By the counter, the man nodded soberly while the woman spoke, her voice rapid, hitching from time to time.

". . . the cops said no one was reported missing. They didn't even want to listen to me-" She turned her head a little, and he lost the sense of the words.

She'd changed clothes, Julian saw, no longer the caped vampiress but a plain woman in faded jeans and a forest green silk shirt.

No, not plain, he corrected. Her milky skin and midnight hair made her extraordinary. Her hands fluttered uncertainly as she spoke, the nails, still blood red, dancing patterns in the air. Her friend had died, Julian remembered suddenly. Her name had been Dina, and Nicholas had killed her.

He felt a soft p.r.i.c.k against his lower lip and closed his eyes as desire slid hot through his system. Desire for blood, and for other things. He could remember the last time he'd had a woman, but not how long ago it had been. She'd been another vampire, and it had gone as well as such things could go. To be truly satisfied, he needed a human woman. To be truly satisfied, he needed to take her blood afterwards. Or during.

His fangs slipped back where they belonged. Julian took a step forward, and suddenly the woman looked up. She stared at him, schooling her pale features to smooth expressionlessness.

"Julian," she said.

The man with her touched her arm. "You need me to get rid of him, Lorelei?"

Julian smiled at the thought. The slim man would be no match for him. But Julian approved of the fierce loyalty in the man's expression. He also approved, very much, of the woman's name.

"No, it's okay, Randy," said Lorelei. "This is Julian. He saved my life last night."

"Too bad he couldn't save Dina's," Randy said darkly.

"No. No, it wasn't his fault. There was nothing he could have done." 23 In spite of her defense, Lorelei still looked suspicious and wary as she turned to Julian. "How did you find me?"

Julian shrugged. "It doesn't matter."

Lorelei's eyes flashed. Blue, sapphire, striking in her pale face beneath the black hair. "Then why are you here?"

"I wanted to be sure you were all right." He paused. Lorelei regarded him from under a dark fringe of bangs. "Are you all right?"

"I suppose. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"Have dinner with me." The words surprised him. Perhaps they shouldn't have. He wasn't even certain why he'd sought her out in the first place.

Lorelei looked at Randy, then back at Julian. "Yeah, all right. I could use some free food." She pushed away from the counter and came to join him.

"Who said I was paying?"

Lorelei's mouth quirked into a smile. She hooked her arm through Julian's and let him lead her out of the boutique.

He was dangerous. Lorelei was certain of it. But for whatever reason, she felt safe walking down the sidewalk with him, her arm hooked through his. He was dangerous, but not to her.

She watched as he paused to light a cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame until it took. He drew a long drag and released a breath of strange-smelling smoke. He smiled at her then, a twinkle in those odd, almost-Asian eyes. She smiled back.

"Did I thank you for saving my life?" she said.

He offered his arm again and they continued up the sidewalk.

"I don't remember."

"Thank you."

He acknowledged it with a tilt of his head.

"So, Julian, what do you do that you have to sleep all day?"

"I work at night."

"Yeah, I caught that," Lorelei replied dryly.

"I work at a television station."

That piqued Lorelei's interest. "On air?" 24 "No. Very much behind the scenes. Somebody has to keep those late-night reruns rerunning."

"Which station?"

"One of the independents."

"Fascinating." She couldn't identify the smell of his cigarettes. Not quite tobacco, certainly not marijuana. Strange, spicy. And, she noticed, hand-rolled. An odd man, this Julian.

Odd and dangerous.

She followed him with complete confidence to a high-priced j.a.panese restaurant she'd always wanted to try. He ordered a monster tray of sashimi, and she indulged herself with sushi.

"This is wonderful," she said, thoroughly enjoying a spicy tuna roll.

"I'm glad you like it. I quite like this restaurant, myself."

Then his gaze darted about the room.

"What is it?"

"Nothing." His careful smile didn't convince her. "Nothing at all."

To Julian, the meal seemed to go on forever. He'd had every intention of treating Lorelei to a leisurely dinner, a walk in the dark, a few stolen touches and perhaps a kiss. But a smell had drifted to him across the restaurant. Steely, coppery.

Blood on the breath of a vampire.

Nicholas' words echoed in Julian's head. There's a Call out for you, man. Julian knew why. The Senior knew of Julian's change. He wondered if the Senior also knew what Julian was becoming. The Call could be for Julian's audience, or for his blood. Not to be consumed-it was anathema for a vampire to feed on one of his own kind-but certainly to be shed.

He could see no evidence to support either possibility, though. Only a smell, a sense, a flickering of shadow in the corners of his vision. Nothing he could hold, nothing he could be certain was more than his imagination.

They finished dinner, he holding up his end of the conversation with the easy web of fabrications he'd perfected over the years about his nonexistent job at an imaginary TV station. He barely had to pay attention to what he was saying, 25 which gave him the opportunity to concentrate on Lorelei.

She was beautiful. Brilliant, wonderfully alive, achingly mortal. Forbidden. He shouldn't have come, Julian could see that now. But he couldn't not. This kind of compulsion struck him rarely-three, perhaps four times in his eight hundred years.

At that moment, watching the light shift on her black hair, the movement of emotion in her sapphire eyes, he chose not to recall that it had always ended in pain.

By the end of the meal, the coppery smell had faded, barely leaving a memory behind. And when Lorelei, much to his surprise, asked him if he wanted to walk back to her place for a nightcap, he agreed before taking time to evaluate the foolishness of it.

"I live above the boutique," she said. "I own the building, in fact."

"Ah. An entrepreneur."

"That's me." She flicked him a coy blue look. "The bank helped me get started, but it's all mine now. All debts paid in full, and we've been in the black for the last two years."

"Impressive."

"I think so."

She watched him as he pulled out a cigarette. He lit it and dragged deep, feeling his fangs retract again. They'd been insistent tonight, stabbing the back of his lip at the most inopportune moments. The raw fish had dulled the need a bit, but not as much as red meat would have-certainly not as much as blood would have.

"You smoke an awful lot," Lorelei commented.

"I'm sorry," Julian said. "Does it bother you?"

She shrugged. "If you mean the smoke, no, not really." She gave him an odd look. "Somehow it doesn't smell as bad on you."

He smiled, charmed. He thought of another girl, a Pictish warrior woman who'd worn her red hair in braids and painted her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her face blue with woad after the manner of her people. They could have been the same soul. Maybe they were.

Her apartment above the boutique brought back similar 26 memories. A reproduction of a Celtic stone cross hung above her couch, and similar trinkets adorned a knickknack shelf in a corner. She took small gla.s.ses from a cabinet and filled them with wine. Julian didn't notice what kind. It didn't matter-he couldn't drink it.

"It's a very nice apartment," he said.

"Thank you. It serves its purpose."

She drank from her gla.s.s. He tipped his up so the wine touched his lips, but he didn't drink. A deep warmth moved through him anyway, the way wine had felt in his blood when he'd been mortal. But the smell brought the feeling to him now.

The wine smell, her smell and the soft sound of her pulse vibrating in the air. In his pocket, he fingered another cigarette, feeling the length of it, turning it between his fingers. He didn't take it out. Desire rose in his throat, and his fangs p.r.i.c.ked at the inside of his lip. He wanted her.

She sat on the couch and turned on the TV. "There. Is this your station? What time do you have to be at work?"

"No, and later."

He sat next to her and set the winegla.s.s on the table by the couch. The warmth of her body reached his skin, and another deep convulsion of need shuddered through him. He held very still. He should smoke. But he wanted to feel. This desire was the deepest emotion left to him, and he'd kept it at bay for so long. He wanted to let it take him over just for a time. Long enough to experience it, but not to act upon it.

She turned to look at him. He blinked as her eyes measured his. She sensed his desire-somehow he knew that. More, she shared it-he saw it in the darkening of her blue-blue eyes.

Her body shifted toward him, her breath brushed his lips even as his fangs slid into place behind them.

Feel it, he thought as his body became a flame of hunger.

Feel it, because it's the only thing you can feel, because it's the closest you'll ever get to love- The smell again, brittle and invasive, as if a knife had cut through the air made soft by the scent of her skin. The smell of bloodied breath. Then a sharp, violent pain at the base of his skull, and then nothing. 27

THREE.

Lorelei didn't have time to scream. The black shadow appeared so quickly she barely realized it was there before Julian jerked and went limp against her. An arm closed around her from behind, pulling her away from Julian's slumped body.

"Hold still and maybe I won't hurt you." The voice was hot against her ear, the breath strange, metallic. Lorelei nodded emphatically. Afraid to move, afraid to speak, she watched as the other man lowered Julian's body to the floor.

"The Senior said we could kill him."

"No," Lorelei breathed.

The man holding her laughed. "You can do nothing for him, little girl. He sealed his own fate a very long time ago."

Silver flashed above Julian's face. Lorelei sucked in a breath as the knife descended.

"No!" she screamed. The man behind her jerked her closer and clamped a hand over her mouth. She brought her heel down hard on his instep. He howled in pain and let her go.

Blind now with fear and fury, Lorelei grabbed the first thing she perceived as a weapon. The fireplace poker flew up in her hand, pointed toward her attacker, who flung himself at her.

Too late, he saw the weapon. Too late, as the force of his movement, combined with the force of Lorelei's, drove the sharp-ended metal straight through his chest.

"Oh, my G.o.d," said Lorelei. Purely on instinct, she yanked the poker free. Blood spurted everywhere as the man staggered backwards, utter bewilderment on his face.

A choking sound came from behind her. Lorelei whirled, poker at the ready. A second man knelt over Julian, hacking with the knife.

Lorelei was simply too shocked to think. On an intellectual level, she knew she should be gibbering in pure fear. Her stomach as well as her mind should have rebelled at the sight of this strange, dark man slicing Julian's throat open, again and again, with the long-bladed silver knife. Slicing it again and again 28 because, with each fountaining spray of blood, the gaping, bubbling wound healed itself.

Lorelei swung with the poker. It struck the intruder's head with a sick thud. He sank, unconscious or maybe dead, to the floor next to Julian's blood-soaked body.

Julian's throat was open, sliced so deep the spine showed white. The flow of blood had become sluggish. Lorelei stared as the horrible wound knit itself shut, until his throat was whole again, smooth and unbroken, but covered with thick, blackening blood.

His eyes opened. They were dull and gla.s.sy. Lorelei had seen that look before-in Dina's eyes as she'd slumped bloodless against her killer.

"Blood," he whispered. "I need blood."

"I know." She wanted to comfort him, but her intellect was functioning again and the blood repulsed her. She found his hand and held it. "I'll call an ambulance."

"No," he said.

She nodded. There wasn't much a paramedic could do, anyway, she thought. And how could she explain this to the police? But she had to call. She started to move toward the phone, but his hand tightened on hers, stopping her.

She looked back at him, and saw, but didn't believe.

He was dying. His body shutting down by degrees, starved of blood. Helpless to prevent it as his semiconscious mind, rattled by the blow to the back of his head, had felt each slash of the knife, the bursting forth of blood, the knitting together of the open wound. He'd felt this way only once before, when he'd been Made.