She looked midtwenties, though she sounded like a teenager. "Hi, did you have a question?"

"Is Carlos in?"

"Oh, he's around. Probably upstairs. Just a second." She looked around the store and spotted a young man over in the only dark corner the store had, crowded between vibrating plastic penises and the green-painted dressing-room doors.

She called to him. "Jason, is Carlos upstairs?"

Jason raised his head out of a cardboard shipping container filled with videotapes and looked in our direction. "I… um, yeah, I guess I saw him go up there about half an hour ago. One of the girls came downstairs to get him."

"Would you go up there and tell him someone down here wants to talk to him?" she asked, displaying the kind of patience mothers have for backward children.

"What about my box?"

"I'll keep an eye on it," she assured him. "OK?"

"Sure. OK. I'll go get him." Jason slumped off toward the door.

We stood there in the vague thump of music from the rooms upstairs. Her gaze kept flickering down to her notebook. "You can look around, if you want. Sometimes it takes a while for the guys to get back downstairs. I don't know why. I mean, they've seen tits before."

I nodded. "What are you studying?"

"I'm writing an article for The Stranger, about safe sex."

"That should be a winner." I wondered what qualified as safe from the point of view of someone who felt the need to chain her nose on. Not wanting to cramp her writing style, I wandered around.

I was examining a black and purple leather bustier with marabou feathers around the top when I felt my stomach fall toward the floor. I turned my head. A slab-bodied, bearded man strode toward me. He wore a clot of darkness like a cape, riding on the broad shoulders of his black leather jacket. His eyes were a couple of pits under lowering, cliff like brows. He stopped a scant two feet from me and looked me over. The desire to run far and fast, shrieking, electrified my legs and caught at my throat. I quashed the urge and pivoted to face him.

He clasped his hands in front of himself. "You wanted to see me?" he rumbled.

The breath. I tried not to flinch. "Alice sent me," I stated.

"Alice." Glaciers react more.

"Liddell." I stared right back at him, even though it racked me. A tremor of fright moved under my skin.

He grunted. "Let's go to the office." He turned, assuming I would follow him. As we passed the counter, he glanced at the Goth girl.

"Keep Jason out."

"OK," she agreed, barely raising her head from her page.

A door next to the dressing rooms led to a small storage room with a desk and a couple of chairs shoved in among the boxes and files. Carlos went behind the desk and pointed at the chair on my side.

"Sit down."

I did.

He folded his arms on the desktop, cupping his left elbow with his right hand. His fist was as big as a billboard against the black leather sleeve. "Now. What do want with me, ghost girl?"

I bridled. "Excuse me?"

"You got 'em hangin all over you," he growled, reaching toward me. I shied, but he hooked something out of my hair and pulled it back to the desktop. A wisp of Grey, like a steam-spun cobweb, wafted from his fingertips. He wadded it up and shoved it into his inside breast pocket. "Now, what do you want?"

"I–I'm a private investigator and I'm working for Cameron Shadley."

"Edward's little blond toy? That Cameron?"

"Yes, that Cameron." I gave a sharp, annoyed nod. "But he's not Edward's 'toy, as you put it, anymore."

He sketched a shrug.

"I need to know more about Edward before I attempt to meet with him about Cameron," I continued. "Alice suggested you might have something to say that I could use."

Carlos raised an eyebrow and started laughing, bellowing shocks like a gale against a plate glass window.

"You have an ax to grind?" I prompted. I was quaking inside.

He lowered his laughter to a seismic chuckle. "You bet I've got an ax to grind, and when it's good and sharp, I'd like to bury it in that bastard's skull."

"Why?" My voice did not shake, though by rights it should have.

"You wouldn't like the story very much. Or understand it. And if I take you into my confidence, daylighter, I cross a line most of my kind would find unforgivable."

"I can't ask you to jeopardize yourself for my client's sake." I started to get up, relieved to have an excuse to leave.

"What do you plan to do with this information you're seeking?"

"Raise trouble."

Carlos frowned in thought. I shuddered at the rolling weight of his mental processes grinding over me. The Grey had been an encroaching sea near Alice. It was an inescapable drowning pool in his presence.

"You will tell no one what you learn from me."

I fought the compulsion to agree. "I will tell my client, if he needs to know, and I will use whatever I have to to get to Edward."

His stare ripped into me. "The details shall not go farther than this room until you face Edward."

I swallowed dust and shuddered. "Yes. All right." I sat back down, my knees shaking and my heart thumping weird syncopations.

Chapter 21

Carlos leaned across the desk and pinned me to the chair with his gaze. He spoke in a low, intense voice that enthralled and smothered me. "It's not mere blood that sustains a vampire, but the life force that flows with the blood. Our own is weak. We must take this life force from others or we fade to crippled shadows, fall into madness, and drown by slow agony to the true death.

"The most vital and powerful of creatures offers the greatest quality of life. That is why we prey on daylighters, like you. You offer us so much that we need not hunt too frequently and death is not always necessary to acquire what we need. A vampire uses this energy to replace what he cannot produce himself. All creatures need it. Some rare few can give up this energy by will and use it for other purposes. When it is given up, it eats your own life as well. If the power required is great enough, it may devour every shred of life and death within you. You must have other lives—other blood—to draw upon. If the undertaking requires great power, it may require many lives. Or the blood of a vampire, which commingles life and death. Neither blood nor this power are to be coerced or commanded. The price for them is too high. But Edward demanded them—ripped then—from me.

"We met in Lisbon. Edward was still young, but his ambition burned like an equatorial sun. He schemed and clawed to raise himself, but only antagonized the rest of our kind. He had few friends but I—fool—was among them."

His voice fell into older rhythms as he spoke, and I felt the past rise around us in a Grey curtain I could not turn back.

"He had a plan to destroy his enemies at a single blow, but it required that power which he, himself, did not command."

His words began to press on me.

"He brought his plan to me. I told him it was too risky. The blood required, the deaths, would be noticed, and the spells were dangerous. We argued over it. I would not give up blood for him—nor would any other—but he agreed to a smaller conflagration bought with mere human lives.

"I went a safe distance, to Seville, and began gathering the men and women we would need, the materials, the place… I kept our prisoners and began to craft the great spell into the very walls. Edward arrived and I helped him to build the machine until I was near exhausted. He sent me away to rest until we were ready."

Something half memory and half vision coiled around me. I shied from it, but it clutched me. I could see shadowy faces of the men and women in eighteenth-century rags and feel his labor burn in my own muscles.

"On All Hallows Eve, he came for me. We walked to the cathedral and descended into our cellar near La Giralda. New symbols lined the walls and floor in chalk and charcoal, gold and blood. I did not study them, for I was distracted by the sight of what we had built."