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  "How much would you have to use?" Garreth crossed his fingers, hoping the tech would not ask why he was so interested in anticoagulants.

  The blood on some of the slides looked clumped. The tech wrote letters on a report form, then stood and reached for a book on a shelf above the cabinet behind him. "Well, let's see. Anticoagulants . . . Here we are. You need ten milligrams for a hundred milliliters of blood. I've bought it in a two and a half percent solution. That gives you twentyfive milligrams per cc. So a cc will keep two hundred and fifty milliliters. That help?"

  "Yes. Thanks." Garreth hoped so.

  9

  Jubilation carried him into work on Friday. The citrate worked. Four quarts of blood sat cold and liquid in his refrigerator. A lot of drained rat bodies fed the fishes today but the slaughter was worth it. He would not have to hunt for several days. Rat blood still did not satisfy him; hunger continued to gnaw no matter how much he drank, but at least it took the edge off. He could live with what remained, like the time Marti took him off bread and he survived very well even though he never stopped craving the bread. His thermos of tea would help keep his appetite under control during the day. He was also learning to live with the pressure of daylight. The dream had been right; he could go on living a normal life and no one would ever have to suspect the changes in him.

  Not even a useless interview with Lane's agent-current agent, Garreth qualified silently; she almost certainly changed them along with her identity-failed to dampen his spirits.

  "She phoned and told me not to book her any gigs for an indefinite period of time," the woman said. "She said her mother is critically ill and she intends to stay with her until the crisis is over."

  "Where's that?" Harry asked.

  "I don't know. She never said."

  Harry frowned. "You mean you don't have any background information on your clients?"

  The agent frowned back. "Lane has a dozen backgrounds, all probably false. Look, Sergeant, I find her gigs and she pays me ten percent. That was our agreement. She gives me no trouble with performing drunk or strung out, or not showing up at all, and she brings me a small but steady income, so I don't pry into her life." The agent paused. "Once or twice I asked her personal questions and she changed the subject. She looks like a hot, foxy kid, but she's ice and steel underneath."

  A very perceptive lady, Garreth reflected.

  As they left, Harry asked, "Where do you want to eat lunch?"

  The optimism in Garreth faltered only a little. "I'm on a diet, remember? We can eat anywhere you want, as long as I can buy a cup of tea there."

  Harry grinned. "You're serious about the diet this time?"

  "Of course." As though he had a choice.

  "North Beach being our Italian Quarter, how about Italian food?"

  "Fine." Garreth would hate it, whatever the restaurant. He hated all meals. Tea filled his stomach, but did nothing to neutralize the longings that food smells stirred in him. He envied Harry, happily putting away everything Garreth had loved but could no longer eat.

  But the moment they walked in the door of the restaurant, Garreth lost all future appetite for Italian food. At the first breath of inside air, his lungs froze. Instant panic set in as he tried to breathe and could not. He clawed frantically at his tie and shirt collar, yanking them open.

  "Garreth! What's wrong?" Harry shook him by the shoulders.

  Garreth opened his mouth wide, straining, desperately struggling to suck in air, but he might as well have been trying to inhale solid concrete.

  "Garreth!"

  He would suffocate in here! Half dragging Harry, half carried by him, Garreth bolted for the street.

  Outside, the air turned from concrete to cold molasses. Garreth staggered up the street until the last foul taint of garlic disappeared. Only then did the air return to normal consistency. He leaned against a building, head thrown back, gulping air greedily.

  "Garreth, what happened?" Harry demanded.

  Garreth had no idea what to say. Would any mention of garlic start fatal thought trains? "I'm all right." As long as he avoided garlic. Put one more piece of the legend in the truth column. "It was nothing."

  "Nothing! That wasn't nothing, partner. We'd better-"

  From the direction of their car, a radio sputtered. "Inspectors 55."

  Harry hurried back to the car to roger the call. Garreth followed with unsteady knees.

  "Public service 555-6116," Dispatch said.

  Harry's brows rose. "Sound familiar?"

  Garreth shook his head.

  They drove to the nearest phone booth and Harry dialed the number. Garreth could not hear Harry's end of the conversation, only see his lips moving through the glass wall of the booth, but as he talked, Harry became more animated. He came back to the car at a run and jumped behind the wheel.

  "Hey, Mik-san, are we still interested in Wink O'Hare?"

  Garreth sat up straight. "Are you kidding? Did someone find him?"

  "A lady who says she's Rosella Hambright's sister knows where he is. Seems he got peeved at his girl and worked her over. The sister doesn't approve and wants Wink's hide for it."

  "Let's go get him," Garreth said.

  They collected two black-and-whites for backup on the way. Garreth surreptitiously checked the house, a decaying two-story building with poverty ground like dirt into its facade, before they moved in. Wink was supposed to be in the second-floor apartment. Narrow, bare stairs led up from a front hall that reeked of garbage and broken plumbing. Two windows overlooked the street. Built against its neighbor, it had no side windows. In back, rotting stairs in two flights rose to a narrow back porch with one window into the apartment and a back door whose upper half contained nine small panes of glass.

  The wages of sin is the hell of hiding in stinking holes, Garreth thought while walking back up the hill and around the corner to where Harry and the black­and-whites waited.

  Harry deployed everyone, a uniform to be behind a black-and-white out front, covering the front windows, another around the corner of a building covering the rear window. A third uniform would go in the front with Harry, and the fourth, up the back with Garreth.

  "You're sure you're all right?" Harry asked.

  Garreth removed his glasses and looked him straight in the eyes. "I'm fine. Let's go."

  "We'll give him a chance to come out. If he doesn't, you break in the back door. I'll go through the front at the same time. Back door and hall door are at right angles to each other, so we shouldn't be in each other's cross fire, but for God's sake be careful about that."

  Garreth and his uniformed partner, a barrel-chested veteran named Rhoades, made their way around to the back of the building and eased up the stairs, checking each tread to avoid telltale creaks. Keeping low, they crossed the porch, then flattened themselves against the building on each side of the door.

  With his ear pressed against the side of the house, Garreth heard Harry knock at the front door and call, "Wink O'Hare, this is the police." Nothing stirred in the apartment.

  "Come out, Wink."

  A board creaked inside. Listening carefully, Garreth made out the sound of stealthy footsteps. Garreth shifted his hand up on his gun so that he could use the handgrip to break the window. His eyes met Rhoades'. The uniformed officer nodded his readiness. Garreth, breaking the window, would go in high. Rhoades would dive in low.

  "O'Hare, open up!"

  The footsteps inside moved closer. "Garreth! Get him!"

  At Harry's yell, Garreth smashed the handgrip of the gun into the pane directly above the knob. The glass shattered, but with it a wave of pain like fire burned up his arm and out through his body at the same time a shot sounded explosively inside the kitchen and glass higher up shattered under the impact of a bullet.

  Rhoades swore. Garreth tossed his gun into his left hand and pointed it around the edge of the doorjamb to shoot back at Wink, tilting his head just enough to expose one eye for aiming. But his finger could not move t
he trigger. The gun mechanism seemed frozen.

  "Shoot!" Rhoades yelled.

  Garreth could not. Fire seared him.

  What the hell was wrong with his gun? He remembered then, in dismay, that he carried a new one, one he had never fired before. Damn. That did not account for the pain, though.

  The thoughts raced through his head between one heartbeat and the next. Another followed, one that could explain both the pain and apparent failure of the gun, but he could not accept it. No, that's just a legend! Besides, this is a hideout, not a dwelling . . . just a hideout!

  Wink disappeared from the kitchen doorway and two more shots sounded, this time followed by a man's agonized yell. Garreth could not tell whether the shots came from Wink's .45 or the hot-loaded Special that Harry carried. "Harry! Harry."

  "Don't just stand there!" Rhoades yelled.

  The uniformed officer hurled himself at the door, shouldering Garreth aside. A third shot sounded. The aging door gave way under his weight. He hit the floor inside rolling, kept rolling back onto his feet, and vanished through the kitchen doorway.

  With pain wrapping him in flame, Garreth pressed at the opening, willing himself through it. The hot metallic/salty reek of blood filled the apartment. "Harry, are you all right?"

  "Get in here, Mikaelian," Rhoades's voice snapped.

  The pain vanished instantly. Garreth stumbled forward, cold with fear. Fear justified. He found Harry sprawled groaning in the middle of the living room while the uniform who had come up the front with him tried to staunch the blood from a hole in the middle of Harry's chest. Garreth saw Wink, too, shoulder­wounded and screaming as Rhoades roughly cuffed his hands behind his back, but it was Harry he went to, dropping on his knees and pulling out his handkerchief to use as a compress on the wound.

  A hand caught his collar and dragged him back. "What the hell were you doing out there?" Rhoades demanded. "If you'd fired when you had the chance, this wouldn't have happened. You froze, didn't you? This turkey shot at you and you lost your nerve!"

  "I-" Garreth stared up at him. He could hardly admit his defense, that the apartment was a dwelling and that as a vampire, he could not enter it the first time without an invitation. It appeared that not even a bullet from his gun could violate the barrier around a dwelling.

  Rhoades pushed him toward the telephone. "See if you can make yourself use that and call for an ambulance. If we get him to a hospital fast enough, maybe we can still save your partner's life."

  Flushing from the lash of the sarcasm, Garreth picked up the phone.

  The ambulance took a lifetime to arrive, and every minute of the wait, Garreth sat on the floor holding Harry's head in his lap, silently willing him to live. Hang on, Harry! Dear God, don't let him die! As though he, unholy creature, had a right to appeal to a power of Good for anything. Wink's complaints that he was bleeding to death, Rhoades's mutter as he read Wink his rights, the anger of the four uniformed officers directed at the one who failed them . . . all existed somewhere beyond Garreth, not touching him. Only Harry felt real, Harry and fury at himself. What a fool he was! See the vampire, funny beast, trying to act like a human. Foolish, certainly, not to have systematically checked out every legendary condition of vampire existence. In the jungle, death is the price of error, only this time Harry might pay the price for Garreth's error. Hang on, Harry. Don't let me destroy you.

  He rode with Harry in the ambulance to the hospital and rooted himself in the trauma unit's waiting room, smelling blood everywhere and sickened by it. Lien was not home. He could only give Dispatch the license number of her car and hope that some patrol unit found her before she heard the news on the radio or TV.

  "Mikaelian."

  Serruto's voice. Garreth knew he could not meet the lieutenant's eyes, so he kept his gaze riveted on the door through which Harry had disappeared.

  "What happened?" The question sounded concerned, not angry.

  Garreth kept his voice expressionless. "They say I froze."

  "Did you?"

  He could say no. He could say his gun jammed. Or he could say yes, and blame it on psychological shock, on suffering from the effects of his own recent experiences, on having come back to work too soon, after all. The first could be disproven by examining his gun and the second seemed too easy. He stared at the doorway and said, "It's my fault Harry was shot."

  He heard Serruto sit down beside him . . . smelled his mixed scent of soap, after­shave, and, beneath them, blood. "I have this feeling of being ignored. I didn't know what to tell the captain. Somehow I thought these operations needed to be cleared through me first."

  Why did Serruto confine himself to mild sarcasm? He ought to be yelling. Garreth and Harry knew procedure. Why had they failed to follow it? Had his, Garreth's, eagerness to collar Wink persuaded Harry in the same way the doctor and then Serruto had been persuaded to let him come back to work? Was all of it his fault? "I got carried away and forgot to call in."

  "And Harry? He's the sergeant. Why didn't he call in?"

  Garreth sat angrily upright. "Harry's in there maybe dying and you're trying to blame him?"

  Serruto sighed. "I know how you feel, but-"

  Garreth stood. "How can you possibly know how I feel?" He heard the despair in his voice, a despair sharpened by the realization of how true the question was. Serruto could not know. No one normal, no one human, no one who was as he used to be could ever know exactly how he felt.

  And it was looking across that now-perceived, unbridgeable gulf between himself and everyone he knew that Garreth saw Lien come running white-faced into the waiting room.

  She stopped in front of him. "How bad is it?"

  A constriction in Garreth's throat made speech impossible. He could only shrug.

  Serruto answered her. "We don't know."

  "How did it happen?"

  "I'm sorry." Garreth forced the words out. "I'm sorry I didn't take better care of him. It's all my fault."

  She, too, disappointed him by looking sympathetic instead of angry.

  The doctor came through the doors from the trauma unit. They spun to face him. Garreth felt as though even his heart stopped, waiting for what the doctor would say.

  The doctor spread his hands. "He's still alive. The bullet missed his heart. However, there's massive trauma and hemorrhage, so although we have the bleeding stopped now and the damaged vessels repaired, we'll just have to wait to see how he snaps back."

  Her face like a china mask, Lien asked, "May I see him?"

  "I'm sorry; not yet."

  Pain twisted in Garreth. If Harry lived, it would be through no credit to Garreth Doyle Mikaelian. And if Harry lived this time, what about the next? Because there would be a next time, inevitably, another dwelling, another impenetrable barrier Garreth would face and fail. He might as well accept a hard fact . . . he could not continue playing cop when his own personal set of rules differed so much from those applied to the rest of humanity.

  Garreth felt in his inside pocket for his badge case. Pulling it out, he turned toward Serruto and extended it. "I shouldn't be carrying this." The words pierced like a knife in his gut.

  Serruto frowned. "Mikaelian-"

  The lieutenant did not reach for the badge case, but Garreth let go of it anyway, before he lost his courage to give it up. It fell to the floor, flipping open.

  Lien, Serruto, and the doctor stared startled at him. The badge seemed to stare, too . . . a seven-pointed star, the remaining half of his soul, shining up from the floor.

  "Mikaelian."

  "Oh, Garreth."

  Their voices reached out for him, like nets or webs, seeking to snare him. Garreth fled the trap. He spun and bolted from the room. He fled down the corridor with their voices chasing him. An orderly reached for him but he jerked loose in one easy pull and escaped into the twilight.

  Tears blinded him. He jerked his glasses off and wiped his eyes. What did he do now? Or should he do anything? He did not really want to live. He did not
enjoy it, and his life, or undeath, had endangered the existence of people who could be integral, productive members of society.

  He started walking, considering how he might kill himself. It must look like an accident, to spare his family. That made it harder than ever. He cursed the changes in him that did that to him. If Lane had used her strength to simply break his neck, it would have been over, finished with. Damn you for not doing it!

  He stopped short in the middle of a street. Brakes screamed and horns blared unheard around him.

  Because Lane had made him what he was, Harry was dying. Indirectly, she could be held responsible, too, for that fiasco in taking Wink.

  An angry voice swore at him. Garreth finally heard and moved on across the street.

  She had destroyed Garreth's life, killed his partner, taken away his job, and removed him from his friends. She had destroyed more lives than his, too, when he counted the families of Adair and Mossman. He had no way of knowing how many others she had killed in her lifetime. The tally must be high. All those lives over all those years, and she still went free, to kill and destroy again, laughing at law, sidestepping justice. Growing up with a cop father, working as a cop himself, Garreth believed strongly in law and justice as the foundation of civilization. Without them, nothing remained but barbarism and chaos.

  Garreth took a deep breath. He knew now what he could do . . . the same job he had been doing before. Before he ended his disliked unlife, he would hunt down the red-haired vampire. It takes one to catch one might be truer for this case than any. He would hunt her and he would bring her back to stand accountable for what she had done to Adair and Mossman and to Harry and him. If it took him to the end of the earth and time, he would find her.

  1

  By lamplight, the liquid in the cut-glass tumbler had the rich, dark red of Burgundy. Since giving up regular food, Garreth had taken to gulping his meals, dispensing with the unpleasant necessity as quickly as pos­sible. Tonight, however, he turned the tumbler in his hands, wondering sardonically what Marti's Aunt Elizabeth would think if she knew the end to which her crystal wedding gift had come. He sipped the blood almost idly, playing with it as a wine taster might. This Rattus '83 is a bold vintage, speaking to the palate with lively authority, while . . .