Chapter Sixteen

"My God. What happened to you?"

Samuel Gregory's eyes flicked from his own reflection in the bathroom mirror to the reflection of Farro's face over his shoulder.

"I got burned," he said, setting down the tube of ointment and turning away from the mirror.

"Some fire," Farro said. "A witch?"

"Yes."

"Smells like witchfire."

Samuel didn't answer. Brushing past Farro, he left the bathroom and went to lie on the bed. The connecting door between their rooms was open, although it had been locked the last time he'd noticed. Well, that was one of the prices of having a friend who could pick locks.

Farro followed Samuel, though he didn't sit or lie on the bed. Instead, he leaned against the sliding mirrored door of the closet and stared at the older vampire.

"Are you all right?"

"Why do you think I wouldn't be?"

"The fact that you're limping?"

"It's nothing."

"How long ago did she strike you?" Samuel didn't answer. Farro persisted. "If you're still limping after a few hours, it's not 'nothing.'"

"Witchfire can hurt a vampire more than most things. It doesn't mean that I'm about to die of it. It's not as bad as wood."

"It's not good, either." Farro leaned out to touch Samuel's leg. Samuel jerked away before the touch could connect. Farro straightened.

"You're hurt worse than you would admit."

"I'll heal."

"Yes, we always heal, but it can take time, if it's witchfire. Who did this?"

Samuel didn't answer.

"You might as well tell me now, because I'm going to stay here and pester you until you give in."

"Farro. Leave it."

"No."

"Why on earth not?" Samuel's exasperation broke through the calm tone he had intended to use.

"Because the council sent me here to clean matters up. Which may include killing you, if you don't seem to be following the council's orders."

"You don't want to try to kill me," Samuel said, almost pleasantly.

Farro ignored the undertones. "No, I don't want to. Haven't I said that all along? You've done me favors in the past, and I'd rather work with you than any of the other assassins. But I've told you that I won't stick my neck out on your account. Not much further, anyway."

"So do whatever you think you must." Samuel closed his eyes.

"What I want to know is what's going on. Is that so much to ask? And if you won't tell me, then what am I supposed to think?" When Samuel was silent, Farro went on. "Are you violating your oath?"

Samuel opened his eyes. "Never."

"Then you ought to be able to tell me what happened and how you managed to end up burned with witchfire so badly that you still haven't healed from it."

Samuel sighed.

"Talk," Farro said, unrelenting.

Samuel did.

"Anne?"

Although the voice hadn't been loud, Anne woke up hastily. She hadn't been sleeping deeply. The big chair in the corner of her mother's room pulled out and down to make a narrow bed, but it wasn't really comfortable.

To her relief, she saw that it was Mary bending over her.

"Sh." Mary gestured, and Anne hastily grabbed her shoes and followed Mary outside into the hall. Behind them, Anne's mother slept peacefully.

There was a chair by the nurses' station. Anne sat there and tied her shoes while Mary talked.

"They released Neil late last night. It was just a simple break, nothing too bad. They gave him a bunch of drugs for the pain, though, and he's home asleep now."

"What about Amaranth?"

Mary hesitated. "She's still unconscious."

Anne felt her stomach plunge. "No."

"She may wake up soon," Mary said. "The doctors don't know."

"But do they think she'll be all right? That it's just temporary?"

Mary paused again before answering. "They say that it's hard to tell with head wounds. She might wake up any minute, or . . . well, she might stay in a coma for a long time."

"A coma?"

"Technically, she's in a coma now. It's a coma if you're unconscious. But most comas are very short," Mary added hastily. "Lots of people wake up after a day or two."

Anne was silent. She didn't know what to say.

"Her parents are with her now," Mary offered, after a few seconds. "They're . . . you know. Like Amaranth."

"So they might be able to help her? In, um, their special ways?"

"They think so. No one's giving up hope yet," Mary assured Anne earnestly. "She'll probably be fine."

Anne wished that Mary had said so right away, instead of saying that Amaranth was still in a coma and that her parents were using their witch powers to bring her back to consciousness.

"What are we going to do now?" she voiced her thoughts.

Mary took a deep breath. "We'll try to stay safe. To protect Amaranth and Neil, while they can't protect themselves."

"Can we—" Anne noticed how close they were to the station nurse, and she stood and walked with Mary a little way down the hall. "Can we call some other people from Daybreak to help us?"

"I don't know." Mary sounded unhappier than Anne had ever heard her before. "Amaranth was the one who had the Daybreak contacts. I really don't know who to call."

"You don't?" Anne was startled. She'd assumed that both Amaranth and Mary, as Nightworlders by birth, knew all about Circle Daybreak and had friends in it.

"No. Most of us don't know much. For secrecy reasons," Mary explained. "If someone from the Night World council catches us and questions us, we can't betray too many other people. Amaranth was the only one who had email addresses and phone numbers."

"And she's unconscious." Anne thought rapidly. "Does she have an address book? Somewhere that she might have written the addresses down?"

"I don't know."

"Can we get into her house to look? We've got to try."

"I can tell her parents that I left some of my homework in her room. They might give me a key."

"Good." Anne felt better. They had a plan now, and it could work. If they could find even a single Daybreak address or phone number, they could call for help. Surely Daybreak would send someone to rescue them.

"I'll go see if I can get the key. If you wait here, they won't know you're involved."

"Okay." That was fine with Anne.

Mary came back in twenty minutes, beaming and holding a house key in her hand. "We've got a couple of hours. Amaranth's father said that they might have to go back to the house to get some things that they need, but that they'd keep trying what they're doing for a while first."

A couple of hours later, though, they were both tired and discouraged.

"We've looked everywhere," Anne said. They had. Under the mattress, in the closet, in all the drawers of Amaranth's dresser and her desk and in her books.

"Maybe she kept the addresses only in her head. Memorizing them would be safest." Mary collapsed on the bed, looking exhausted. Anne wondered briefly if her friend had gotten any sleep that night.

"Would the addresses be in her email account?"

"Maybe. But I don't know her password."

"Could we find a hacker?" Anne asked hopefully. "Someone who could hack into her account?"

"I don't know. Do you know how to find a hacker?"

Anne didn't. She knew lots of people who spent lots of time online, but she doubted that any of them knew how to break into someone's email account without a password.

"Maybe we could persuade a network administrator to give us her password?"

"Persuading people is a witch skill." Mary sounded very tired. "Amaranth might have been able to do it. But if Amaranth were here to do it—"

"—we wouldn't need her to persuade the network administrator," Anne finished gloomily.

"We might go back to the hospital," Mary offered, after a silent minute. "Maybe Amaranth's woken up."

It was a faint hope, but better than nothing. When they reached the hospital, though, the nurses told them that there had been no change in Amaranth's condition.

"This is my fault," Mary said unhappily, as they wandered away. "If I had waited, not jumped for Samuel Gregory right then. . . ."

"It wasn't your fault," Anne said, trying to comfort her. "It was his fault. You didn't make him throw Amaranth at you."

"But he wouldn't have done that if we hadn't been attacking him. And it was horrible. I felt her head hit my shoulder, and I knew right away that it was too hard. Witches aren't as strong as shifters or vampires, and I knew right away that she might be hurt. But it was too late."

"Hey," Anne said, frightened for the first time by Mary's tone. She'd never heard the shifter girl sound so despairing and guilty before. "It wasn't your fault. Really."

"It was. I should have waited. Or I should have been there earlier. But I didn't want to change before he arrived. I was afraid he would smell the lion, and there was absolutely no reason why a lion would be there unless it was a shifter, and he would have guessed right away what was going on."

"It wasn't your fault," Anne repeated, as forcefully as she could. "You were trying to help. Everything that happened was his fault. He was trying to kill us all."

Mary shook her head. "If he had really been trying to kill us, we'd all be dead."

"Not you. You could have fought him off. I mean, you were a lion. He's only a vampire."

Mary shook her head again, but Anne thought she looked a little less troubled. "It's kind of you to say that, but . . . I don't know. Vampires are very hard to kill, even for shifters. And he's an assassin, while I've never actually . . . killed anyone before. I don't even change often, not really. It's too risky when you have a form that humans would notice."

"Still," Anne said comfortingly, "you're big and strong when you're a lion. I'd be scared of you, even if I were a vampire."

Mary smiled faintly. "Thanks."

"Maybe," Anne said thoughtfully, "we might be able to get Amaranth's password from the school computers. If she checked her email at school, maybe there'd be a record of it in the computer system there?"

"She might not have checked her email there," Mary said dubiously. "Or sent a message to anyone in the Night World. She might have been worried that someone would look over her shoulder at the wrong minute, or that one of the counselors would read her email."

"Or the principal," Anne said, remembering how frightened she'd been to find herself waking up in the counselor's office with the principal standing over her.

"Oh, the principal's a Nightworlder."

"He's what?" Anne's voice rose on the last word in spite of herself, and she saw annoyed nurses' faces turning toward her. Even in the hospital's hallways, you were supposed to be quiet.

"He's a vampire, a lamia. I thought you knew," Mary added, when Anne simply stared at her.

"No. How would I know?"

"I thought Amaranth would have told you."

"No. She never said that much about other Nightworlders." Anne's mind was racing. "So when he called a fire drill right before the bomb went off . . . did he know?"

Mary opened her mouth and then shut it again without saying anything. Her slightly heavy face looked disturbed. "I don't know."

"Can we get into the school computer system without his knowing? Because maybe he's in league with the Night World council, or Circle Midnight, or whatever."

Mary shrugged. "We can try."

They tried. They failed.

The school computer system, as it turned out, was protected with more firewalls and passwords than Anne had imagined the military used.

"They're afraid we'll get in there and change all our grades to As," one of the boys explained. "They figure teenagers have nothing better to do than try to hack their system."

Anne had to admit that she and Mary were trying to do just that. Of course, the circumstances were special. And they weren't trying to change their grades. Just to save their lives.

But nothing worked. The day ended, and Mary started to look at the lengthening shadows worriedly.

"We'd better get back to the hospital," she said at last. "I think it's safest there."

"What about Neil?" Anne imagined him at home, with no one to keep him safe but human parents who didn't know about the Night World. He might even be drugged and unable to warn them about any danger.

From the look on Mary's face, she was imagining the same thing. "What if I left you at the hospital and went to check on Neil? I can warn his parents, maybe . . . or maybe I can get them to take him back to the hospital, just for the night. . . ."

Anne didn't like the thought of their separating, but it seemed cowardly to protest that she didn't want Mary to leave her alone. Neil needed Mary more than she did. And Mary was right. Probably Samuel Gregory wouldn't want to attack her in a crowded hospital, with nurses and doctors everywhere.

"All right," she agreed.

Anne went to her mother's room first, but Ms. Jamison was dozing. Anne waited for a short time in the darkened, silent room before deciding to go check on Amaranth.

"She's still unconscious," a nurse told her.

"Can I see her?"

"Are you family?" the nurse asked, as if she was already sure the answer would be no.

"No," admitted Anne.

"Well, then—" The nurse suddenly paused and frowned. "All right."

Anne blinked. "It's all right?"

"Yes, but only for a short time, and be careful. You can talk to her, so long as you keep your voice down."

Anne couldn't believe her luck. She ducked inside Amaranth's room before the nurse could change her mind.

Amaranth was lying motionless in a bed identical to the bed in which Anne's mother was lying two floors above. Her eyes were shut, and she appeared to be sleeping. Next to her stood an IV pole with a transparent plastic bag, some tubing, and a number of mysterious red and green lights. Anne saw that Amaranth was hooked up to the IV pole by a variety of tubes and needles, and she looked away hastily. Her stomach roiled, but she forced the feeling back.

She hoped desperately that Amaranth would wake up soon. Anne couldn't bear to think that her friend might be in a coma permanently because of her.

Anne had seen a thousand movies with people getting killed. She'd read a thousand books with people getting killed. She expected violence in movies and books, and she realized that she expected to find it there. Violence was fine, even entertaining, when it was fictional.

But this moment, when she sat beside her friend's hospital bed and realized that her friend might never recover, was not entertaining at all. It was frightening and terrible and sickeningly real.

And it could just as easily have been Anne herself. She was Samuel Gregory's main target, after all.

Even if she managed to escape him, would she be here someday in a bed like this one, dying of old age or of some disease like cancer? Very possibly. Everyone died someday, and a lot of people did it in a hospital.

And would Amaranth be here again someday, too, even if she woke from her coma and was all right this time? She was a witch, not a vampire. She would grow old someday as well.

She might not even live to grow old. Circle Daybreak was disobeying the rules of the Night World, and Anne could see now that the rest of the Night World was taking Daybreak's disobedience very seriously. It was like a war. And, of course, people got killed in wars. If Amaranth continued to tell humans about the Night World, then the Night World might find out what she was doing, and it might send another assassin to kill her. The more Amaranth did to stop the prejudices and evil of the Night World, the more it was likely that they'd find her and kill her.

If Daybreak won the war, of course, then they'd all be safe. But it didn't look as if Daybreak was going to win any time soon. In the meantime, there'd be more fighting. More people would die. Any of the Daybreakers she knew could be among them—Amaranth, Mary, Neil, her. She could find herself on a hospital bed like this at any time, hooked to machines that would keep her alive while her brain was dead.

Or she could be dead and in her coffin at any time. She might be killed on the spot in a fight. She'd never really learned how to use the sword, in spite of Mary's patient training. And she'd failed pretty badly with the gun.

She was thinking about her death and the deaths of everyone near to her, so she wasn't startled at the quiet "Hello" that came from the door behind her. Even though the voice was that of Samuel Gregory.

"Hello," she answered, without turning. She kept her eyes fixed on Amaranth, the slow rise and fall of her friend's chest under the thin blankets. The monitor lights, blinking in a pattern Anne didn't know how to read.

She waited, but Samuel didn't say anything more. She didn't hear his approaching footsteps. Through the soulmate link, she could feel his presence across the room, but he seemed content to stay there, silent and watchful.

My damned soulmate, she thought, meaning it literally.

She couldn't stand putting it off any longer. She turned to face him.

"Have you come to finish what you started?" she challenged. "To kill her while she's lying there and she can't defend herself? That would probably be just like you, wouldn't it?"

She didn't know if the words were true. She didn't care any more, actually. She didn't care if she was being fair to Samuel Gregory, or not, or if they could find a way to resolve their conflict without killing one another, or not. She was tired of all the fighting, and all the violence, and the death that she saw as inevitable.

Just let's get this over with, she thought.

He'd been looking at Amaranth, not her, and she couldn't read the expression on his face. But as she spoke to him, he transferred his gaze to her.

Such a wonderful thing their soulmate connection was. In his eyes, she could see his own tiredness. A weariness as great as her own, and a similar sense that death was inevitable. Emptiness, and exhaustion, and a belief that their situation was going to end badly. That there was no possibility for them but unhappiness, in some form or another.

Great. They finally agreed on something.

She rose from the chair she'd pulled to sit beside Amaranth's bed. "I should have known you'd be willing to come kill me even in a hospital. You don't have any respect for anyone at all, do you? Not even the sick and dying."

"You're right," he said finally. His voice was quiet, but it seemed shockingly loud to her after the silence that had been broken only by the beeps of the machine and her own voice. "I don't care about the deaths of vermin."

"We are not vermin. Humans are people."

"I would have gone mad long ago, if I had believed that."

"You did go mad. You're absolutely crazy now. A crazy, insane killer. That's what you are, did you know that? An insane murdering madman."

He didn't answer. Behind Anne, Amaranth's machine continued its steady, rhythmic beeping.

"I didn't shoot your mother," he said suddenly, inconsequentially. "That was Ivy Greer. At least, my associate says so."

"Liar."

"You could use the soulmate connection to find out if I'm telling you the truth."

"You're not my soulmate," Anne said. "You're a monster. I can't have a monster as a soulmate."

He didn't seem offended, or surprised. Through the connection that she'd just denied, Anne didn't feel anything new in Samuel Gregory at all. He was still tired, and empty, and unhappily certain of what was going to happen.

"What does it say about us all, though, if I am your soulmate?" he asked. "That we change? That the old and the young can never truly connect with one another? That we all become monsters, with time?"

"Not everyone. Just you."

He smiled then, just a quick, unhappy twist of his lips. "Do you think that any other two soulmates who happened to be a teenage human and a centuries-old vampire would have had a better chance?"

"Yes."

"Well. Maybe you're right."

More agreement between them. It was such a pity, Anne thought, that they hadn't been able to agree on anything good. Only about the bad things, the horrible truths, that she'd come to accept existed.

"So have you come for Amaranth, or for me? Or for both of us?" she challenged.

"For you."

She hadn't expected anything different, but the familiar twist of physical terror at approaching death started to curdle slowly in her stomach.

He stepped forward slowly. She stepped forward as well, away from Amaranth. If she could do nothing else, she could keep their fight away from her friend. Only a few steps away, maybe, but she could have that small victory.

She noticed that he was limping, very slightly, as he walked. She hadn't noticed a limp before. If he'd been hurt in the fight, she was glad.

They were close enough to touch, now.

"I have everything I need from you already," he told her softly. "All the information you have about Daybreak. I already took it from you when I drank from you before."

"I didn't know all that much for you to take." Anne remembered, with a savage pleasure, that Amaranth had kept the Daybreak email addresses and phone numbers completely secret. Anne had failed to discover them that day, which was bad in one way but good in another. She wouldn't be able to betray anyone to Samuel Gregory. And Amaranth, who might have been forced by torture to talk, was safely unconscious.

"You didn't," he agreed. "But the point is that I don't have to torture you now."

"But you still have to kill me, right?"

"Right." But he paused, his dark eyes lingering on hers. The moment stretched unbearably.

"Well?" she challenged him. "If you're going to kill me, why don't you go ahead and do it?"

His fingers came up, cradled the back of her head and tangled in her hair. She knew, then, that he intended to drink her blood and to kill her that way. She supposed it was the natural way for a vampire to kill.

She didn't have the gun Neil had given her, or the wooden sword that she and Mary had practiced with. She was almost completely unarmed.

She was ready for him to strike at her throat. But he paused once more.

"You've changed," he said.

"I'm still me."

"Yes. But you've changed. You wouldn't have challenged me to kill you before. Remember? Before, you tried to persuade me to give up my place in the Night World and to join Circle Daybreak with you. You wanted us to have some sort of a life together. You believed that everything would be all right if I just agreed to change in a few ways."

"I know better now."

"Yes." His eyes, dark and tired, flickered across her face. "As I said. You've changed."

With no warning, then, he struck for her throat. Anne felt the pain of the penetration, the peculiar sensation of something foreign deep inside in her flesh. She prepared herself to fight back.

But darkness was rising all around her. It was faster than she had expected. Almost between one heartbeat and the next, her knees were giving way. Her hands groped clumsily for her pockets, but they never reached inside. Her eyes lost focus, then shut. Slowly, her body sagged deadweight into Samuel Gregory's arms.

He continued to drink for some time.

The door to Amaranth's room opened again, closed discreetly.

"Is it over?" Farro asked.

"More or less." Samuel Gregory straightened from the body on the floor. "I should get a gurney. It will be the least obvious way of removing her."

"I had to reinforce your command to the nurse to be elsewhere," Farro commented, walking over and bending to inspect Anne's lifeless body. "You took a while. What were you two doing so long? Having sex? Holding a debate about the meaning of life?"

"More or less?"

"Really? Which one?"

"The debate."

"Pity." Farro's eyes rested on Anne's pale face. "It's supposed to be better with a soulmate. You shouldn't have wasted your last opportunity."

"Why don't you get the gurney?"

"Why should I?" When Samuel didn't answer, Farro sighed and straightened. "Right. Feel free to pay your last respects to the dearly departed. It's not every day you kill your soulmate, is it?"

"No."

"What about the other one?"

"Which other one?"

"The Daybreak witch." Farro's eyes traveled casually to Amaranth's still figure in the bed. "She's under sentence of death too, isn't she? For having told your ex-soulmate about the Night World?"

"I want confirmation from the council first."

"Getting cautious, aren't you?"

"And if she has to be killed, then I don't want to do it here."

"Where else is better? Lots of people die in hospitals. It won't look strange for another to die, too."

"Her parents were here recently. They're Night World witches too. It's perfectly possible that they might be able to find out that her death wasn't natural."

"They're supposed to find out. They're supposed to learn that joining Daybreak brings about your execution. That's part of the idea." When Samuel Gregory didn't answer, Farro sighed. "Right. I'll go find that gurney."

"Farro?" Samuel's quiet voice stopped the other assassin as his hand touched the door handle.

"What?"

"This is over now. I've conformed to the council's orders regarding Hunter Farmer's daughter. So you can report back to them, preferably as soon as possible, that everything is under control here. I do not need any more supervision."

There was a slight pause.

"As you wish," Farro finally said. His voice was neutral. "I'll be on my way as soon as I can schedule a flight."

"Good."

As Farro's quiet footsteps retreated down the hall, Samuel Gregory continued to look down at Anne's still body.