you to shreds?"

The chains rattled a third time as he gestured toward the wall beside him.

Nick reached out through the hole and groped until she grabbed her bag and pulled it inside. Once she had retrieved her bolt cutters, she looked around the crude wooden cross. The chains had been threaded through rusted iron rings driven into the wall around him. She started there, cutting the rings open and tugging the loops of chain away. The weighty copper links felt icy and sticky, and wherever they had touched him, they left dark impressions of their links on his skin.

This close Nick could smell nothing else but the evergreen scent he radiated. How long had he been sealed in this room?

Weeks? Months? His matted brown hair shifted and his head moved back, as if he were trying to see under the edge of his blindfold.

"Want to have a look at me?" She stopped cutting long enough to remove the black rag from his eyes. His closed eyelids didn't open, and he sagged a little. "I'm Nick," she told him as she went back to work on the chains. "And you're a mess."

She freed his neck and arms, and examined the copper band gagging him. It had been welded together at the ends, but it was thin, and her tin snips cut through it nicely. The raw skin under it began to heal at once, and she flung the copper to the floor in disgust.

"I've got to pry these bolts out." His mouth matched the perfection of his body; she saw that right away. Were any of these things ever ugly, or even a little plain? "It's going to hurt, maybe as much as when they went in."

Nick heard a jerking, tearing sound.

"Ce n'est pas necessaire." The voice sounded as dry and shredded as the feel of the trembling hand that pushed her back. "I can do the rest. Leave me, girl."

Like an animal in a trap, he'd ripped his wrists free of the bolts. Maybe that was all they were: gorgeous two-legged animals.

Not very grateful ones, either. "You want me to leave now! Before you thank me, and say good-bye, and tell me to have a wonderful life? Tell me, is that what Jesus would do?"

He leaned forward, his eyes still closed. "If you remain, and if I look upon you," he murmured, "I will kill us both."

He sounded like the genie that'd been kept too long in the bottle: enraged and wanting some payback. Of course, he needed blood, and she was the only source present. In his state he'd lose control and try to drain her dry.

"I'm not leaving until I cut through enough of these so that you can get out on your own." She went back to work on the chains.

Bugs found their way into the room and began flying at her head. Absently she swatted at them until she remembered all the bugs were upstairs in the chapel.

She hadn't left the cellar door open. How had they gotten down- Father Claudio was right there, his walking stick raised high, and then he clubbed her across the head with it. Nick couldn't avoid the blow, and in the explosion of pain that followed felt her scalp split and the heat of her own blood. She went down like a sack of stones.

The last things she heard and saw before the night took her were chains falling on the floor, and two bare, dirty, beautiful feet walking across the stone.

The last time Alexandra had walked into a private laboratory as expensively outfitted as the one Richard had installed in his dungeon, she had ended up operating on Michael Cyprien. Later, she had also been served up by eliane as Michael's his first postop meal.

Being reminded of what had taken her human life from her and changed her into a blood-dependent mutant made her want to do something slightly more intelligent this time around. Like set fire to the place.

But if she were going to get back home, she had to at least go through the motions.

"I'll need a bigger autoclave," Alex said as she walked down the row of new equipment. "Another clot timer for multiple specimens, and a coagulyzer."

Michael Cyprien. She needed Michael. Now.

She paused for a moment to cover her agitation by tapping some keys on an efficient-looking PC before moving on to the microscope. "Nice computer. Scope's okay for now, but we may have to upgrade to something more powerful."

Michael was powerful. Michael was what she needed.

Alex stopped and glared at a cheap import model of something she really needed. "Who picked out this centrifuge?"

"I did," eliane said, "It resembled the one you requested while you were in New Orleans."

"That was a great piece of equipment, top of the line. This? This is a piece of junk." She went over and opened up the supply cabinet to inspect the instruments, beakers, and vials inside. "I'm not seeing any syringes, scissors, pipettes, or biopsy needles here."

Or Michael.

The scent of cherry tobacco stung the air. "My tresora does not yet trust you with sharp objects." Richard's distinctive footsteps came up behind her. "Nor do I."

"How am I supposed to take blood and tissue samples from you? With my teeth? Don't answer that." Alex closed the cabinet and moved on to the portable X-ray machine, culture racks, and what she thought might be a genetic a.n.a.lyzer of some sort.

"This is going to take longer than I thought."

"Why?""I'm an American, used to working on American equipment. This stuff is all European. I'll need more operating manuals, especially on the electronics." She pointed to the a.n.a.lyzer console. "I'm not even sure how to turn that on." She also couldn't stop thinking about Cyprien, or the way her dermis seemed to want to divorce her muscle tissue.

Get it together, Alexandra.

"All you need will be provided for you." Richard turned and hobbled toward the door.

Nice work, Alex. Who knows how long it will take for him to get all the manuals? Why the h.e.l.l do you care how everything works? Not like you're going to use it. You're never going to get out of here.

Alex agreed with her common sense, but there was more to it than helping the monster who had kidnapped her. Richard's changeling blood might reveal something she hadn't yet found in studying other Kyn. Something that might cure the condition and allow her to take back her life.

f.u.c.k life. You need Michael.

"Hold your horses, high lord." She walked over to the exam table. "I can still do a physical."

Richard turned toward her, removing his mask as he did. Out of the corner of her eye, Alex saw eliane quickly look away, as if the sight of the high lord's distorted features repelled her.

The high lord's face was, Alex had to admit, pretty revolting. Black and silver hair stubble darkened the skin around his bulging eyes, lipless mouth, and over his flattened nose.

As bone structures went, his was a nightmare. His forehead was gone, as were his chin and the lower half of his cheekbones.

She probed and discovered that the bone hadn't been removed or crushed; it simply wasn't there anymore. Spiky bunches of white hair sprouted from his eyebrows, which had become a single, three-inch-wide strip of hair rolling across the grossly p.r.o.nounced brow ridge shading his eyes.

The features would have been bad enough on their own, but hearing Richard's human voice coming out of that mouth, and seeing the intelligence in those alien eyes, gave the impression of a man trapped inside the body of a beast-as if Richard had been swallowed alive.

Alex definitely preferred him when he was the man behind the mask. But after years of repairing some of the worst facial injuries human beings could endure, she'd acquired a lot of tolerance for the unnatural and repulsive, even as extreme as Richard's case was.

"Take off all your clothes and get on the table." She reached for a pair of gloves. When the high lord didn't move, she glanced at him. "What, you can't undress yourself? Want me to ring for your valet?"

"I can disrobe." As he unfastened his cloak, his eyelids dropped, hiding half of his almond-shaped, gold-green eyes with their slitted pupils. "Were you this abrupt and demanding with Cyprien?"

"Much worse. He had to wear earplugs." She circled around him, gesturing for the Frenchwoman. "Can you take down some notes, or will that violate your sacred oath of standing around doing nothing so you can look pressed and pretty?"

"I will a.s.sist." eliane sounded as aloof and uncaring as always, but her hands trembled when she took the chart that Alex handed to her, and her breathing sounded like someone about to have an acute asthma attack.

"Maybe you should send someone else in to help," Alex suggested, and got a nasty look in return. "Screw me. Got it."

Alex took Richard's clothing as he removed it and draped it over the back of a chair. It helped her conceal her own reaction to seeing the high lord's extreme physical mutations.The changeling condition had distorted his body even more so than his face and skull, curving his spine in three places and reversing the elbow and knee joints. His enlarged hands and feet were no longer recognizably human.

"Are you ready for this?" she asked once he stood naked. After he nodded, she said to eliane, "All right, Blondie, start writing.

Patient is Richard Tremayne, a mutated human male, approximately seven hundred years old. Step over here." She had him climb onto the scale and measured him. "Seventy-two inches tall, one hundred ninety-seven pounds. Is that close to what you were before this happened?"

"Yes."

"No loss of body ma.s.s," she said. "All right, hop up on the exam table and lie on your back."

Alex checked Richard's heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure, all of which were far below normal human limits but were slightly elevated for what she knew to be normal Kyn limits. He watched her without blinking.

"Patient presents what appears to be hypertrichosis," she said after having eliane note the vitals. "With the exception of the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, the entire body is covered with dense black hair. Face has been recently shaved." She took some measurements. "Hair ranges from one-half to eight inches in length on limbs and torso." She glanced down at him. "When did the abnormal hair growth begin?"

Richard looked up at the ceiling. "A long time ago."

"Need a year," Alex said as she picked up a light scope.

"Eighteen forty-nine."

She did the math in her head. "Hypertrichotic condition first manifested one hundred fifty-eight years ago." She moved some of his thick, curly mane to inspect his left ear, which sat high on his elongated skull and had acquired a distinct pointed profile. The human outer whorls and folds had disappeared altogether, and she could not see his eardrum. "What caused the condition?"

"The Brethren."

She remembered what Lucan had told her. You are what you eat. "I need more specifics. What did they do to you?"

"I cannot say." His gaze shifted away from her. "My memory of that time has become unreliable."

She didn't believe him, but it didn't really matter how he lied to her.

"Make a note of the memory loss on the chart, Blondie." Alex looked into his eyes with the scope and noted how the pupils did not react to the intense light. "Have there been any consistent symptoms since the hypertrichosis manifested?"

"I cannot feed on humans. My moods are sometimes uncertain." He closed his eyes. "I lose time."

Alex wondered if she could manage to do a brain scan on Richard before she escaped the castle. "Define olose' for me."

He sighed. "I go to sleep without wishing to. When I awake, it is often two or three hours later, and I am in a different place."

She tried to make sense of what he was telling her. "Do you mean you sleepwalk?"

"It does not always happen during the day," he said. "I never know when such spells will come upon me."

"Patient complains of having blackouts. Tell me if you feel any discomfort or pain." Alex palpated Richard's torso and discovered that the changeling condition had also lengthened and narrowed his rib cage. Unlike some of her former male patients, he did not become erect when she inspected his genitals. "Any changes down here? Other than the hair covering things?""I am larger than I was." He sounded slightly smug.

"Good for you." Alex found two rows of odd b.u.mps on either side of his shaft and tapped one. "Are these old or new?"

"New."

"How nice. Note some enlarged or infected follicles on the p.e.n.i.s. Any problems having s.e.x?"

Richard's upper lip split open as he bared teeth too long and pointed to be human. "None."

Alex glanced at eliane, who had stopped writing, and whose face had turned almost as white as her blouse.

Terrific. Aside from the danger to the Frenchwoman, now every time Alex saw her or Richard she'd imagine the two of them going at it. But something was wrong here, very wrong, as evidenced by the b.l.o.o.d.y spot eliane had gnawed into her bottom lip.

"That's it for the chart," Alex lied. "If you're not busy, Blondie, I'll need those supplies that aren't in the cabinet, and a better centrifuge."

"I will see to it, Doctor." The Frenchwoman all but ran from the lab.

"She is modest," Richard said as he sat up.

More like she was head over heels about him, Alex guessed. But Richard had been a changeling for a hundred fifty years plus; how could eliane have lost her heart to that face?

You began falling in love with Cyprien when he didn't even have a face.