Her accent was as provocative as the rest of her. "Come on," she repeated, with more insistence.

Jay resisted the urge to look over his shoulder to see if somebody else was on the steps behind him. He couldn't take his eyes off her anyway. When Jube had said that Sascha was seeing a Haitian prostitute, he'd expected some gaunt, pockmarked girl with hungry eyes and needle tracks along her arms. He cleared his throat and tried to sound like he ran into half-naked women all the time. "Ah," he managed, "Sascha, ah-"

"Sascha bores me," the woman said. "I am Ezili. Come." She smiled again and held out her hand.

"I'm Jay Ackroyd," Jay said. "I'm a friend of Chrysalis," he added. "Sascha too," he went on. "I need to talk to him again," he explained. "About her," he clarified. "Chrysalis, that is." All the time walking up the stairs. Ezili just listened, nodding, smiling, nodding. Jay was two steps below her when he saw that her eyes matched her lingerie, two small black irises surrounded by a sea of liquid red. "Your eyes," Jay blurted out, stopping suddenly.

Ezili reached down, took his hand, and put it between her legs. Her heat was like a living thing. Moisture ran over his fingers and down the inside of her coffee-colored thighs.

She moved against him, and gasped as his fingers slipped up inside her, moving almost of their own accord. She had her first climax right there on the stairs, grinding her hips furiously against his hand. Afterward she licked his fingers like a greedy child, sucking the fluids off them one by one, then drew him wordlessly into the apartment.

By then Jay had forgotten all about her eyes.

10:00 P.M.

There was never a Werewolf around when you needed one. Egrets were scarce, too. Brennan pounded the streets for two hours before he spotted one of the gang members, a Werewolf, staggering out of Freakers.

The Werewolf was big, hairy, and muscular. He wore faded and torn jeans and enough chains and leather straps and cords to fill Michael Jackson's closet. The plastic Mae West mask that covered his face added more than a touch of incongruity to his appearance. He stopped on the street in front of Freakers to extort a few bucks from some slumming nat tourists who were trying to decide whether or not to go into the bar, then lurched past them into an alley half a block down the street. Brennan followed him.

The alley was suitably dark and isolated. The joker was urinating against a brick wall and singing "I'm So Lonesome I Could Die" to himself, lowly and badly. He was zipping up his fly when Brennan laid the edge of his knife against his throat and said conversationally, "I think your voice would sound a lot better if I cut you right here. What do you think?"

The joker stood paralyzed until Brennan stepped back, then he turned around slowly, carefully holding his hands out and away from his sides.

"You some kind of crazy nat?" the joker finally asked. "Just visiting the big bad city to check on some of my old friends." Brennan reached into the pocket of his denim jacket with his left hand. "My card," he said, holding up an ace of spades.

The huge joker seemed to shrink back into himself. "You the real thing, man?"

"Try me," Brennan offered, but the joker just shook his head. "I don't want to dance," Brennan said. "I just want to talk. I'm looking for one of the bigger fish. Warlock. Lazy Dragon. Maybe Fadeout. Seen any of them tonight?"

"I seen Dragon earlier. He said he was going to be spending the night at Chickadee's, but he wasn't too happy about it. He was bodygdarding some Fist wheel, so he couldn't party."

Brennan nodded. Lazy Dragon was a free-lance ace who worked part-time for the Fists, often directly for a Shadow Fist lieutenant named Philip Cunningham, who was fairly high in the organization. Cunningham, who was also called Fadeout because of his ability to turn invisible, would know if Kien had put out a contract on Chrysalis. Brennan had once worked for Fadeout himself when he'd joined the Fists undercover in an attempt to bring them down from within. In fact he'd saved Fadeout's life when the Mafia had attacked his headquarters. Perhaps they could come to some kind of accommodation.

"Okay,"' Brennan said. He gestured with his knife. "That the model the Werewolves are wearing this week?"

"Huh?"

"Your mask."

"Sure."

"Give it to me."

Brennan watched the Werewolf carefully. The common mask the gang wore was their symbol, their badge of belonging. Some fanatic Werewolves would kill before giving it up.

This one visibly tensed, then sighed and relaxed. He obviously knew Brennan's reputation, and despite his size and ferocious appearance had no wish to tangle with the man who had decimated Shadow Fist ranks the year before.

He slipped the mask off and gave it to Brennan, turning his face down and away. Brennan took the mask, glanced at the man's face, and said nothing. He'd seen worse, a lot worse, though he could understand why the fierce-looking Werewolf was ashamed of his face. It looked as if it had stopped growing during the man's first year. It was a baby's face, soft and beautiful, perched grotesquely in the middle of his oversized head. It contrasted weirdly with the joker's savage, metal-and-leather appearance.

Brennan stepped back and the Werewolf edged around him and backed away, face still averted. He started off down the alley.

"Your fly's still undone," Brennan called out after him.

"Sleep," Ezili whispered to him, afterward.

He was very drowsy. He felt as though he could just surrender, settle slowly into the deep soft pile of the carpet beneath him, close his eyes, and drift peacefully. Until this moment, he hadn't realized how exhausted he was.

Ezili was smiling down at him, the soft weight of her breast against his arm. They'd never even bothered to turn on a light, but he could see her dimly by the light from the street lamp outside, filtering through softly blowing curtains. Her nipples were large and dark, the color of bittersweet chocolate. He remembered the taste of them. He reached out a hand, stroked the soft skin on the underside of her breast, but this time her fingers caught his wrist and gently took his hand away. "No," she whispered, "just sleep. Close your eyes, little boy. Dream." She kissed his brow. "Dream of Ezili-je-rouge."

Some part of Jay realized how crazy this was, but the rest of him didn't care. He wondered if Ezili was going to try and hit him up for money. She was supposed to be a hooker, after all. He didn't care. Whatever she charged, she was worth it. "How much for all night?" he whispered drowsily.

Ezili seemed to find that amusing. She laughed a light, musical laugh and began to stroke his forehead with languid, knowing fingers. It was incredibly soothing. The room was warm and dark. He closed his eyes and let the world begin to drift away. Ezili's fingers touched and gentled. Far off he heard her talking to herself, murmuring, "All night, all night," as if it were the funniest thing anyone had ever said. There were other noises, too, more distant, a door opening somewhere, a rustling of clothing, as if there were someone else there with them, but Jay was too tired to care. He was floating, sinking into a warm sea of sleep, and tonight he knew his nightmare would not come.

Then the outer door slammed open with a loud bang, and someone screamed, "Where is he?"

Bright light from the hallway fell across Jay's face, jolting him awake. He sat up groggily and put a hand in front of his eyes. Through his fingers, he saw a man outlined in the doorway, indistinct against the glare. "Shit," he complained, before he quite remembered where he was.

Ezili was on her feet, screaming at the intruder in French. Jay didn't speak a word of French, but he could tell from her tone that you wouldn't find many of those words in your basic French-English dictionaries. He heard a muffled noise behind him and turned just in time to glimpse a dark shape vanish through a bedroom door. A child, he thought, with some kind of humpback or twisted spine, but in the dim light it was hard to be sure. Whoever it was slammed the door behind them.