I'm begging. Please come back.

It hardly sounded like a promise of protection. In fact, it seemed like the opposite. Suddenly, a thought came to me. What if Peter Roffcale had not been offering his protection, but begging for hers? I glanced at the date on the letter. It was quite recent, only a day before Joan Talbott had disappeared. I folded the pages back into a bundle and slid them into their rough pulp envelope. The postmark on the envelope showed that it had gone out the next morning. Joan Talbott would have read it only a few hours before she vanished.

"So?" Harper's voice caught me off guard. I almost jumped, he was so close behind me.

"So, what?" I replied as coldly as I could. I turned back to him slowly.

Harper had located his clothes and dressed. Only his cap was missing. I caught his puzzled glance toward my hat rack. I smiled at that. The night before I had stuffed his cap into one of the spider-infested filing cases under my bed.

Harper's hair tangled around his face like a thorn briar. His eyes were red, rimmed, and bloodshot from the excesses of the evening before. Without a cap shadowing his features, his exhaustion and youth were easy to see. He seemed vulnerable despite the hard black lines of his Inquisitor's coat. That almost made up for him surprising me.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I think that we need to go to Roffcale's residence at Good Commons." I stood up, grabbed my coat and smoked-glass spectacles, then glanced back at Harper. "Are you hungry?"

"Not right now," he replied.

"Badly hung-over?" Perhaps I sounded a little too pleased, but Harper didn't seem to care. Perhaps taunting was what he expected of my kind, even after a night spent together.

"No." Harper pushed his fingers through his wild hair. "I just haven't had much of an appetite lately."

Of course not. His sister was missing and quite possibly dead. It was no wonder that I had been able to get him so drunk, so easily. He probably hadn't eaten in days.

"It'll only get worse if you don't eat something." I reluctantly found myself picking up my own black wool cap and tossing it to Harper. "We'll stop in at Mig's. They have decent beef pies there."

Harper turned the cap over in his hands and then put it on. It fit about as well as his old one had, though this cap was more scuffed. It smelled lightly of my hair. I wondered if Harper noticed.

"Before we go..." Harper adjusted the cap so that his eyes were once again shadowed.

"Yes?" I was already at the door with one hand wrapped around the knob.

"About last night..." Harper shifted slightly. "I think it would be best if we got it clear between the two of us—"

"I have no intention of telling anyone, if that's what you're worried about." I smiled so that Harper could see my long teeth. "And I don't think you're likely to be bragging about it, so what's left to say?"

"No, I meant between us.. .We were both pretty drunk. I just wanted you to understand that..." Harper paused, unwilling to go on. Steadily, the pause began to spread into a lingering silence. He seemed unable to make himself speak of the night before. It amused, but didn't surprise me.

"You wanted to make it clear that it was just a drunk fuck?" I filled in for him at last.

"I'm not sure those are the words I would have used," Harper replied.

"It was a good tumble, Captain. But rest assured, I haven't fallen madly in love with you. Just forget about it, and let's get on with our business." I turned the knob experimentally, feeling the latch slide free and then slip back. Discussions after sex always ran the chance of turning ugly. Or worse, sentimental. I pulled the door open just a crack.

"I just wanted to make sure we were of the same mind," Harper said at last.

"Well, I've told you what I think. So, are we agreed?" I asked.

"Yes," Harper said.

"Then that's all there is to say about it," I said.

Harper nodded and I opened the door with a sense of relief.

It was pleasant to find another man as willing to let go as myself. Others had lingered in my bed and concerned themselves with the syringes scattered across my desk. They had clung to me as I descended into ruin. Some had attempted to save me. I had been wept on, slapped, and pulled into a dozen chapels by men who had mistaken me for their true love.

None of them had understood that my moments of sweetness were pure ophorium. Everything that they seemed to love about me came from the needles they detested. The man they desired was an illusion, an ugly stone made briefly beautiful by a trick of the light. In their own ways, each of them had fallen as deeply in love with my addiction as I had. None of them had known how absurd they were, begging me to leave behind the drug that was the source of all they loved most about me. My kindness, my calm, even my careless ease. Ophorium made me their perfect lover because it erased the truth of what I was.

When it coursed through my body, I burned free of thought and memory. That radiant absolution was far more consuming than any number of desperate climaxes against another man's sweating flesh.

I doubted that Harper concerned himself with any of this, but at least he didn't care. We descended into the evening with a comfortable distance between us.

Chapter Five

Ghosts

The sun sat back against the horizon like a bloated foreman refusing to end the day. It poured its yellow heat across the city streets, baking the horse shit and mud into a steaming soup. Flies, dogs, and filthy children zipped through the hot muck while horse carriages and wagons stirred it into a seeping river. It stank in a way that fans and perfume-soaked kerchiefs couldn't begin to disguise. The radiant sunlight only made things seem worse. It illuminated each fetid detail of day around me. The bare ugliness of everything under the sun repulsed me.

I strode toward the staircase ahead. A massive granite arch rose up over the wide stone steps, which lead down into humid blackness. It was one of the thirteen gateways that lead down into the Prodigal ghetto. The actual gates had been removed, but the engraving in the archway remained: They who were lost shall be found.

I imagined that the men who wrote those words had higher aspirations than most of us who passed beneath them into the city below.

Some optimistic bishop had christened the place Hopetown. Anyone who had ever gone there called it Hells Below. That summed it up well enough.

It might have been beautiful three hundred years ago when the Covenant of Redemption had brought my fallen ancestors up from Damnation. They abandoned their great kingdom of endless darkness in exchange for the promise of Salvation for themselves and their descendants.

The walls of the staircase were adorned with mosaics of the Great Conversion. Ashmedai, Sariel, Satanel. The pride and glory of hell had come in their robes of fire, in their chariots of beaten gold. Some were adorned with jewels, while others wore the polished bones of the angels that had fallen beneath their blades. They had each bowed down before the Silver Cross and submitted to baptism at the hands of the Inquisition.

The brilliant glazes were darkened with lamp smoke and factory grease now, but the images were still discernable. Some-where among the glittering host of demons, one of my own ancestors stood. They all looked fierce and beautiful. I found it difficult to imagine that I could have descended from such creatures.

The blood had certainly thinned.

The carved temples and catacombs that had once been a city of hope had decayed into dank ghetto. Hundreds of tunnels riddled Hells Below now. City sewer pipes and massive gas lines invaded every space and dripped with condensation. The lattice of temple walls had collapsed. Now, vast caverns gaped wide with tenement houses and ore sluices. The children of hell's greatest lords had been bred down into coal miners.