"A wise alternative." Cyprien looked around the room and spotted the buckshot. ""You were able to help Arnaud?"

"Physically. Aside from the fact that l'attrait in his case makes him smell like a garnish." She righted the table and sat on it, dangling her feet from the edge. "Mentally? He's just like all the others. Gloom and doom. Convinced he's damned to eternal vampiric life for some horrible sin he committed." She eyed him. "You know the guy, right? Tell me the truth. What's the worst thing Arnaud ever did?"

Cyprien thought for a moment. "'He joined the Templars so that he would not have to marry the woman his father chose as his betrothed. It was said that she had vast holdings and an impressive dowry."

"So he's… enormously stupid?"

"His betrothed also had boils and the pox."

"Whoa. Nice dad. But see what I mean?" Alex propped her forehead against her hands. "How am I going to come up with a viable treatment if no one will talk to me about the genesis of this thing? I'm not going to risk going to any human experts, not after what happened to Leann." Leann Pollock, an old Peace Corps friend of Alex's who had offered to get her access to the CDC disease archives, had been tortured to death because of her involvement in Alex's research.

"Be patient." Cyprien came to stand in front of her, and stroked one of his long, sensitive hands over her messy mop of curls. "Secrecy is how the Darkyn have survived all these centuries. You cannot undo seven hundred years of experience with a single conversation."

"They don't trust me." Alex brooded for a moment. "It's because I took longer to wake up, isn't it? They don't think I'm for real."

"The fact that you took seven days to make the final change concerns many," he admitted. "But you are the first human to become Darkyn since the fifteenth century. We have no basis of comparison." His eyes, light turquoise rimmed in gold, fixed on hers. "What are you keeping from me this time, chérie?"

Too many things. Like her talent.

"You know I don't need as much blood as you do." She noticed a new scratch on her palm and showed it to him. "Evidently I don't heal as quickly, either."

He cradled her hand between his and studied it. "How long before it heals?"

"If it's the same as the last one, it'll disappear in an hour. Maybe two." She poked him in the ribs. "Stop looking at me like I have boils and the pox."

Cyprien didn't laugh. "You have been feeding only on human blood? You are not experimenting on yourself again?"

"Grade A, type O whole units, fresh from the private stash." She tried not to think about the fact that he had bought a blood bank to serve as her caterer. "All I've done is tap my veins for a few blood samples." When he started to protest, she shook her head. "This is nonnegotiable. My mutation is not progressing the same as yours did. I could have some kind of modern immunity that's interfering with it."

He didn't like that. "You are Darkyn—"

"—but am I immortal, like the rest of you?" Because she didn't know, and couldn't bear the look in his eyes, she slid off the table and into his arms. "You're in charge now. You've got the Brethren, Tremayne, and every secret vampire club in America on your plate. I'm the doctor. Medical has to be my baby."

"So it seems." He rubbed his thumb across her lips. "You are done for the night?"

"Yeah." She grinned. "I forgot to tell you the good news. I've found a way to help Jamys." She slipped out of his loose embrace to grab the folder of research from her desk.

Alex showed Cyprien the data and diagrams she had gleaned from different medical journals that published the latest in reconstructive surgical techniques. "The first time I examined him, I thought the Brethren had torn out his whole tongue, but on my second check I found a stump with muscle tissue still intact. This is what it looks like now."

"Could it grow back?" Cyprien asked, looking through what she pulled from the folder.

"No. the Darkyn's regenerative powers don't stretch that far. The good news is I can make him a new one." She lifted her arm and made a circle with one linger on the inside, near her wrist. "'It'll take two patches of muscle, harvested from this area. I'll fold and graft them onto the remnant muscle."

Cyprien nodded. "This has been done before?"

"To vampires, no. To humans who have lost their tongues to cancer or massive oral injuries, yes. It's a very successful procedure, too. Most patients who undergo it regain their ability to swallow and speak." She showed him several before-and-after photos of patients who had undergone the origami-like reconstruction. "They've also done successful whole-tongue transplants as well, but that isn't an option for us. The only tissue Jamys's body will accept is his own."

"'Have you spoken to him about this?"

She thought of the last time she'd talked with the young Darkyn. I have to stop thinking that way: Jamys may look seventeen, but he's got six hundred years on me. "'He wasn't very interested. I think he's worried about his dad. Has there been any word on Thierry?"

"I have scouts looking for him." Cyprien studied one of the surgical diagrams of the harvest site. "'Will transferring muscle in this fashion cause Jamys to lose use of his arm?"

Why was he changing the subject so fast? Alex made a mental note to talk to Phillipe, Cyprien's seneschal, about Thierry. "The grafts won't be that deep or extensive. Remember how small the tongue is." She stuck hers out at him.

Cyprien set the papers aside. "I do not remember," he said, his voice deeper, his accent heavier. "Show me again."

Invisible roses filled the room.

Alex felt a sudden dull ache between her legs and swallowed. "We can't have sex in my office," she said, bracing herself against the edge of the desk. '"It's unprofessional. It's unethical."

"'I won't report you to the authorities." Cyprien pulled her up against him, holding her there with one hand splayed over her bottom. "Do you know, I haven't touched you in fourteen hours."

"You count the hours?"

"The hours." He bent his head and skimmed his lips over hers. "The minutes." His hands were under her shirt, his fingers pulling aside the cups of her bra. "The moments."

Alex felt another ache, harder and hotter, inside her mouth as her dents acerees emerged from the holes in her palate. Her fangs had formed soon after Cyprien had infected her with his blood, but she'd never used them.

"I want to kiss you," she muttered, "and I want to jump on you, and do terribly personal things to your body. But why the hell do I want to bite you?"

"Because it feels good." Cyprien scraped the side of her throat with the tips of his own fangs, so delicately that he didn't break the skin. "Aren't you curious to know how it is, chérie?"

"I haven't fed." She would not beg. She would tremble, moan, and shimmy against him like a lap dancer, but she refused to beg. "If I bite you, you'll ruin my dinner."

"I taste better than the plastic-bag blood." He kissed her, hard and fast and so deep their fangs met. Alex's were smaller and shorter, and the tips fit just inside Cyprien's. He lifted his head and tore his collar open. "Try me."

Alex stared at the smooth skin on the side of his neck. Her own l'attrait drenched the air around them with lavender. "What if I take too much?"

Drinking too much blood put the Darkyn into a mindless bloodlust they called thrall, after which they remained unconscious for several days. Thrall also induced something in humans that the Darkyn called rapture. Rapture somehow destroyed the mind of the victim before they died of blood loss.

"You cannot, unless you bite me many times or feed quickly." He caught her lower lip between his teeth, released it. "We heal too fast."

"Okay." She could hardly believe she was saying this, agreeing to do this. Injections of blood weren't sustaining her anymore, however, and there was nothing else she could digest except blood, water, and a little wine. "This doesn't mean I hunt. I do not hunt."

"I will hunt for you." Cyprien lifted her off her feet and carried her five steps to the exam table.

They're going to fuck. Satisfaction, urgency, caution. Light it now.

Alex stiffened as she saw Cyprien carrying her inside her mind, but through a window, as if she were standing outside. A black-gloved hand picked up a red can and hurled the liquid in it against the office's front door. "Michael, wait. Put me down."

Two cans oughta do it. Trotting around the building, splashing more liquid. Take the interstate. Get back before dawn, keep my alibi together.

"I am." Cyprien was laying her out on the table.

"No. Someone's outside." Alex pushed his hands away and jumped from the table. Strong gasoline fumes made her eyes water. "Can't you smell it?"

He comes out, I gotta pop him. The thought was as cold and hard as the gun the man removed from his jacket. Checking the clip. The dark gleam of bullets. Head shots. Only head shots.

The man was a hired assassin.

Alex knew because it was her talent—the ability to read minds of killers. She seized Cyprien's arm. "We have to get out of here. Someone's been sent to kill you. He's outside, splashing gas around the building. He's going to burn down the office. If you walk out, he'll shoot you with bullets made of copper. I don't know what they're called but they explode inside a body."

Cyprien picked up a scalpel. "Go to the tunnels."

A match, lit and tossed. Another. God, this stuff catches fast. Huge, black-smoking flames burst from the gas-soaked walls. Caught up in the vision, Alex nearly shrieked.

"Alexandra." He was shaking her. "We must go, now." He dragged her out of the treatment room.