PROLOGUE The thief walked out of the shadows to the rear entrance of a shop that wasn't officially open. He had to knock for quite a while before the old man came to the door. He didn't think he'd been followed, but he felt like it. He'd felt like he'd been hunted, played with, since the moment he'd broken into the disc jockey's apartment. That place had been weird, full of valuable things, things that had been almost too easy to steal. It had been like an invitation. Yeah, like an invitation to do evil. And then face the consequences. The thief shook his head to clear it of these strange thoughts. He shivered, and when the old man opened the door just a little, enough to let him into the back room, he hustled inside. "Full moon tonight," the antique dealer said. He closed the door, then raised a window blind. "Hunter's moon," the thief answered. He didn't know why he'd said it. "It's not like anyone can see us back here," the old man said. "Besides, I like the moon." The silver moon- light covered his desk. His attention was caught by an object already on the desk as the silvery light sparked for a moment on the polished steel of a British cavalry saber. When the moon was overpowered by the brighter electric light as he turned on the desk lamp, the sword lost its almost magical glow. The old man looked curiously at his nervous protege. "What have you got for me?" The young man laid a briefcase flat on the desk. The old man leaned over him eagerly as he opened the case. Inside were two very special items, for the antique dealer's very private customers. The young man had a good eye for what those special customers liked to collect. The old man picked up the silver box and lifted the lid. "What's this?" he asked. "I don't know. 1 haven't looked inside it." "Looks like ashes." He chuckled. "The work's exquisite." "Turkish," the young man said. "Sixteenth century, I think." The old man sifted his fingers through the small pile of gray ashes in the bottom of the silver box. "Ashtray, you think?" He gave a short bark of laughter. "Funeral urn?" "God, I hope not." The thief shuddered again. Maybe he'd been carrying around the ashes of a cremated dead man. Maybe he was being haunted. He took the box from the old man and tossed the ashes away. They flew toward the window, toward the moonlight. They danced and glittered in a moonbeam, but neither man noticed as they turned back to the second item in the briefcase. The old man picked up a marble statue. It was about eight inches high, of a nude man holding a trident. "Roman." "Roman," the young man agreed. "First century. A household god, I think." "A numina, yes." The dealer ran his fingers lovingly over the cool skin of marble. "I have just the buyer for this." It was time to discuss prices. Behind them, the dust stopped swirling. It hung suspended on the air. It swayed back and forth, as if to music. It pulsed, as if to a heartbeat rhythm, It thinned and stretched and writhed. It changed color, from ash gray to silver to pearl. For a moment it was blue-veined molten lava. Then blood red. It turned into arms and legs, a torso, and finally a man. Or at least something shaped like a man. A naked, dark-haired form, with glowing yellow eyes. The creature stretched out its arms, looked up into the moonlight, and grew fangs. It turned around, toward the heated scent of life. It saw two men, and moved forward silently to feed. Then it saw the weapon resting on the table. The monster snatched it up with a howl of joy. It sliced the air with the sharp blade, then turned toward its first victim. The sound of steel severing flesh was as satisfying as the taste of blood. The old man died the true death, the saber slicing off the drained body's head, but the monster was too gorged to finish off the young one. The young one it tasted but didn't drain, didn't sever the spine. When it was done with its prey, the monster found the door, wrenched it off its hinges, and ran out to dance in the moonlight. After a long while, the young man stirred. He saw nothing, felt nothing, was nothing. He walked out the door and into the street. He had two needs. All that was left to him was the terrible, driving compulsion to find his maker, and the burning hunger. He followed them both into the night. 1 "ILLmet by moonlight, or so the saying goes. There's a full moon out tonight, my children. What does that mean? Is it ill or fair? What does the full moon really mean?" The voice on the radio was at once seductive and mocking. Not only was there a full moon, but LaCroix was in the mood to howl, Nick Knight thought, as he moved across his living room to open the specially made window hangings. There was a time when Nick would have been nervous to hear that tone in his maker's voice. He was still a little nervous, but not worried that LaCroix was going to go on one of his mad rampages. Not tonight. LaCroix was having too much fun taunting the citizens ofToronto as a call-in talk-show host. As the Nightcrawler he spewed equal amounts of vitriol and philosophy five nights a week. He enjoyed creating chaos as much as he did killing, and was gathering quite a fan following. Even Nick listened more nights than not. Monitoring the monster, he'd told Natalie when she'd asked why he bothered. And maybe missing him a little, which was something Nick didn't like to admit to himself. "Maybe one of us is mellowing in our old age," Nick said to the radio voice as the metal curtains rose noisily on their motorized tracks. Though he didn't need to breathe, he waited with held breath as the full silver disk came into view above the skyline. "Ah," he said when he could see it, and held his arms out wide. The ancients were right, there was magic in moonlight. He could feel it tingling along his skin and deep into his bones. Nick could not stand in the sun, but he loved moonlight. All of his kind did. He would have been happy to stand naked and bathe in it, but Natalie was coming over to share a rare night off. He didn't want to shock the lady, though he doubted there was anything that could shock a coroner who'd made friends with a vampire. "It makes you want to howl, doesn 't it? To scream. To conjure demons. To writhe in ecstasy or agony under its cold, hard light. To make love. Love." LaCroix had a way of saying the most tender human word that gave it the same meaning as pestilence. In LaCroix's hands, love was a plague. Nick had known LaCroix's kind of love for centuries. Someday he was going to escape it. For now, he crossed the room, found the remote, and turned off the stereo receiver. As LaCroix's voice disappeared, Nick heard the sound of the elevator coming up from the ground floor of the warehouse he'd turned into his home. He closed his eyes, and he could feel Natalie Lambert. Her heartbeat and the scent of her blood were as familiar as her face. He could feel her anticipation, and a sense of serenity as well. He shook his head and smiled. Nick could never understand why she enjoyed spending time in the company of a vampire. Tonight, he knew Nat was looking forward to watching a video of a film she hadn't had time to catch in the theaters. Nick had hopes that he could talk her into a walk in the moonlight instead. "No way. At least not yet," Natalie answered Nick's suggestion. She held up the yellow plastic bag from the video rental store. "I had to go to three places before I found this." She pointed a finger at her friend. There was a teasing light in Nick's eyes, a certain boyish set to his tilted head. It was all very charming, but he wasn't going to get away with it. "We're going to watch Slash and Burn." Nick made a face. "Oh, Nat, not another horror movie." "You said it was fine when I asked." He ran a hand through his dark blond hair, then gave her his best toothy smile?not the patented, yellow-eyed, fanged fiend look but the very human charm he turned on her when he wanted his way. "I changed my mind?" She had already put her Chinese carry out food down on the counter. Now she was ready to kick off her shoes and put the tape in the VCR. She was looking forward to a hot dinner and a gory movie. Considering what she did for a living and that she had a genuine vampire for a best friend, she didn't know why she liked horror movies, but she did. Maybe because horror movies weren't real. She glanced at her watch. "We can go for a walk at midnight." She smiled at him. "Now, doesn't that sound . . . ?" "Like a reasonable compromise," Nick supplied for her. She almost said "romantic," but that wasn't a word that they allowed to enter into their relationship, though they danced around it often enough. He was too pale to blush. She had a redhead's complexion, and turned her face away to hide the momentary embarrassment. He took the tape from her and moved to put it in the VCR. She grabbed her meal and a pair of chopsticks, and joined him on the leather couch as the credits rolled across the large-screen TV. While she ate her dinner, they stayed at opposite ends of the couch. By the time the white box was abandoned on the coffee table, they had sidled closer. By the time the werewolf hero of the movie had been captured by the ecoterrorists, they were seated close together in the center of the couch. Nick's arm was around her shoulders and she was leaning easily into his friendly, familiar embrace. It didn't bother her that his skin gave off very little warmth. And for once she didn't nag him because she knew that wasn't red wine he was sipping out of a champagne flute. Sometimes it was more important for them just to relax and be together than to remember that...
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