Alex had never faced down someone with a knife. Still, something surged inside her, answering the adrenaline rush, ballooning and building. Something much bigger and meaner than the child rapist coming at her.

"Will you?" When his hand jabbed the blade at her face, she caught his wrist almost without thinking.

The rapist grunted, pushed, and then froze in place—just like his blade.

"Oops." She stared at her hand, amazed to see that her grip was actually stopping him. "Maybe not."

Hatred gleamed in his ugly eyes. "You dumb cunt—"

"Where's this famous Southern hospitality I've heard so much about?" She tightened her grip, and heard finger bones snap. "You're giving Atlanta a bad rep, you know." And when the hell had she gotten so strong?

"Fuh-uh—" His eyes bulged out, and the knife fell from his broken hand. "Uh-uh—"

The contact between them made the images and thoughts pour into Alex's head in a fast, continuous stream. It was coming from his mind, she realized. All night, she had been picking up his thoughts, his memories.

She clamped her other hand around his neck and walked him back toward the wall. She probed, pulling things from his mind now.

A good childhood. Parents who had loved him, who had not known what he was. Always acting, always hiding. The pets that had vanished. Such tiny graves. The babysitting jobs. Impotency. The first killing. The power of it. Cruising for little girls. Another murder. Another. Digging larger, deeper graves. A mistake. The brat told. Arrest. Conviction. Prison. Behaving, acting, hiding again. Helping the chaplain. Praying. The letters of recommendation. The early release. Back to cruising the playgrounds and schools.

Taylor. Pretty Kitty.

For Alex, digging through Dermont Whitfield's memories was the same as swimming underwater in a sewer. With her mouth open.

"Dermont, you've been a very bad boy, swearing you found Christ like that when you hadn't even been looking for him." She shook her head. "That parole officer of yours is going to be so disappointed."

Because Alex wasn't letting him have any air, all he could do was make muffled squealing noises. His head bounced a little as the back of it hit brick, and then he tried kicking her with one of his work boots. She pinned him with one knee, watching as he finally registered her strength and the fact that he wasn't getting away. She could almost see the cartoon question mark form over the top of his gleaming scalp.

How? How? How? he was screaming behind his face.

"Well, I certainly don't look like it, but I'm apparently in better shape than I thought." Alex felt strong enough to heave him and the Dumpster onto the roof of the abandoned, three-story building behind him. She settled for breaking his wrist, and felt his carotid jump under her fingertips. "Bet that hurts. Well, you're really not going to like this part." She released him only to cradle his face between her palms. As he brought his good arm up to punch her, she jerked his head hard to the left. What breath there was left in his lungs emerged in a low liquid gurgle as he slid down the wall. "Enjoy hell, Dermont. Try not to take it over."

… warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife…

Alex stepped over his body, retrieved her case, and went back to the girl. A quick exam revealed a nasty bump on her crown, a bruised eye from Dermont's last punch, and some cuts and bruises, but no signs of oral or genital penetration. Since Dermont was not only among the lowest scum of humanity, but also had contracted HIV while raping other men in prison, that was a small blessing.

The scent of blood made Alex swallow, hard.

She took out her cell phone, dialed 911, and requested an ambulance and the police. Before the operator could interrogate her, she ended the call and found an observation post on the second floor of the abandoned building.

Cyprien said some of them acquired special talents. Maybe mine is reading thoughts and kicking ass.

She didn't want to think about Michael Cyprien. She had excised him from her life, and eventually she'd do the same from her mind. She didn't need him, didn't want him, and absolutely did not miss him. He'd never sink his fangs or anything else into her again.

God, Alex thought, looking up at the star-dusted sky and feeling more alone than she ever had in her young life, I wish he were here.

The ambulance arrived three minutes later, flanked by squad cars. Alex stayed well out of the flashing red and blue lights, and concentrated on the paramedics and the cops, trying to pull something from the mind of each.

She got nothing.

Alex waited until they had Taylor securely strapped to a gurney before she slipped down the back stairs and silently made her way back to the bar. She went inside and methodically tried to scan the thoughts of everyone inside.

Still, nothing.

So what does this mean? She stalked out to wave down a taxi. I can only read the minds of killer pedophiles? As she watched the passing traffic, she smelled flowers—deep, dark, full-blown roses—and wondered if she would have to kill again this night.

"Alexandra."

Chapter Twelve

It took every ounce of will she had, but Alex turned her back on Michael Cyprien's voice and walked away. So she'd made that idiot wish, and he'd popped out of nowhere. It didn't mean anything. He'd done this to her, changed her, maybe even made her strong enough to kill a psychopath with one hand.

Walking away wouldn't solve things; she knew he would catch up to her. In seven-hundred-plus years, Michael Cyprien evidently had never learned how to take no for an answer. She might have to give him some remedial instruction.

"Alexandra, wait."

She might rip off that pretty face she'd given him, too. "Get away from me."

"We must talk." He caught up and paced her.

She didn't have to check him out to know that he was dressed in the same black trench coat and designer suit he'd worn to visit her in Chicago. Maybe it was standard uniform for the tasteful but trendy omnipotent immortal. The other Darkyn she'd seen a few times from a distance dressed the same way. She wondered if they all went shopping together, like best girlfriends.

"I need you to come back with me to New Orleans."

His voice tugged at her, slowing her. "I'm leaving for New York tomorrow." Alex skirted around two prostitutes who eyed Cyprien like Santa had delivered early. "I need more comfortable walking shoes, and DSW has a seventy-five-percent-off sale."

"It is important, Alexandra. You are the only one who can do this."

"Heard that one before, and now look at me." She crossed the street against the light, making a taxi swerve. The driver stuck his head out the window and shouted his poor opinion of Alex's mother. "Living the night life. Which sucks, by the way. Thank you very much."

Cyprien tugged her to a stop at the edge of the curb. "The child in that alley would disagree, I think."

"Would she? I was a heartbeat away from making her corpse number two." Alex finally looked up into his face. There was really no need to lose her temper, or yell, or give him a face-lift with her fingernails. "You got what you wanted last time, Cyprien. I didn't. So." She produced a polite smile. "Fuck off."

"I would respect your privacy, but there is no one else to whom I can turn." He guided her over to the recessed doorway of a clothing store, where glassed-in display fronts of the latest in plus-size women's wear framed a four-foot square of privacy. "Some of our kind were captured and tortured, as I was. We have tried to help them, but we need you to—"

"Our kind? We?" She wanted to grab the gun from her case and shoot him, but she hadn't loaded it. Stupid. She settled for grabbing a lapel and tugging gently on it. It parted from the rest of his suit like tissue paper. I really don't know my own strength. "You might want to rephrase that." She dropped the torn lapel. "Fast."

"You cannot deny what you have become, Alexandra." His expression changed. "You are cursed to be Darkyn. You are my sygkenis."

"Oh, for God's sake." She laughed, a deep, hearty belly laugh that seemed to shock him. "What are you, reading bad horror novels? I haven't taken any oath, and there is no curse. You don't own me. You infected me, you contagious jackass."

Cyprien's eyes narrowed. "You are not still human."

"Come and find out." Alex eyed Phillipe, who with the other thug had stepped into the small space. "What the hell is your problem?"

His scar turned pink and he rattled off something in quick, liquid French.

She turned to Cyprien. "In English?"

"He says you should not disobey or insult your master."

Good old Phillipe. Always calm, always hovering, always concerned with not insulting the master. Was this how Cyprien expected her to behave?

"Right. Take a walk, Phil." The threat of violence broke Alex's already shaky self-control, and two hollow, pointed teeth punched through the bilateral abscesses at the front of her upper palate. She flashed her fangs for them. "I'm hungry, and you and your friend are starting to resemble a double cheeseburger."

When Phillipe advanced, Cyprien shook his head slightly, halting the seneschal in his tracks. Phillipe and the other guard retreated, turning their backs and forming a wall between them and the street.

"You have made the change." Cyprien sounded perplexed this time. "Yet you resist me."

"I told myself I wouldn't go back to New Orleans unless I was going to kill you." Alex took a long look at Cyprien's face. It was symmetrical, nearly flawless, and handsomer than she remembered. Absolutely her best work, careerwise. Too bad the medical journals would never publish an article on the hazards of operating on a bloodsucker.

He noticed the inspection. "What is it?"

"Any complications since the surgery?" she asked casually. "Pain, stiffness, scarring?"

"No." He bunked. "I am surprised you ask."

"You're the last patient I'll ever have." She had missed surgery—missed it like a limb that had been amputated—but she wouldn't take the chance of nicking herself with an instrument and infecting someone with the shit he'd dumped in her blood. "I'd like to know I went out a winner."