Chapter Nine

"I need to speak with you," Anne told Amaranth, as soon as homeroom ended and they had a few minutes between classes.

"Now?" Amaranth shoved her English notebook in her locker and looked at Anne in surprise.

"At lunch. But I've absolutely got to talk to you then. It's important."

Amaranth blinked. "All right."

Anne was a few seconds late to her next class. It might have made her feel guilty last week. It didn't bother her at all that day. She stared at her notebook or out the window while the teacher talked to them about the very odd Battle of New Orleans. She was worried, and frightened, and nervous with anticipation, all at the same time.

When lunch finally came, she could barely control her impatience long enough to stand in the food line. She took the first selections offered and hurried to the spot in the corner where she and Amaranth had eaten before. It was about as private a place as you could get in a school lunchroom, which wasn't saying much.

Amaranth was already there, poking with some uncertainty at what the school alleged was vegetable lasagna. "What's up?"

"I got an email late last night," Anne said tersely, sitting down. "From him." She emphasized the last word meaningfully.

Amaranth blinked. "From Samuel?"

"Yes, him. Whatever his real name is."

Amaranth pushed her plate to one side and leaned forward, excited. "This is great! I knew he'd contact you. What did he say?"

"He wants to have a private meeting with me," Anne said grimly.

"Great! When, where?"

"Tonight. And here, actually."

"Here?"

"School," Anne elaborated. "The chemistry classroom where he kidnapped me before, actually." She frowned. "I wonder if he's got a set of keys to the school, or something like that? Because this is the second time he seems to think that he can get into the school at night, without any problems at all."

"He's a Night World assassin and a vampire. They probably, I don't know, trained him in assassin school to be able to get into whatever building he wants."

Anne had a brief ludicrous image of kindergarteners in ninja costumes sitting with their chubby, tiny hands folded at their desks while a teacher drew lock-picking diagrams on the blackboard. Well, that was certainly unreal, but for all she knew there was a Night World Assassins' Academy somewhere.

"Anyway," she said, bringing herself firmly back to the lunchroom and her conversation with Amaranth, "what do you think I should do? Neil hasn't gotten me a gun yet. We don't even know for sure if he'll be able to."

"You don't need a gun to meet your soulmate!" Amaranth sounded horrified.

"You keep saying that, but he tried to kill me last time."

"That was before he knew you were his soulmate."

"Well, he didn't seem terribly impressed with me," Anne muttered.

"Doesn't matter. You're still his soulmate. He's had time to realize that," Amaranth sounded very certain. "There's only one way that this can go now. He'll talk to you a little, he'll fall in love, you'll fall in love with him, and he'll leave Circle Midnight and join Circle Daybreak so that the two of you can be together forever."

Anne blew out her breath in a frustrated puff.

"I hope you're right," she finally said, choosing her words carefully. "I really do. Please don't think that I don't hope that everything goes exactly the way you said."

Amaranth sighed in turn. "But you just aren't sure it will."

Anne nodded. "I mean, he tried to kill me last time. That was—" she hesitated, at a loss for words, before finally settling on "—scary."

It had been much worse than "scary," but she didn't want to say that. She wanted to be a strong member of Circle Daybreak, and not weak or incompetent.

Amaranth was clearly thinking hard. "I could give you a spell of protection. I don't have a lot of time if your meeting's tonight, and I need time to make a strong spell that will last a long time. But I can still make a strong spell if it doesn't have to last very long. If you know when you're going to meet with Samuel. . . ."

"At ten o'clock exactly."

"I could give you a protection spell that would start around 9:30 and last until midnight," Amaranth offered, after thinking a little. "And we could all come with you and stay outside, but close enough that we could hear you if you shout."

It was Anne's turn now to think hard. "I don't know if it would be a good idea for all of you to come. He said that I had to come alone. He might not show up if he knew the rest of you were out there."

It also occurred to her that it might be dangerous for her friends to wait for her. What if Samuel Gregory followed them home, learned who they were? If he told the Night World council that he'd found and identified a group of Daybreakers, would the council order their deaths? Or—worse yet--was Samuel Gregory under standing orders to kill any Daybreakers he found?

She didn't know if Amaranth was thinking the same thing, but the other girl was nodding, if a bit reluctantly.

"You're right," she said. "He asked for a private meeting between the two of you, and you can't lie to your soulmate. You have to give him a private meeting, or else not go at all." She brightened. "But I can still help you get permission from your mother to be out late."

Anne winced at the thought of having Amaranth put yet another spell on her mother. But she didn't see what other choice she had, not really. Her mother would almost certainly ask a lot of questions if Anne said that she had to go somewhere that late in the evening.

"All right."

That evening, while her mother looked faintly dazed and agreed with Amaranth that Anne could and should stay out as long as she wanted that night, Anne clung firmly to the thought that she had no choice. She had to meet with the assassin, and she had to allow Amaranth to bespell her mother in order to have her meeting. It might not be a good thing, but it was less bad than refusing to meet with Samuel Gregory. She had no idea what would happen if she refused to talk with her soulmate, but she was afraid that it wouldn't be good.

When she arrived at the school, she wasn't sure at first how she would get in. But one of the front doors was unlocked, and a few lights had been left on. She walked slowly through the dim corridors to the science wing. She'd never been in the school before when it was empty, and the halls somehow seemed both bigger and uglier. She wished she could turn around and leave, but she knew she couldn't.

The door to her chemistry classroom was closed but unlocked. She pushed it open slowly and stepped inside.

She'd imagined that Samuel Gregory would either have turned all the lights on, or that he'd have met her there in pitch darkness. Neither was true. A single overhead light was on, just as had been true in all the other classrooms she'd passed. From outside, she realized, this room would look no different than any other. As long as neither of them stepped close enough to the windows to be seen, no one would know they were there. And the windows were small and high, so that it wasn't easy for the students to look out, or anyone to break in.

He was sitting at the teacher's desk, riffling through what she recognized with a shock as Mr. Farris's grade book. He didn't look up as she entered. She stood there, uncertain for a second of what to do.

"Did you know that you're only doing a little above average in this class?" he asked her, still looking at the grade book. She could hear the accent in his voice again, faint but distinct.

"I have a B-plus." This wasn't the conversation she'd expected.

"Yes, exactly. Most of the students are making either a B or a B-plus. A few Cs, one D. A bunch of As. You may think you're making good grades, but in fact you're only average." He shut the book and slipped it back in the drawer before looking at her and smiling.

"You said I was a little above average before," was all Anne could think to say.

"Well. A very little." He held his fingers up to pinch a tiny bit of air.

He was still smiling. It was a condescending smile, that of an adult to a child, and it made Anne angry. Maybe he was older than she was, but he didn't have any right to condescend to her.

"How old are you?" she asked abruptly.

He tilted his head, smile fading. "Does it matter?"

"It does to me."

"And I am here to answer your questions, of course." He said it as if it weren't true at all, as if it were rather funny that she might have even imagined that he might answer.

"You might as well tell me," Anne said. She could feel her own anger growing, and she struggled to try to keep it back. She was here in the hope that he'd agree to abandon his project of trying to kill her. There wasn't any point in antagonizing him.

Even if he behaved as if he knew everything, and she knew nothing; as if he had all the power and time in the world, and she had none of either.

"Over six hundred," he said, pushing the chair back slightly from the desk and starting to swivel it back and forth.

Anne did some rapid math in her head. "You're practically medieval," was the first thing that came to her mind.

"No. I'm a Night World assassin." He wasn't smiling any more. "Not a human. Human time doesn't matter to me."

"But you were a human once. You're a made vampire."

There was a pause, and then the chair began to swivel again. "I am," he said, lightly.

"You remember being human."

"I have an excellent memory." The chair continued to swivel, back and forth.

"Why do you kill humans? You used to be one," Anne challenged. "Do you think it's right?"

"You're vermin."

"You used to be vermin, too."

"But I'm not now," he pointed out reasonably.

His foot suddenly stopped the swing of the chair and he looked at her, motionless.

"You don't have to be human any more, either. In fact, it would be an excellent solution to our current problem."

"What problem?" she asked. But her heart was beginning to pound, and she had a bad feeling that she wouldn't like where the conversation was going.

"I have to kill you," he said. He sounded quite calm, as if this were no more important to him than the chemistry grades he'd been looking at before.

"Why don't you just stop? Stop trying to kill me, I mean."

"And then what do you think would happen?"

"You'd just . . . go home. Back where you came from. Wherever. I'd go on with school. Nothing would happen."

Her heart was pounding even harder. What would he say to that?

According to Amaranth, Anne's soulmate would have stood up, declared he had no intention of leaving his beloved soulmate, and taken her in his arms. After which, they'd have flown to the arms of Circle Daybreak together. Anne didn't really expect such a happy, painless ending. But she still felt sick at the answer she got.

"No, that's not would happen. What would happen is that the Night World council would punish me, maybe kill me, for having refused to kill you. And it wouldn't do you any good, either because the council would send another assassin after you. And you'd be dead."

"Maybe I wouldn't. Maybe I can take of myself," Anne said, struggling to sound defiant and strong.

He just shook his head, his expression going remote. "You don't know how easy it is to kill a person."

"I know enough."

"No, you don't, or you wouldn't say you can defend yourself." He met her eyes, and she was surprised to see how serious he'd become.

"Assassins don't kill because they're supermen with super-skills. That's for television shows, books, movies. Assassins kill because their targets don't know that they're there. You can't protect yourself from a lethal blow when you don't know that someone's planning to deliver it. It takes one bullet—just one—with a rifle with a laser target. One bomb—"

"Someone already tried to kill me with a bomb. And I'm still here."

He made an impatient sound with his tongue. "Yes, bombs can go off at the wrong time, and you weren't in the classroom when it went off, so you survived. And maybe you would have survived even if you had been there, because you might not have been sitting close enough to the bomb to be caught directly in the blast. But you're missing the point here. If someone really wants you dead, and that person's reasonably competent, that person can buy or make a weapon to kill you before you even know what's happening. That's how your father managed to kill Nightworlders, after all."

"It was?" Anne said, before she could stop herself.

"Oh, yes. Did you think he was eight feet tall and a samurai who'd trained for years in some mystical dojo? No, he had a gun and knew how to shoot well. He shot Nightworlders before they could defend themselves with their powers. If half your head is blown off, it doesn't matter what powers you have. You're dead. Or at least, you're so close to dead that your killer can come up to you and finish you off easily with wood or silver or whatever you're vulnerable to." He looked her directly in the eye. "I never met your father, but he was infamous in the Night World. He usually shot Nightworlders in the back, because that was more efficient and safer than challenging them and letting them gather their powers to defend themselves."

Anne felt sick. She'd never known her father had killed Nightworlders until recently, but when Amaranth had told her, she'd imagined her father as . . . as a male version of Buffy. Amaranth had even called him a slayer, just like Buffy. She'd thought of him as doing backflips with a stake and effortlessly turning snarling, soulless vampires to dust. Or as fighting the way Mary did, with a wooden sword.

"I'm sorry," she said softly.

But Samuel was shaking his head impatiently. "I'm not criticizing him. I'm pointing out how assassins work. All assassins. He didn't do anything I haven't done. Every assassin I know kills by shooting the target in the back, or by doing things that are equally unfair. Shooting people in the back is efficient and gets the job done. And we're professionals. We're not doing this for TV ratings. Our job is to kill people, not to look pretty while we're doing it."

He paused.

"So don't think you can defend yourself. You can't. I couldn't, if an assassin targeted me. Powers are good, vampire speed is good, witch spells are good, changing shapes is good—but none of it matters, absolutely none, against a bullet in the head. Or any of half a dozen other tools that assassins use," he finished, bleakly.

"So what do I do?" Anne said, after it became clear that he wasn't going to lecture her any more about assassins and how they worked. "Do I just give up and die?" She was surprised to hear how bitter her voice sounded.

He took a deep breath, and she was startled to see how fast he pushed away the dark mood that seemed to have come over him. Suddenly, he was alert and focused again. She could almost see that strange detachment return, see him look at her as if he were the adult and she were the child and he'd always find her clumsy and naive and amusing.

"I have a proposition for you," he said, lightly. "Perhaps it might save your life."

"What is it?"

"Leave."

"What?"

"Leave. Go to a Daybreak safehouse," he elaborated, as she stared at him. "In another city, it doesn't matter where—just far away from here. Let Circle Daybreak protect you. Change your name—the witches should be able to help with that. Make the Night World council lose track of you. After a while, they may even forget about you. But whether they do or don't, you'll be safe. You might even find a vampire or shifter to change you," he added, as an afterthought. "The council would be looking for a human, and they might overlook you if you were just another newly made vampire or shifter with a name they didn't recognize."

Anne shook her head.

"I can't do that."

"It's your only chance. You don't have much of a choice."

"I can stay here and fight."

"You can only stay here and die. I'll kill you."

Anne swallowed. "You're my soulmate. How can you say that? That you'll kill me? Without even blinking, or sounding as if it matters to you? Don't you care that we're soulmates at all? Even a little?"

He looked away from her for an instant—but not, Anne thought, as if he were ashamed of himself. It was more as if he were trying to find the words to explain something that he thought should have been too obvious to need explanation.

"I'm an assassin," he finally said. Carefully, choosing his words. "I kill people because the Night World council sends me to do so. It sends me to kill people in order to protect the Night World and to uphold its laws. Whoever I kill . . . suffers in dying. Their friends and families suffer and grieve when they're gone. I've always known that's what I do. But it's worth it, because sometimes killing people is necessary to uphold Night World society and its laws. Sometimes nothing else works."

He took a breath and went on, as carefully as before. "As for killing you—yes, it will hurt you, and it will hurt your family and friends, and it may even hurt me. If what people say about soulmates is true, then I'll suffer because of your death. But it doesn't matter whether you and I and everyone around you suffers. What matters is that the law will have been upheld, and that the Night World will be safe. That's what I swore to protect, centuries ago. And I've never broken my oath. It's the closest thing I have to a sacred trust."

He looked straight at her, and she could feel that he was completely certain of what he was saying. It was the truth as he saw it.

"You'll kill me," she said again, partly to be sure, and partly because she didn't know what else to say.

"Yes."

"Even though I'm your soulmate."

"Yes."

"Even though you'll be hurt, too."

"Yes."

He sat there, looking calmly at her through his dark eyes, and she didn't know what to say to reach him. To convince him that this was crazy.

"You could leave Circle Midnight and join Circle Daybreak with me," she suggested. Maybe that possibility hadn't occurred to him yet.

He shook his head. "I've taken an oath to the Night World council, which is controlled now by Circle Midnight. I won't break it."

Anne shut her eyes. "Why did you ever take such a stupid oath in the first place?"

It was a rhetorical question, and she didn't expect him to answer. But from the darkness behind her closed eyelids, she heard his voice, remote and emotionless, but with a hint of tiredness.

"When I became an assassin, I wanted to make the Night World a better place."

She opened her eyes.

"It was worse then than it is now," he went on. "Although you might not believe that. But there was a great deal of killing for no particular reason. Nightworlders didn't feel that they needed a reason to kill vermin. If you were hungry, you killed; it was as simple as that. There were always more peasants, and there was actually never quite enough food to feed them. Unless there was a famine, or a plague, and then enough of them died that you had to be careful to allow them to breed and replenish their ranks. And vermin killed us too, whenever they found us. They didn't think they needed reasons to kill, either. Or they had reasons that were obvious to them." He shrugged.

"In any case, Nightworlders and vermin killed one another all the time. For food, for sport, for revenge. There was no end to it. And then the Night World council imposed some laws. There would be perfect secrecy. There would not be any changing of vermin into Nightworlders, because the new Nightworlders might have remaining loyalties to the human world. There would be no love affairs between Nightworlders and vermin, because Nightworlders always want to change the human when they fall in love." He smiled, but not pleasantly. "It's always a one-way street, you know. The humans never change the Nightworlders into humans. If you think about it, that's proof that we're higher on the evolutionary chain than you are."

"It is not," Anne said instantly. "We're not higher or lower. We're just different. Not better or worse, but different."

"Modern twenty-first century democratic politically correct propaganda," he dismissed her words. "Six hundred years ago, we knew better."

"Six hundred years ago you didn't know about evolution at all."

"You'd be surprised what vampires who live for millennia know."

Anne looked away. Took a deep breath. There was no point in debating with him. He was obviously wrong, but he always had an answer.

"And so that's why you agreed to take their stupid oath and become—a tool for the Night World council to use to kill people?"

"I uphold the law."

"But these are bad laws."

"Better a bad law than no law at all. And, as I told you, things have gotten better. I believe that what I've done has helped make the Night World a better place."

Anne couldn't believe what he was saying was true. "What's your name?" she asked abruptly.

"I'm calling myself Samuel Gregory, at the moment."

"From Kafka."

He smiled and nodded.

"But what's your real name?"

He looked distant and amused. "You don't need to know it."

"So I don't need to know your name, and we're not going to . . . get together in any way. You're going to stay with Circle Midnight because of your precious oath, and I need to run away and hide for the rest of my life in a Circle Daybreak safehouse. Because if I don't, you'll kill me."

"Slowly and painfully," he agreed.

She snorted. "You wish."

He looked at her with those dark eyes that seemed to see what she did not, and suddenly she wasn't entirely sure he was just trying to frighten her.

"So is that it? You asked me to come here just to warn me that I needed to leave town or you'd kill me?"

He nodded.

"I don't believe you," she said. "We're soulmates."

"And that's a magic word to conjure by?"

"You're not killing me now," she pointed out. "Even though you keep saying that you won't break your oath to the Night World council, and it told you to kill me."

He frowned, obviously irritated. "The council allows me to judge the best time to strike."

"Does it also allow you to tell your prey that she should run to a Daybreak safehouse?"

Watching him, she saw the frown lines in his forehead melt away. Smooth, impassive, he looked at her as if he hadn't quite focused on her before that second.

"Do you want me to kill you now?"

She wasn't sure if it was a rhetorical question. She decided to play it safe. "No."

He rose. "Then I suggest you not bait me. And this conversation is over."

Over, and she wasn't in any better situation than before.

"You can't just—"

"I can." He turned away, obviously preparing to leave.

Anne darted forward and caught his wrist.

Amaranth had suggested that she try another skin-to-skin contact, if nothing else worked to persuade Samuel Gregory to leave Circle Daybreak and join Circle Daybreak. Anne had thought at the time that she wouldn't be desperate enough to grab a guy who'd tried to kill her once already. But she had changed her mind. Nothing had gone the way she'd expected it to that evening, and she was desperate enough after all to try to reanimate their soulmate connection.

For an instant, she only felt his skin, cool against her own. Then it seemed that sparks flashed between them, and she felt his presence all around her. Their minds seemed to touch, and all boundaries between them dissolved.

-Please,- she thought. –Don't kill me. Don't kill anyone. Just stop.-

He was angry in his head. The calm she'd seen on his face was gone, or had always been a pretense. -How often do I need to tell you what you ought to be able to see for yourself? I've been sent to kill you. You broke Night World law. I will kill you, unless you get out and aren't here any longer for me to kill!-

-We can all live in peace together! Humans and Nightworlders alike! It doesn't have to be this way!- She tried to send him some of the sense of optimism, of hope and faith, that she'd felt during the ceremony when she'd joined Circle Daybreak.

Cold denial, and impatience. –Yes, it does have to be this way.-

-No!-

-If you're young and naive enough to think that people can live in peace together now, when they never have in all of recorded and unrecorded history, that's no problem of mine.-

-I'm not young and I'm not naive!- All her frustration with the way he'd been treating her came out in a silent mental shout.

-Yes, you are,- he replied coldly.

And she saw then, with her mind touching his, that he really saw her that way. She saw the centuries stretch out in his mind, the wrinkled aged faces of people whose grandparents he'd seen born. She saw humans in satin knee breeches and embroidered coats saying, with sublime confidence, that they'd change the world to make it a place where no war would exist. She saw that he regarded her only as the latest naive fool who'd come up with the idea.

-I've lived six hundred years,- he told her brutally, and she realized that he'd followed what she was seeing in his mind. –All your Daybreaker ideas? All your hopes, fears, dreams, plans? I've heard them before. Before your country was even founded. Before your continent was even discovered! And you may be my soulmate, but you're also only seventeen years old!-

In his mind she felt, rather than heard, how young he thought seventeen was.

-And if I lived to be a hundred, you'd still think I was a child?- she asked bitterly.

-If you lived to be a hundred, I would still be six centuries older than you. The distance between us can never change.-

She wanted to cry, and scream, and hit him. She didn't know if that just proved his point that she was a child, or whether anyone would have felt the same way in her position.

With the barriers between them down, she could feel what he felt as well. It was cold disgust—perhaps not so much for her as for the situation, but disgust all the same. He'd been saddled with a soulmate that he didn't want. He didn't want any soulmate at all, but if he had to have one, he would have preferred another vampire, someone who was as old as himself, who had gone through similar experiences. Not a seventeen-year-old human.

He was seeing into her soul, but he didn't want the person he saw there. She was, truly, just a child to him. Someone who wasn't his equal and never could be, in his opinion. And maybe his dislike had other grounds besides her age. She wasn't sure; she only knew he didn't like her.

Then he pulled his wrist sharply away. The connection between them snapped.

Anne stared at him. She knew she ought to move, to say something, but she could find no words. Her emotions still vibrated with the shock and horror of finding that Samuel Gregory had looked into her soul and not liked what he saw there. He knew her, more deeply than anyone ever had and anyone ever would. And he disliked her.

"Don't do that again," her soulmate said. "Don't even think of doing that again."

And then, in a swirl and blur of vampiric speed, he was gone.