"... you'll see that..."

Sweet girl. Claws sinking into pale flesh. So sweet.

Alex pressed a hand to her temple. "Is your husband hanging around here somewhere?"

"I cannot say. You must be thirsty after all this talk." Elizabeth set aside her needlework and clapped her hands.

Like magic, one of the wall panels opened into the room, and two Kyn males appeared. Both wore old-fashioned gold-and- white garments that reminded Alex of some Merchant Ivory films she'd seen. Between them they held a human male dressed in a dark suit and a full-face black mask. Although Alex couldn't see his face, the human's dark eyes had the same empty, unfocused cast to them as those of the other zombies in the castle.

"You've got your own secret pa.s.sage?" Alex asked Elizabeth.

"It amuses my husband to move about undetected. He has had them built on nearly every floor." She rose and shook out her skirts. "I find them convenient for discreet deliveries."

The human male seemed weirdly familiar to Alex, but he wasn't the one she'd seen in the white robe during the killing vision she'd had in the hall. "What's with the mask?"

"Another amus.e.m.e.nt. Would you care to feed first?" Elizabeth asked, as if offering Alex a cup of tea."I'm not thirsty, thanks."

Elizabeth dismissed the Kyn males and went to the human. The scent of lilies almost choked Alex, but the zombie-eyed man didn't move from his spot. Richard's wife embraced him, pulling his head down to hers.

"The faithful have such hot blood." Elizabeth sank her fangs into his neck and pushed her hand into the front of his trousers.

Alex saw awareness flicker through the dark eyes. "Hey. He knows what you're doing."

Richard's wife lifted her mouth from her victim. "I want him to feel it." She struck a second time.

The man made a sound, and pain and disgust clouded his eyes.

Oh, no. Alex grabbed the laces at the back of Elizabeth's gown and used them to jerk her away. "Get off him."

"Of course." Richard's wife took a white handkerchief from her sleeve and daintily patted her lips. "It has been some time since you've fed directly from a human, has it not?"

"I don't feed from humans." Alex checked the four puncture wounds, none of which had penetrated any major vessel, and then carefully removed the mask. "Johnny?" She tore away the strip of yellow silk gagging her brother. "John, it's all right."

Her brother stared over her head and said nothing.

Alex turned on Elizabeth. "What did you do to him?"

"It is Stefan's talent, not mine. The dear boy cannot do anything but obey me, but he will feel every sensation." Elizabeth smiled, showing b.l.o.o.d.y teeth. "We will share him."

"Thanks," Alex said, "but I don't eat family members, and you've had enough."

"We are your family now, Alexandra. Two Kyn feeding at once prevents thrall. We can still enjoy him in other ways." She reached out and ran a finger down between Alex's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "Don't you want to see me riding his c.o.c.k while you bespell him?"

"Cheat on Richard with someone else." Alex grabbed her wrist and bent it until the joints cracked. "You're not touching my brother again."

"I give the order, and your brother will die." Elizabeth peered at her. "You're not afraid."

"Of you? Sorry, no." She caught another flash of the killing vision. "So this is your thing. Who was the kid in the white robe, Liz?

Who were the people you butchered in front of him?"

Elizabeth's gory smile faltered. "You cannot read my thoughts."

"Oddly enough, it's my talent. Reading the minds of killers." Alex turned to John, and saw the alarm in his eyes. "You're going to get my brother out of here."

"I certainly shall not."

Alex knew the Kyn had to feed, and preferred to take blood straight from the source, but this was too perverted for words. "If you don't, I'll go to Richard and tell him everything."

"Be my guest." Elizabeth dropped her soiled handkerchief on the floor. "I've done this hundreds of times, and Richard has never cared. He's even had me torture some of his Brethren prisoners. You see, Doctor, the fear and pain they feel as I feed comes from my talent."Alex drove her fist into Elizabeth's belly, knocking her back against one of the amber panels. She went after her to punch her again, but this time someone caught her from behind.

"Enough." eliane, with a tranquilizer gun in one hand. "I apologize for the intrusion, my lady. Guard. The mistress is done with the human."

Stefan came in and led John out of the room.

When Alex tried to wrench free, eliane pressed the muzzle of the gun into her side. "I will see to it that the doctor does not disturb you again."

"Saved by my husband's wh.o.r.e." Elizabeth pushed away from the amber panel and fussed with her skirts.

"You'd better keep your teeth out of my brother," Alex warned. "Or I'll make it my purpose in life to ruin that pretty face of yours."

"Will you." Elizabeth's hand shot out and she caught Alex's face in a bruising grip. She leaned in, almost kissing her mouth before she added in a whisper, "The one thing you had better not do, Doctor, is cure my husband. If you do, I will kill your brother, and make you watch."

The dark shifted around Nick, becoming less empty as the shadows swelled. Whatever was happening, she wasn't meant to witness it. Aside from her own body she couldn't see or hear a blessed thing.

Dreaming.

Her other senses told her that gra.s.s, cool and crackling, flattened under her steps, and gardenia and roses bloomed nearby. Her skin lit up with nerves, absorbing textures from all the unseen things she brushed against: the slick gloss of leaves, the b.u.mpy roughness of bark, the silken glide of petals.

Being Helen Keller in the nightlands seemed about as smart as playing Marco Polo with razor blades, so Nick stopped walking.

"I'm not moving again until someone turns on the lights."

Someone did.

Nick saw that she was standing on the edge of a small alpine meadow, a pool of gra.s.s framed by endless acres of pine and ringed by towering mountains. Millions of dandelions studded the clearing's green carpet and filled the air with the wish fluff of their seeds.

Despite the peace and serenity around her, she felt something coming, and braced herself.

Nothing touched her but cool breeze and floating dandelion seed. She was about to sit down in the gra.s.s and wait for what had better show up, and soon, when the Green Man stepped into sight, twenty feet away from her on the other side of the meadow.

He wore Father Claudio's bloodstained trousers, and his blind eyes glittered with metallic green light.

Nick watched him. He seemed to return the inspection. "Gabriel?"

Gabriel is lost.

He began walking toward her, and with every step the dandelions within two feet of him began to droop and wither. The air within the dream grew frosty.

"I found you, remember?" Nick could see her breath puffing out as she spoke. "We got away from them."Gabriel will never be free. Gabriel died in that cellar.

The words, not the cold, made her shiver. "Who are you, then?"

He halted just out of reach. The remnant of what he was. A shred of soul. I belong to the many now.

"The many what?"

They are all around you, wherever you go. The Green Man moved then, too sudden and speedy for Nick to avoid, and knocked her flat on her back. He lay full-length on top of her. Yet you never see them.

"You're the one who's blind." She wanted to go back to the forest, where he had done nicer things to her. Why couldn't she have a nightmare about having s.e.x with Gabriel while he subjected her to the horrors of continuous o.r.g.a.s.ms?

I see everything. He pinned her wrists to the gra.s.s, his hands slipping a little on her wet flesh.

Suddenly they were both completely, comprehensively soaked: their clothes, their skin, even their hair-his dripped beads of sweat or water all around her face. It came from what appeared to be a stream running across the sky and pouring over the entire meadow simultaneously.

"You're hurting me," she told him, resisting a terrible urge to dig her fingernails into his wrists. Instead she blinked the water out of her eyes, trying not to fight. Even like this, she didn't want to hurt him. He needed love-her love-and here she could give him what she couldn't in the waking world.

I do not wish that. He looked around, puzzled now, as if he wasn't sure where they were. Where are the mourning hens?

Now he was worried about depressed chickens. "I don't know."

The rain stopped, and the air around them turned frigid. The glittery green glow of his irises expanded, making his pupils shrink to mere slits. The rain on his skin turned in tiny scrolls of frost, elongated bindi bejeweling the solid-emerald flesh. His body felt too big, too hard on top of hers, but Nick refused to struggle.

Do you not want me now? he murmured, watching her face.

The cold didn't seem to affect Nick; she felt as if on fire, so hot that her own skin and clothes went from saturated to flash-dried.

"Everyone always wants the coolest guy around, don't they?" She watched a veil of ice crystals form over his hair while wisps of steam rose from around her own head. "I guess that would be you."

He bent his head, making tiny chips of ice like confetti pelt her. Open your mouth.

"What f-"

His thinner, harder lips used hers like cushions, sinking into them, pushing them apart. Despite the frost coating his skin, his kiss felt warm instead of cold, masculine, demanding. Hard-mouthed men had always turned Nick on. If that weren't bad enough, the slow, slick trespa.s.s of his tongue about made her come right there. Then they were tasting and sucking and biting, lost in it, as explosive as ice to fire, and everything she'd felt in the forest paled like a maiden aunt, packed its overnight bag and went home whimpering.

He lifted his lips from hers. Do you love me, or him?

"I'm not in love with anyone." Jesus Christ, yes, she was, but until this moment it had been mixed up with wanting and s.e.x and disbelief and being afraid for him. Why did they have to meet like this, in this unreal place, to talk about their feelings? Was he even the same guy who was sleeping next to her? "Why do you care?"He would love you if I could, Nicola.

"We'll work with what we've got." Something moved under her, biting into her a.s.s. Literally-she could feel tiny teeth piercing her jeans.

I'll never have enough. Neither will you.

"Optimist. d.a.m.n it." She rolled over, forcing him onto his back, and reached between her legs to pry something small, green, and snapping from the seat of her pants. She held it up between them and frowned. "A dandelion? With thorns?" She yelped as it wriggled, bending over to bite the side of her hand and draw blood. "Ouch." Disgusted, she flung it away.

Two green hands grabbed her hips. Stay where you are.

She turned her head and saw that the dandelions near her face were uprooting themselves, their fluffy heads parting and flashing pointy little fangs.

So, this was bad news. "I'd better call this a night."

You cannot leave without finishing this.

"I don't want to leave you, but the weeds look hungry." Nick tried, but for once she couldn't force herself awake. "s.h.i.t." She redoubled her focus, ordering her body to rouse, but remained locked in the nightmare. "Listen, we're in trouble. You're sleeping beside me. See if you can wake up."

Gabriel sleeps beside you. He turned his head slowly, a.s.sessing the area around them. I exist only here, with you.

"I can't catch a break, can I?" She noted that every single dandelion in the meadow had come to life and was going feral. One dandelion bite on the a.s.s wasn't fun. One hundred thousand of them... "Give me another option."

I have none to give. You control these nightlands. You have to burn them.

"I have to burn them." And here she'd forgotten to pack a flamethrower. "With what?"

The Green Man's pine-needle hair whisked across her cheek. It has no name. As Nick stared at him, he seized her hand in his.

What you feel when we touch.

Oh, that heat. The fanged dandelions were starting to break free of the earth, and they were all turning toward them. "How?"

Feel it, hold it, use it. He pushed her hands flat against the ground. He held her wrists so she couldn't lift her hands away.

Quickly.

Nick didn't like the feeling of the gra.s.s under her palms, or the faint squirming sensation that she suspected came from the dandelions squashed under her.

The Green Man's grip tightened past painful, grinding the bones under it. Burn them now or the nightlands will rip us apart.

Understanding precisely what he wanted her to do never happened. Something instead bit Nick's forearm. She dug her fingers into the dirt and felt something rise inside her. It spread, a bad fever, an outrageous climax, both and neither. Whatever it was, it slammed through her arms and shot out of her hands.

Black fire erupted all around, a sweeping dark flash of a circle that blasted outward, reducing every feral dandelion in its path to a little pile of dark ash. The circle of fire kept expanding until the entire clearing had turned into smoldering soot, and then it seemed to blow itself out at the tree line.As soon as the Green Man released Nick's sore wrists, she rolled away, curled over, and got to her feet.

"What's going to happen to Gabriel?" she asked the Green Man.

He didn't stand as much as he floated to his feet. Gabriel is dead.

"He's sleeping beside me at the inn," Nick argued. "I can feel him breathing. You're part of him. If you could get back together- be one man instead of two..."

The Green Man shook his head. The body lives. The soul dies.

More dream riddles. "Could you for once talk in a way that I can actually understand?"

Ask Gabriel what he dreams. The Green Man turned transparent. Ask what he feeds the many. It is what keeps us apart.

Nick came awake with a gasp and a lunge, and got out of bed. As in the dream, she was soaked from head to toe, although with a clammy sweat instead of sky-bound stream water. She looked back and saw Gabriel's scarred torso, and the tangle of his hair on the pillow. He had turned away from a shaft of light that had filtered through a gap in the window curtains.

Nick decided against waking him, and quietly dressed before getting on her laptop. Using her Midi-Pyrenes maps, she planned out her route to Gabriel's estate in Toulouse. Even with the pit stop, if they left just before sunset and took some shortcuts, she'd get him home by midnight.

Leaving him there with his servant seemed a little cold, but she didn't have to be a stranger. If his place was secure enough, she might ask him to let her drop in now and then. She didn't have many safe places to stay in France. It was probably a very cool house. A lot of wealthy people with extensive properties lived in or near Toulouse.