"I'll only be a minute-"

"Get out, idiot, or I call the police."

No sound came except the rasp of the old man's breath, and then the light, soft footsteps that crossed the chapel floor and outside onto the grounds.

She was leaving.

The chains binding Gabriel rattled as his muscles went lax. The sound of the motorcycle engine barely registered. That he had come so close to escape did not dismay him as much as the woman's voice did.It was not madness or delusion.

He now knew the shape of her mouth, the blond-white gleam of the tousled hair that framed her soft cheeks, the depth of the tiny dent in the center of her chin. That if she stood before him, the top of her bright head would barely reach the top of his shoulder. He saw without seeing her spare, boyish frame, the hollows of her throat, the scars across the knuckles of her roughened, blunt-nailed hands. He did not have to look into her eyes to know they were bluer than a midsummer sky, or that her eyelashes and eyebrows were four shades darker than her hair.

He knew all of these things because he knew her, had known her these many months, had taken solace from the curve of her lips, the brightness of her eyes, the sound of that voice. The same voice that had called to him too many times for him to be mistaken about this.

His maiden was not a dream.

Chapter 4.

As Gabriel encountered the reality of his dreams, another outcast endured what was becoming his personal nightmare.

The one person John Keller loved most in the world, his sister, Alexandra, was in terrible danger. To save her, he had to trust creatures he had been told were soulless demons intent on destroying humanity. The soulless demons, who had until a short time ago considered him one of their enemies, had reluctantly allowed him into the ranks. In a few hours they were all jumping on a plane together and going to Ireland to fight the Demon King and rescue his sister.

As plans went, this one had total disaster written all over it.

John knew the Kyn felt suspicious of him, but he saw no sign of it. Since coming to Orlando, he had been treated courteously, even indulgently. He had also been kept out of discussions about his sister and the plans being made to retrieve her from the Darkyn's high lord. Being treated as an uninvited, unwanted guest didn't bother him, but not knowing what was happening to his sister was quietly driving him out of his mind.

"You are Alexandra's brother."

The scent of camellias, not the voice, alerted John to the fact that he was no longer alone. He turned away from the charming Monet he had been studying and faced the short, slim, fair-haired man standing behind him.

"John Keller." He hadn't heard the man come into the room, but as silently as the Kyn could move, he never would. This one looked and sounded familiar, although it took him a moment to place him. "We met in Chicago, didn't we?"

"We did. I am Suzerain Valentin Jaus." The vampire did not offer to shake hands as a human would, but when he removed his coat John saw that he had trouble using his right arm. "I was very sorry to hear about Alexandra's abduction. Has there been any word of her?"

"Not that I've been told." Not that anyone intended to tell him anything. He recalled that Alex had liked this particular vampire- she and Michael had stayed in his enormous mansion as guests-and Alex had surgically reattached his arm after it had been severed during a duel. While the Kyn healed spontaneously, it appeared even they had limits. "Are you going to Ireland with us?"

"I would be of little use." Jaus touched his stiff right arm. "I am to stay behind and protect the seigneur's interests until he returns.

You should consider doing the same."

That would make Cyprien happy, but John wasn't interested in placating Alexandra's boyfriend. "She's my sister. I'm going."

"You are human. You cannot physically prevail over even one of us, and hundreds of Kyn guard Richard's castle. You do not strike me as suicidal." Jaus removed his sungla.s.ses and tossed his coat over the back of a chair before he approached him.

"I don't have to be immortal to be useful." He hoped.

"Your motives puzzle me as well. What can you hope to accomplish with this... how do you think of it?" Jaus c.o.c.ked his head.

"A gesture of brotherly concern, perhaps?"

John turned his back on the man and looked at the painting again. "It's none of your business."

"I hold your sister in high regard, as well as friendship, so I must disagree." The suzerain came to stand beside him. "You are a Catholic priest, a member of the Brethren. You showed little interest in Alexandra's welfare when she asked for your help in Chicago. Now, inexplicably, you are here and you wish to die for her. Yet you are the same man. Explain this to me, please."

He was the same fool the Brethren had used to get to her. "I'm not a priest anymore, and I never belonged to the order. They used me only to get to Alexandra and Cyprien."

"As you say." The vampire's striking, pale blue eyes shifted. "Monet was a genius at depicting water and light, I think. I have one of his paintings of the Seine in my home." Jaus reached out suddenly and put a hand on the back of John's neck, and the scent of camellias became heavy. "Now you will tell me the truth, priest. Why do you wish to go to Ireland with the seigneur?"

"To save her." John didn't want to say that, but something forced the words out of him. "To explain everything that I didn't. To stop the killing."

Jaus's voice became silky. "What will you do on behalf of the Brethren while you are there?"

"Nothing. They're bigger monsters than the Kyn." That the vampire was using the strange power of the Kyn to force him to speak the truth didn't bother John, only that he felt he had to do so. "I won't let them use me anymore."

"Will you betray Cyprien to save yourself?"

"No one can save me." John jerked out of Jaus's reach and stared at him. "Just ask next time. I don't lie."

"You must not be human, then." Jaus studied John's face as the door to the study opened and Cyprien came in. "He has not deceived you, Michael. He does care deeply for Alexandra, more so than perhaps even she knows. If he is acquiring a tolerance to l'attrait, he may provide some reasonable a.s.sistance to you."

"Thank you, Valentin. Byrne has acquired a new breeding stallion for his mares and wishes someone to admire his gift for choosing superb animals. Perhaps you would care to indulge his ego?" Cyprien waited until Jaus had left the study before speaking to John. "Humans cannot lie to Jaus. I had to be sure of you."

Anger that Cyprien doubted him, and shame that he had every reason to, warred inside John. "I know what you're thinking."

Cyprien's eyebrow arched. "I genuinely doubt that."

"I should have taken better care of my sister, but that's the past and I can't change it." No matter how much he wanted to. "I'm not going to walk away from her now. So if you want me out, you'll have to lock me up or kill me."

"These things I could do. Or I could exercise my own talent, and make you forget that you ever had a sister." Cyprien lit a cigarette and watched him through the smoke. "Many times I have been tempted to erase her from your mind, and you from hers.""I can't stop you." John spread his hands. "If you're that much afraid of me, go ahead. Do it."

"However much I wish you were not," Cyprien said, "you are most definitely her brother." His mouth became a bitter line. "I have made promises as well, Father Keller."

"I'm not a priest anymore. It's John." He dropped his hands. "I didn't come here to fight with you, or to be humored. I don't have any psychic tricks or immortal att.i.tude. I just want to get my sister home safely."

"It will not be that simple." The vampire went to his desk and removed a file. "As Val said, Dundellan is a fortress. Richard has spent decades securing it and hand-picking the Kyn who make up his garrison. They were all chosen for the strength of their talents as well as their battle experience."

"We could ask him to give her back," John said. "Negotiate with him."

"He has everything he wants." Cyprien rubbed the back of his neck with an irritable gesture. "Richard will never surrender Alexandra, not now that she is under his complete control. She is too valuable to him."

"Because he thinks she can cure him?" That got Cyprien's attention. "I do speak French, and I've overheard enough bits and pieces of your conversations to get that much. He didn't have to kidnap her. You know as well as I do that Alexandra would have helped him for nothing."

"Richard needs more Kyn to battle the Brethren, but had no hope of such until Alexandra became involved with me. Yes, she may cure his own condition, but it is not what she can do as much as what she is. He now knows that her blood changed Lucan's woman from human to Kyn." He met John's gaze. "Alexandra is the key to our future, to our very survival as a species. I believe the high lord will do anything to keep her."

"That's why you'll do whatever it takes to get her out of there." Cyprien nodded, and John relaxed a little. "I can help. You'll need a human to do some things for you, especially during the day. I don't know how else I can help, but I can and I will.

Anything you say. Use me."

The two words hung between them for a moment before Cyprien checked his watch. "I must go and make the final arrangements." He picked up the file and held it out to him. "These are the floor plans for Dundellan Castle. Study them while we are on the plane; you will need to know the layout."

Before John could reply, a Kyn dressed as a teenage boy came into the room. Jamys Durand glanced at Cyprien but came to John. His expression and the hand he held out were only too familiar to John. Jamys could communicate only by using his Kyn talent to speak through humans, so John had been acting as his unofficial interpreter.

"Jamys has something to tell you before we leave." John braced himself for the mute vampire's touch, and the eerie sensation of hearing him inside his mind.

Before you leave for Ireland, I must tell the seigneur about the cell in Dublin. Although he couldn't make a sound, Jamys's telepathic voice resonated with depth and feeling inside John. I think the high lord had an informant among the interrogators. One of them left the cell only an hour or so before Lucan came and freed us.

Sweat trickled down John's face as he repeated the message to Michael. Although Jamys's telepathic voice didn't cause pain, it usually rendered the humans in contact with it unconscious after only a few minutes.

"You'd better make this quick," John told the youthful-looking vampire. "I already feel light-headed."

Through John, Jamys told Cyprien about a Brethren interrogator named Orson Leary, who had been acting strangely just before Richard's former chief a.s.sa.s.sin had arrived to free the Durands.

"If Leary is the high lord's informant, he may have access to Dundellan that we don't," John said. "Jamys thinks we should talk to him, learn what his connection to Richard is and how much he knows." His vision doubled, and he stepped out of reach, abruptly breaking contact. To Jamys, he said, "Sorry. I'm ready to pa.s.s out."

Cyprien turned to his computer and went to work. After a minute, he nodded. "Orson Leary is in London. We can collect him before we go to Ireland."

"Collect?" John knew better. "You mean abduct."

"I do not play games with humans," Cyprien told him. "If this man can help us gain access to Dundellan, we will take him to Ireland with us."

"I doubt he'll be willing." John resented the easy way the Kyn took and used human beings for their own purposes. Their smug indifference to anything but their own interests might become as destructive as the Brethren's zealous, irrational persecution. "But that doesn't matter, does it?"

"Nothing matters to me but Alexandra." Cyprien stood. "Leary is attained interrogator; he will recognize Kyn. I will need you to make the initial contact and bring him to me." When he saw John's expression, his eyes narrowed. "You said that you wished to help, and that you would do anything for your sister. Have you changed your mind again?"

He could change his mind; that was what Cyprien was saying without saying. For a moment John was tempted. He had seen, firsthand, how the Kyn fought their enemies. Heads would, literally, roll. Leary's might be the first.

John knew how the Kyn had suffered at the hands of the Brethren, and how much Leary likely deserved an unpleasant, painful death. But he believed, just as Alexandra did, that violence wasn't the answer.

The killing had to stop, and these two old enemies had to find some measure of peace. With a Kyn sister and a Brethren mentor, John might be the only one who could make that happen.

"As long as you promise not to hurt Leary," John said slowly, extending his hand, "I'll do it."

"I vow I will not hurt the priest." Michael shook hands with him. "Go up to the garage and wait there; Phillipe will bring the car around shortly." He turned to Jamys. "I must speak with your father before we depart. Come."

John left the study and climbed the stairs to the upper public level of Knight's Realm, where the last show had finished. He merged into the crowd of weary but happy tourists heading for the parking garage.

As he entered the first level of the garage, he smelled peppermint. It grew stronger as a red-haired girl in a party dress b.u.mped into him and hurried past. She slowed from a run to a walk, glanced back, and gave him a contrite smile. "Excuse me, mister."

John rubbed his hand-her sharp little nails had stabbed into the back of it-but he smiled back. "It's okay." Night made the garage seem darker than he remembered, and he squinted, trying to spot Cyprien's limo.

Beneath his feet, the ground tilted slightly.

A white sedan came to an abrupt stop in front of John, and a tall, thick-bodied man in a dark suit climbed out. He walked toward John. "Are you feeling all right, Father?" he asked, some sort of accent blurring the words.

"No." John saw a miniature of himself reflected in the man's mirrored sungla.s.ses, and stopped between two cars. As the thick scent of cloves filled his head and the ground began to roll in concrete waves, he reached out blindly and braced himself.

Something dripped from the end of his nose-sweat?-and his lungs burned. The man had called him "Father," but John was wearing street clothes. "How did you... ?"

The girl joined her father and grinned up at John. A trickle of blood stained the tip of her index finger, which looked like it ended in a silver claw. The scent of peppermint became smothering. "Hey, daddykins. Want to go for a ride?"Nick pulled on her helmet and jerked the chinstrap tight. Dark yellow flecks of petals from the marigolds taking over the front lawns of Chateau St. Valereye speckled the toes of her boot. She didn't stop to look back at the jagged walls of the manor house, or the corner occupied by the chapel, which seemed to have escaped the ravages of time and neglect.

She could feel the old man watching her from the filmy windows of the caretaker's cottage. He was making sure she was leaving, and if she came back, she had no doubt he would make good on his threat and call the police.

Why did he lie to me?

Whoever he was, he acted as if he owned the place. He might just be that, the last of an old French family, living out his golden years watching the old chateau slowly decay into a pile of rubble. It was already halfway there, and definitely uninhabitable.

But the chapel was a different story.

Nick had gotten the chance to do a quick if not too thorough survey of the interior. Unlike the main house, the chapel had been built almost entirely from brick and stone. Whatever had long ago burned the wooden structures of the chateau had only dusted the inside of the church with a careless, blackened brush.

The altar had been dismantled, but no one had bothered to take out the pews and chop them up for firewood. They faced the empty s.p.a.ce behind the railing at the front of the chapel; as if filled with a ghost parish worshiping a G.o.d who had deserted them.

Nick didn't believe in ghosts, and that wasn't the vibe she was getting from the place anyway.

The chapel had not served its purpose in decades, maybe centuries, but the structure was solid. Only one of the roof's ornamental rafters had come down, and that had been pulled down deliberately, as if to make it appear that the roof was unsound.

As authentic as it looked, Nick knew a setup job when she saw one.

She put her bike into gear and rode six b.u.mpy miles over dirt before hitting the paved road that led back to the village. As she went, she scanned the pastoral hills surrounding the chateau. Two farmhouses, both appearing as if they'd been abandoned at the turn of the century. No animals, no squatters, not so much as a single squab hunter or farmer with his pig rooting around the tree trunks for truffles. The chateau's only neighbors were trees, thickets of woody brash, and the fields and pastures they were slowly reclaiming.

No one came out here, either. The dirt road had been wind-worn smooth of ruts. She didn't pa.s.s a single car, bike, or truck until she had crossed the outer boundary of the village, and melded into the light traffic of delivery boys on Vespas, lorry drivers hauling produce and meat in from the south, and the occasional wandering tourist in a rental car.

The old man had lied to her to get her off the property, and to scare her enough to keep her off, but why? Why guard a decrepit pile of worthless rock like St. Valereye so jealously if no one ever went there, and there was nothing worth stealing?

She knew something was there. She could feel it again, the same way she did every time just before she found something old that had been lost. Was that who he was, the Green Man in her dreams? Was he waiting, as the Golden Madonna waited, for Nick to find him?

So I dreamed of the place. It doesn't make him real. He's just wishful thinking.

Nick didn't have time to overa.n.a.lyze the situation. She had to know what was going on at the chateau, and she'd found nothing about it on the Internet. That meant gathering some information from the locals. She decided to start at the inn where she had taken a room for the week.

Jean Laguerre, a taciturn man in his mid-thirties, spent the day stationed behind a bar that had been converted to serve as his reception desk. When Nick approached the innkeeper, she saw that he was sorting through receipts and adding up figures.

Nick was grateful he spoke flawless English. She usually embarra.s.sed herself trying to speak French to the natives. "Excuse me, M. Laguerre, but may I ask you something?"

"Of course." He scanned a yellow delivery slip while his fingers tapped the keys of an old adding machine.

"Is your wife here?" Nick kept her tone casual. "I'd like to ask her about one of the old houses around town."

"Adelie is in the kitchen." He nodded toward the back of the inn. "If you go in there, she will ask you to sample her fish stock. It tastes like dishwater and smells worse."

"Whoa."