"I could have had that this morning." She tapped his shoulder with a limp-fisted mock punch. "You held out on me in the shower." She touched her breast where his fangs had grazed but not pierced her skin. "You can also bite me while you're having sex with me anytime you like. It was… I thought I was going to… Well." She sighed. "Damn."

A distant rumble of thunder made him send the spiders to do other work, and he used the fireflies to see Nicola. "What color is your hair?"

"Mud brown."

He kissed the part in her hair above her left brow. The hair close to her scalp was much lighter than the rest of it. "I meant, under the mud brown dye."

"White. I'm really a little old lady of sixty who's had two hundred face-lifts." She laughed.

Even her laughter made him hard. "You should pay your plastic surgeon triple his fee. His work is flawless."

"It won't help us much with the holy freaks." She sat up. "We should get out of here before those two come back with reinforcements."

"You brought your bike here; they will think we left the house. My watchers will alert us if anyone comes into the forest. I want to be with you." He pulled her back to him and lifted her left leg to ease inside her. "You make me feel alive again. Feel so much, so many things."

"You've been locked up for a couple of years." She curled her leg over his hip, stiffening for a moment and then relaxing into the rhythm of his movements. "I think we can do better than 'damn.' "

Gabriel buried himself in Nicola's eager young body, taking her as many ways as she could manage. She never turned him away. Each touch inched him away from thoughts of oblivion, until he could not imagine not being a part of her, moving in her, kissing her and holding her as she found her pleasure and brought him to his.

He kept her unaware of the thousands of spiders above them, some serving as his eyes, the rest weaving a tent of protective silk around them. When he drifted off into the night-lands, he felt a contentment he had never before experienced.

In the nightlands Gabriel found Nicola standing over him, naked, a stiletto in her hand. It did not alarm him. Nothing about her could. Still content, he watched her use the knife to cut her way out of the tent of webs.

Where was she going? Afraid of alarming her, he sent his watchers after her.

The spiders skittered through the forest, catching up with Nicola in Dalente's neglected garden, where she was drawing water from the old well.

"Okay." She flicked out the stiletto and stared at it. "He's gorgeous and sweet and sets my body on fire. I let him fuck my brains out because we both needed it. He needs someone to take care of him. Just because I'm falling for him doesn't mean I get the job."

She used the blade to cut up a shirt, and then soaked the pieces in the bucket of water before pouring a bottle of dark, watery fluid over them. Gabriel directed his spiders to climb up the sides of the well so that he could better see her face.

"I don't need a blind boyfriend. He doesn't need my shit. I'll just take him to the others and get him safe and forget about him." She sniffed and rubbed the back of her hand against her nose. "It's the only way."

Nicola was talking herself out of caring for him, something that after the events of the night he could well understand. Still, that she would abandon him so ruthlessly tore at him, until the many moved to where they could look upon her countenance.

The wet marks on her face ran from eyes to chin. She was weeping.

Unaware that she was being watched, Nicola put the soaked strips of fabric on the edge of the well, turned the bucket over to dump out the water, and then propped her leg on the bottom of it.

"If you love something, you have to let it go." The blade flashed as she brought it down, stabbing herself in the back of the leg. "So let him go, Nick; let him be free or you'll fuck up his life too."

Nicola. He almost sent the many to her, to wrench the stiletto out of her hand.

"It'll be for the best. He'll be happy. I'll get over it." She worked the knife from side to side. "Maybe in a couple hundred years."

A dark, deformed slug dropped with a bloody splat into a patch of chickweed, and she grabbed the soaked fabric, pressing a wad of it to the back of her leg—

"Nicola."

Gabriel woke with a lurch, turning at once to grope with his hands. He found her curled up beside him, her head pillowed on her hand, and ran his fingers over her. No gunshot wounds marred her bare legs, although he checked over every centimeter of her skin twice.

It had been his imagination, a fantasy that had played out in his head. But if it had been only that, then why had he been blind? In all of his dreams, he could see perfectly.

His hand strayed up to her face and felt the cool, damp remnants of tears.

Sometimes dreams are just reality turned inside out.

Gabriel lay back, pulling her to him and holding her against his pounding heart.

Although Michael Cyprien had been to Dublin countless times over the centuries, the lack of skyscrapers and two- and three-story buildings in the city allowed him to recall the place as it had been before the age of steel and concrete. Dublin was still something of a squat, overgrown village divided in half by the river Liffey, with its back against the pewter sea.

There were changes, radical and subtle. Perhaps the most lasting was the Irish resentment of British colonialism. Dublin displayed it very subtly, as with the street signs written in English and Gaelic, as if to remind visitors that the inhabitants had had their own language, even if no one spoke it anymore. Yet the Irish wanted respectability, and tried to project it with the many buildings prefixed with tall, white Grecian columns.

As Richard's people monitored all of the best hotels in the city, Michael had directed Phillipe to book them in a small, somewhat dismal bed-and-breakfast on Dublin's working-class northside. The proprietor, a widow whose wardrobe seemed to consist only of long-skirted black crepe de chine dresses, warned them that she had gone along with the city's ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants, and would eject them the minute she smelled tobacco or caught anyone lighting up in their rooms. To Michael's displeasure, the innkeeper proved to be one of the rare humans who had a natural resistance to l'attrait. It had been a relief to leave the place and take Leary down to the local pub for a meal.

"So you've just come up from London, then?" the dark, wiry bartender asked Cyprien as he handed him a glass of wine.

"Yesterday." Michael looked over at Phillipe and Marcella, who had taken a table in the corner of the pub and were watching the doors. Between them, Leary sat slowly masticating his way through a plate of corned beef and cabbage.

"Lovely cities the Brits have, don't they? Five or six thousand pubs in London alone. Can't build a proper beer in any of them, but you're in Ireland now, lad." The bartender patted his arm. "You're safe."

Michael remembered the last time he had tasted Irish beer. In that era it had been dark, rough, and almost chew-able—not very different from this brew. "Thank you."

A couple of men dressed in overalls and smelling offish came in, drawing the bartender down to the other end of the bar and giving Cyprien a moment to think.

On the journey to Ireland, Marcella had told him that sending Phillipe and Leary into Dundellan was too dangerous. She didn't believe his seneschal could make a convincing pretense of being yet another drug addict Leary had brought from the streets, or that Leary could be trusted at all. She disdained what she called old siege tactics and wanted to use more modern methods to gain entry to Dundellan.

Cyprien had disagreed. The guards would recognize all of the Kyn, if not by sight then by smell, and the only way to penetrate the castle's defenses was with humans.

Michael was not worried about getting caught—he had every intention of confronting Richard—but like Marcella, he worried about Leary. The man had sat in the very back of the passenger van, his hands and ankles bound to prevent him from making another attempt to escape, but leaving London had not disturbed him. When told they were going to Ireland, Leary had smiled and even giggled.

"Seigneur."

Michael turned to look into haunted dark eyes. "What is it?"

"I am leaving for the village now," Marcella told him. "I would speak to you privately before I go."

He glanced over at Phillipe, who nodded before speaking in a low voice to Leary. Cyprien paid for their drinks before he followed Marcella out of the pub.

"This plan is not sound," she told him as they walked down the street of old brick buildings and brightly colored doors. "Richard holds the advantage. Leary cannot be trusted. We are only three. If you mean to besiege Dundellan, let us return to America and raise a proper army."

"This is not the fourteenth century," he reminded her. "I cannot invade England."

"Very well. There is one thing more I would say to you." She led him around a corner and onto a street of furniture stores. "I did not speak of this when I agreed to serve as your second because it was not my place. Phillipe will not tell you because he is your man."

He lifted his brows. "No one wishes to talk to me?"

"Not in your present mood, my lord." Her mouth twisted. "We are all very fond of our heads."

"I vow not to touch a hair on your head. There." He spread his hands. "Say what you will."

"The bond a Kyn lord shares with his sygkenis is for life, but yours and Alexandra's is particularly strong," she said carefully. "Testing such a bond results in serious consequences, as I well know."

Michael frowned. "You have never belonged to a Kyn lord."

"My brother Arnaud lost his sygkenis during the Revolution," Cella said, her voice falling to a whisper. "Madness and sorrow nearly destroyed his life. It is why we came to America. To escape all of the things that reminded him of his loss."

Michael remembered how Thierry Durand had also lost his mind after believing that his wife had been tortured to death. "You think I will go insane?"