Date: 	Wed, 24 Dec 1997 15:56:48 -0500 (EST)
From: Amy Rambow <akr@email.unc.edu>
To: FK FanFic Archiver <fkarchiver@FKFANFIC.COM>
Subject: For the Archive: "Corners of the Mind"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This story presumes that its reader has seen the entire third season of
_Forever Knight_, particularly "Last Knight," "Ashes to Ashes," "The Human
Factor," and "Fever." 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Corners of the Mind

June 1997

by Amy Rambow  <akr@email.unc.edu>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Claims, disclaimers and credits can be found at the end of the story.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


"Shhhh, it's okay, Tracy," Paul smoothed her pale hair as she cried into
his shoulder. "Whatever it is, I promise, sunny-girl, we'll work it out."
The huge couch pillows her step-mother had given them for Christmas got in
his way as he tried to pull all of her long body into his embrace, so he
gave up on that gesture and rubbed her shoulders soothingly instead.

She tried to choke back the sobs, but they refused to stay inside, and
finally ended up as a fierce case of hiccups.  As soon as she began to
laugh at herself, Paul laughed with her, and as she sat up on the couch,
he slid to the floor at her feet.  "Want to talk about it?" he asked
quietly, taking her hands in his. 

Tracy sniffled, shook her head, and leaned down to kiss him.  "Not just
yet, but thank you for asking."  She smiled half-heartedly, and saw the
pain of that false expression mirrored in his jewel-green eyes; it hurt
worse that he had to taste her tears than it did to cry them.  She
clutched his hands as if she could explain just by the pressure of her
fingers, and after a long moment, began to speak.  "It's the nightmares. 
I think -- I think maybe they're real.  I think maybe they belong to the
year I lost after my head injury from the shooting, and I think . . . I
think I didn't lose my memories, Paul."  Tracy dropped her voice as if she
was afraid she would be overheard.  "I think they were taken from me." 

                ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
                ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If it had not begun on a night she could not remember, the night they said
Dawkins had shot her, and Natalie's body had been found dead in Nick's
loft under a pile of ash, it certainly began on a day she would never
forget, the day she proposed to Paul.

Paul Stephen Spartali had crashed into Tracy Vetter's life three years ago
-- quite literally, smashing his brown Saturn into her blue Taurus at the
corner of Queen and Spadina.  He insisted that the accident was entirely
her fault -- that she had been daydreaming at the wheel, as if there was
anywhere she could have picked up such a bad habit -- and the insurance
companies had been inclined to agree with him, as she had defied her
doctor's orders in getting behind the wheel in the first place.  But six
ghastly months as a near-invalid under the care of one or the other of her
parents after the hospital had finally released her had been quite as much
as Tracy could stand, and she had been determined to prove her ability to
take care of herself again.  That had made the accident all the more
infuriating -- and embarrassing, when it appeared that Sunday in his
Toronto Star newspaper column. 

Darnedest thing, her falling in love with a writer. 

By the time the insurance companies decided the accident had been her
fault, Paul -- whose car had come out rather more intact than hers -- had
been driving her in to her desk job in Computer Operations every morning,
and taking her home to her apartment every evening, for almost a month.
Utterly certain of his own innocence in the matter, his insistent
helpfulness had at first seemed repulsively arrogant to Tracy, the more so
because that help was so necessary; she felt as if she had already imposed
too much on everyone she knew, and if he had not been so helpful she might
have been forced to turn to her parents again, the last thing on earth she
wanted to do.  She loved them -- she did -- but it was exhausting for even
a healthy person to be their daughter, and since her dad had announced his
engagement right on the heels of Uncle Sonny's death, things had only
gotten worse.  Her mom had managed to stay away from alcohol while she'd
had an injured Tracy to occupy her whole attention, but as Tracy got
better, and her dad's wedding day drew closer, her mom had gone to pieces.

The night before the wedding, Barbara Vetter had unexpectedly arrived at
her daughter's apartment from Hamilton, and by the next morning had been
in such a state that Tracy was as afraid to leave her alone as she was
afraid not to appear at her father's ceremony -- both alternatives seemed
to blare evil newspaper headlines in her head: "Commissioner's Daughter
Protests Second Marriage" or "Commissioner's Ex-Wife Found Dead on Day of
Second Wedding."  In her memory, always insubstantial for things connected
with her shooting, Tracy knew she was supposed to have people to turn to,
friends she could rely on, but Bruce was in prison, Jody had gone
who-knows-where, Linda from work was on shift, Aunt Shelly was already at
the church, and . . . and . . . and the other names and faces slid away
like ghosts. 

She had not been able to think of anything to do but confide in Paul, and
his response to her call had made her ashamed of being so stubbornly
resentful of him before.  He had given up his day off and spent it
watching her mother, so she could watch her father make the vows to his
Elizabeth that he had not kept to Barbara, rigidly following all the
public forms of his religion, the public forms that were always so
important to him.  Tracy had prayed to whatever god or saint listened to
dilettante worshipers like her, that her dad had done it right this time,
and would be happy.  When she had come home that evening, she had found
her mother and Paul eating microwave popcorn and playing chess on her
computer; she had not suspected that her mother knew how to play chess,
much less that she would be in a state to do so any time soon.  Her
mother's little animated knight sliced off the head of Paul's queen while
Tracy hung up her coat, check and mate, and the laughter that followed had
rung strangely in Tracy's ears until she placed the unfamiliar tone: it
was hardly either forced or faked. 

As she had seen Paul down to his car, she had thanked him awkwardly and
repetitively.  At the landing he had stopped, taken her hands in his, and
suddenly looked very handsome to her, with his thick, black hair, olive
complexion and the conspicuously green eyes that looked down at her from
above his prominent nose.  "Thank you for calling on me, Tracy," he said. 
"Thank you for letting me help."  If he had moved to kiss her then, she
would have kissed him back, and been embarrassed for it later.  But he had
not.  And it had been up to her to ask him on a full-fledged date the next
week, after which he had kissed her, and for responding to which she had
never been the least bit sorry. 

His protectiveness never seemed smothering to her, as she knew it might to
other women, as she suspected it might have to the woman she had been
before the shooting.  But Paul's was not the marionette-manipulation that
passed for protectiveness with her father, not a demand or an intrusion,
not a way of placing her in the world; it was an abiding concern about how
the world placed her.  While he thought what he wished and said precisely
what he thought -- on paper, when not aloud; it's not always easy being
close to someone who is given fifteen square inches of newsprint to
himself four times a week -- he had never acted against her request.  He
would argue with her from here to doomsday when the occasion arose, but he
would never undermine her in deed.  She believed that.  What she had at
first taken for arrogant self-aggrandizement was really his personal brand
of complete honesty, the thing she would come to love most about him; with
Paul, Tracy always knew exactly where she stood. 

As she had on the evening of June 10, 1998, when Paul had taken her out to
dinner to celebrate her first day back on the homicide squad, matched with
Jason Abrams on his old partner's retirement.  She had become accustomed
to working days while she was stuck in Computer Ops, but back at the 96th,
she had felt somehow out of sync until the sun went down and she met up
with Paul at Azure; she had wished she could remember how the night had
gotten into her blood like that.  Before they had finished their salads,
Paul had asked her to move in with him.  It took her another two weeks to
worry over the idea from every angle, and in the end, he had moved his
mess into her highly-organized apartment instead of the other way around,
but she had known what he wanted almost from the minute he knew himself --
and he had understood how important it was for her to make the decision
herself, in her own time and on her own terms. 

As she had on the morning of January 15, 2000, when she proposed to him. 
It had taken her months to work up the question; it took him minutes to
say "yes," and even that only because his mouth was more immediately
occupied in kissing her. 

"So?  What did he say?" Jason asked as Tracy sank into her desk chair at
the precinct, smiling the smile that had made Paul dub her "sunny-girl," a
smile that was in all the pictures of her from before the shooting, but
had often been a stranger to her face since.  Paul liked to coax it out
from behind the clouds, and no one did so as well as him.  "C'mon," Jason
demanded, snatching her full coffee mug and pretending to hold it hostage. 
"So are you engaged now or what?" 

"He said, 'yes,'" Tracy answered, smiling beatifically on the world in
general and getting a brief round of applause from everyone who was
listening in.  She heard Banks ask Masters to confirm that today was his
on the Vetter-initiative pool list, and to fork over the proceeds
accordingly.  "There was a *pool* on what Paul would say?" Tracy demanded
incredulously. 

"No.  Of course not," her partner informed her severely, his bushy black
eyebrows briefly coming together in the middle of his forehead, like
caterpillars on railway tracks, before he broke into an expansive grin. 
"The pool was on when you were going to get around to asking him, Trace." 
He paused for a second.  "And there was also one on when he'd get around
to asking you.  Too bad they wouldn't let me in on it." He assumed a
wounded expression.  "'Privileged information,' my foot." 

Tracy laughed, and recovered her coffee.  "I wouldn't have told you I was
going to ask him if I'd known you were going to tell the whole precinct,
Jason."

"Yes, you would."  He retorted blandly.  "You did.  Since when can I keep
juicy info like that under my belt?  Speaking of which, how did you ask
him?" 

"How did you ask the ME for those drug results on the Swafford case?" 
Reese interrupted, dropping a manila folder on Jason's desk.  "That would
be the better question, don't you think?  Congratulations, Vetter; we're
all happy for you, and wish you the best; but now how's about doing some
police work, hmm?" 

"Sure thing, Cap," Tracy replied, with a smile that clearly intended to
hold its spot on her face all day.  It did not waver an inch as she drove
Jason and herself down to the Coroner's building, insisting all the way
that using the magnetic poetry set on the refrigerator door to spell out
"Paul, will you marry me?  Tracy" was in fact incredibly romantic, if you
just understood the situation properly.  Paul was always trying to get her
to use it to bring out her creative side, and she was always trying to
convince him that she didn't have a creative side to bring out.  They had
gotten into a mock battle the night before, in which she would alphabetize
a series of what she insisted were totally unrelated words, and he would
then read them out in his rich, flexible voice and make it clear that the
more rigidly logical she became, the more poetic he found her.

They had taken the "battle" into the bedroom, and declared a mutually
satisfactory peace about an hour later.  Tracy had woken up immediately
with the alarm, as usual, but instead of heading directly for the shower
after turning on the coffee machine, she had cleared the refrigerator of
all the extraneous magnets, leaving only the all-important question.  Paul
had reluctantly dragged himself out of bed while she had the water
running, as usual, and had headed for the orange juice that was as vital
to him as her coffee was to her.  When she had finally stepped out of the
bathroom, after agonizing over every possible response he might have, he
had offered one she had not immediately thought of: a kiss that very
probably would have led to the necessity for another shower if she had not
been due in at the precinct momentarily. 

"Yes," he had said, when they came up for air.  "Absolutely.  I love you. 
Thank you so much for asking."

And so Jason had just had to take her word for it about the magnets. 

The current day-shift Medical Examiner, a man named Fowler who always made
Tracy think more of a tax clerk than a proper ME -- though she could
barely muster a clear mental image of the woman she knew must have formed
her idea of a proper ME -- had the drug reports finished for them when
they arrived.  It took him several minutes to find them, however, by
virtue of his patented mathematical filing system.  As he was looking for
the reports, a lab worker wheeled in a new corpse and Fowler said, over
his shoulder, "Could you please just put it in the freezer, Alice?  And
fill out the prelim card?  I'm swamped.  No, it's not in this drawer. 
What if I put it under . . ."  He closed the "600" drawer and began
looking under "250-300."  "Detective Vetter, I know you've spent some time
around here; can you help Alice?  'Drugs: Smith,' 'Drugs: Stanley,'
'Drugs: Stanton' . . . ." 

"Sure," Tracy answered the inattentive ME, and winked at her bored
partner.  Jason mouthed "'some time,' indeed," and rolled his eyes; Tracy
nodded noncommittally.  Sometimes she thought Fowler was the only person
on staff who did not think she must be queasy about morgues since the
shooting, and whatever his other faults, she did appreciate that about
him.  She had woken up, barely conscious but alive, in the hospital morgue
the morning after she had been shot, misfiled like a stray piece of
paperwork by a too-efficient system in a mistake all the more horrifying
for being so simple, so unintentional, and so nearly fatal. 

Tracy held open the door of the freezer room as the young woman rolled in
the body in her charge, shaking away those memories with long-practiced
ease.  Tracy flipped on the light, and picked up the standard prelim card
from a stack on the meticulously-kept supply shelf outside the door while
Alice searched for a pen in the pocket of her lab coat.

"Thanks," the girl said, taking the card from Tracy and setting it on a
counter as she began to fill it in.  "Detective Vetter, would you mind
terribly just opening up the bag while I get this started?  Doctor Fowler
gets awfully picky about power waste for the lights and fans in here, and
the sooner we're back out, the happier he'll be."  The girl sighed, and
Tracy smiled sympathetically; the sympathy for having to work under a
pointlessly exacting boss was sincere, but a smile seemed to be the only
expression in her repertoire that day. 

Until she unzipped the body bag. 

Tracy shivered as if someone had just walked over her grave, and for the
first time, she understood that old saying.  She woke in her own bed, her
throat slit centuries before.  She flew to her own window, and saw the
ghost of a childhood friend beckon her to destruction.  She hid under her
own covers and ignored the knocking on her windowpane, knowing that
nothing could keep the knocker out if he really wanted in, and terrified
that inside might be where she really wanted him.

"Detective Vetter?"  Alice asked, concerned.  "Are you all right?  The
body seemed pretty intact, especially for coming through such--"

"I know this man," Tracy breathed, barely loud enough to hear. 

"That's great!" the intern enthused.  "We don't have any identification on
him at all!  I mean -- I'm sorry, Detective.  Was he a friend?" 

Tracy reached a hand slowly toward the black hair -- long and tangled, not
clipped and sleek like Paul's -- that surrounded the pale, dead face, and
was almost surprised to see that hand steady and calm.  She froze.  She
saw another hand, held apart from its wrist.  She held hands with a dying
man, and saw a defiant, cocky gleam in his eyes that made dawn mean death.
She ran her hand over the top of a new grave, dug and filled in one dark
night, watered liberally with blood and tears, until no more of either
could be spared.

"I don't know," she whispered desperately.  And suddenly, the memory that
had been jarred open like a trunk dropped on the pavement reversed itself,
sucking everything she had built since the shooting into the cracks in
everything she had lost.  Tracy fainted. 

The sensation seemed somehow comfortingly familiar, actually, she thought
as she surrendered to the blackness, though she knew none of her medical
records mentioned her ever doing such a thing.  Her final conscious
thought groaned that Jason was never going to let her live this down.

She came to her senses on the floor of the freezer room less than a minute
later, woozy more from the foul-smelling thing the officious coroner had
held under her nose than from the faint itself, and completely unable to
recall who the unidentified corpse had reminded her of.  She strode out of
the room as soon as she could get Fowler and Jason out of her face long
enough to get to her feet, and since she was fine, otherwise, managed to
laugh it off as a consequence of too little sleep, too much excitement,
the smells of the morgue, and the body's remote resemblance to Paul: a
black-haired, white male. 

Jason hinted that he wanted to drag her down to the hospital anyway, but
she was stubborn and insistent, pushing him to interview Swafford's sister
as soon as possible in light of the finally-produced drug results, and at
last he assented.  They had been partners almost two years, and if Jason
thought a certain focused squeamishness -- understandable with what she
had been through -- was her one Achilles heel, he was perfectly willing to
protect it for her;  that's what partners did, after all, and in his
fifteen years with badge and shield, he had never known a more devoted cop
than Tracy Vetter.  She knew that was what he thought, because she had
overheard him say as much in her behalf more than once, whenever her
father's identity or her memory's impairment made people question her
behind her back. 

Tracy's insistence on tracking down Miss Swafford turned out to be a good
move, case-wise, and, thanks to some help from Vice, they had both the
prime murder suspect and Swafford's dealer in custody by late afternoon.
Tracy was smiling again as she and Jason returned to their desks, she to
fill out the on-line forms and he to write up the officer's-perspective
report.  But as soon as they sat down, Reese came out of his office, his
brow deeply furrowed.  "You're not going to believe this, Vetter.  I'm not
sure I believe it myself.  Beats me how they could misplace--"  He paused
for a moment, shook his head, and then started over.  "Fowler just called
up from the Coroner's Office, and apparently a John Doe you helped tag
this morning -- white male, mid-twenties, black hair, about 5'10"? -- is,
well, *gone.*"

The nightmares began that night. 

Or, rather, they returned.  With reinforcements.  In the months
immediately after Tracy had first awakened in the hospital morgue, she'd
had the same nightmare almost every night: a tall, pale man, with
closely-cropped blond hair, standing over her in a black coat, his
expression both horrifying and somehow pitiable, his eyes red with
unnatural fire . . . and with tears.  She had come to herself in the
morgue, she had thought, staring endlessly into those red eyes, unable to
move, unable even to look away until he broke the connection himself.  She
had felt like a fish on the end of an angler's line.  "I promised him," 
the man in her nightmare had said then, looking down at his hands and
intoning the words like a dirge.  "And in my own way, I always . . . keep
. . . my promises."  Then he had disappeared. 

Doctor Kadlec, Tracy's therapist since shortly before the shooting, had
led her to understand that the dream was not a memory, but the coping
mechanism invented by a mind that had hovered between life and death, and
perhaps a manifestation of the guilt she felt for outliving Doctor
Lambert, and, presumably, her partner, Nick Knight.  Tracy had accepted
Doctor Kadlec's explanation -- embraced it, even -- but though she was
glad to fend off the nightmare with the secure conviction that her
subconscious pictured Death as a demonic cliche in a black suit, she
wondered how she could feel guilt for outliving people she could hardly
recall.

That lack of memory, though, she did grieve.  She knew she ought to miss
her partner and her coworker; she was told she ought to mourn them as
friends.  And so, while dismissing the nightmare as imagination only, she
had clung to the few flashes of memory she did possess, like switching the
station on the radio of Nick's car away from some awful talk-show, and
sitting on the floor of the morgue as Natalie handed her an oxygen mask. 
It was not as if that year was entirely missing from her memory, really,
it was more as if someone had come along and tried his best to cut out all
the scenes with the supporting players.

Captain Reese had come to see her now and then while she was recovering,
and once had told her about the time Nick had lost his memory; she had
laughed at Nick's immediate assumption that his partner must be male, been
glad to hear that they had solved the case in tandem, and disturbed to
hear about the perp's death.  Reese had assured her that her memory would
come back, just as Nick's had, and that story had become a talisman in her
fight to get well, and, later, a bond to the partner, friend and self she
had lost.

>From the moment the anonymous body disappeared from the morgue, however,
that bond began to strangle her.  The night of the day she proposed to
Paul, Tracy dreamed again of the tall, pale man with the demon's eyes, but
instead of waking up at his departure as she always had before, she saw
him fall, as if into one of the holes in her memory, and then, suddenly,
she was holding a baby in what looked like a battlefield, and Nick was
kneeling beside her, clutching Schanke's boarding pass.  She set the baby
on its feet, and it became a boy, who clutched a picture of her partner
and called him, "Uncle Nicholas," and then turned into little Susan
Feldman with her sled, and then an older girl, who would not reveal where
she had hidden a knife, and then a young woman, who asked Tracy if she had
ever wanted to die.

"No," Tracy replied, confused, looking down to find a wooden stake in her
hand. 

"Too bad," the girl grinned, wide-eyed, and turned into the corpse that
had disappeared from the morgue.  "The first time around, it was the most
erotic thing I ever experienced." 

Tracy woke up after that, to Paul gently shaking her shoulder.  "Tracy. 
Tracy," he repeated softly, as if to avoid jarring her re-entry into the
waking world.  "You're having a nightmare, Tracy." 

She sat up slowly and drew her knees to her chin, clasping her hands
around her ankles.  "*The* nightmare." 

At that, Paul switched on the lamp on his nightstand, and looked
appraisingly at her flushed features.  He drew her back onto the pillows,
and told her silly stories until she fell asleep again.  They were stories
he had invented for his little brother Matt during the hard years right
after their father had died, when their mother had had to work nights and
he had been responsible for getting them both supper and sleep, so Tracy
drifted off to a tale of a frog that lived in a cave and convinced
everyone it was a fearsome monster by speaking through a megaphone.  The
townspeople were afraid at first, but when the theft of the megaphone from
the general store was discovered, they understood what had happened, and
decided to keep the frog's secret and make the monster into a tourist
attraction that drew silly vacationers from all over the world. 

Tracy missed the second half of the story the first time, but had the
opportunity to hear it again when her nightmare disturbed Paul the next
night.  And the next.  After that, she took to sleeping on the couch in
simple fairness, and Paul asked if she had thought of calling Doctor
Kadlec.

"And what would I say to her?" Tracy demanded impatiently.  She mimed
picking up the phone.  "Hi, doc, this is Tracy Vetter and I'm having
nightmares about vampires.  No, I'm not crazy, and please don't tell my
captain?"

Paul swiveled his chair away from his computer so he could catch her eyes. 
"No, you are not crazy, and no, she can't tell Reese: doctor-patient
privilege.  And no, your nightmares are probably not about vampires; the
vampires must symbolize something.  Like sex.  Or fears of being trapped
and used."  He turned quickly back to his computer at that, and commenced
typing furiously.  "Or something.  Food, cleaning products, whatever: I
don't know."  Tracy watched his back for a moment, and then walked up
behind him, placing her arms around his neck.

"I love you, Paul," she whispered urgently.  "I swear, this isn't about
us.  It can't be." 

He had stilled his fingers on the keyboard so as not to drown out her
words, and then raised them to her hands, and brought her hands to his
lips.  "Then let someone help you find out what it *is* about, okay?" 

"I'll think about it," she replied. 

In fact, she spent the next five days trying to avoid thinking about it,
until the next time her day off coincided with Paul's.  They had planned
on going to look at rings, but in the end, neither one of them had been in
the mood, so Paul decided to go in to the paper after all, and Tracy
sacked out on the couch with a stack of newsmagazines, a plate of
chocolate-chip cookies, and every intention of winning an uninterrupted
nap.

She did not. 

Tracy dropped off somewhere between an article on a massacre in the middle
east and one on the increasing efficacy of vitamin supplements, but
instead of finding ages-old battles or new medical miracles in her dreams,
she found, again, the image of Death.  "In my own way, I always . . . keep
. . . my promises," he said, as she knew he would, but instead of
disappearing this time, he extended a hand to help her up off the gurney,
and she found herself able to stand.

"Very good, Miss Vetter," he congratulated her.  "Or, should I say,
Detective?" 

"Am I on duty?" she asked, looking down at the hospital gown she wore. 

"Oh, you do have a case to solve," he informed her.  "But your shield is
of little use here."  He gestured as if to draw her attention to their
surroundings, and the morgue melted into some sort of club, with pounding
music and decorative chains.  "Have you read any good books lately?" he
asked.  "_Killing Mind_?  _Exorcism in the Modern World_?"  She shook her
head; they did not sound familiar.  Raising one eyebrow at her ignorance,
Death seated himself at the bar, picked up a raven-handled obsidian knife
from the counter, and calmly sliced off Tracy's right hand, catching the
blood in a goblet.  It did not hurt, and that was as shocking as the act
itself.  She looked up at him.  "Would you like something to drink?" he
asked, offering her the goblet under her wrist.  "No?  Too bad."  He
drained it himself, and then kissed her on the forehead with his bloody
lips, leaving a print she could somehow feel.  "Compliments of Rosebud," 
he informed her before strolling away.

A hand tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention.  It was her own,
and the rat-faced man holding it bowed deeply to her.  "Yer rooker, I
don't doubt me, missy.  Too pretty a paw fer the likes o' 'im."  He jerked
his head at someone in the shadows behind him, and then dropped his voice.
"Confidenteel-like, blondie, Enrique from the clinic in Rio ain't really
the sort o' bloke a lady like yerself oughter be 'angin' on the words o',
if yer don' min' me sayin' so.  'e'll take yer 'eart, 'e will." 

The body that had disappeared from the morgue stepped out of the shadows
holding its own right hand in a jar.  "Do you want me to take your heart,
Trace?" he asked, a half-smile on his face.  She shivered at the strange
sensuousness of the question.  "Your body?  Your blood?" 

"Who are you?" Tracy demanded. 

"She don' rekkernize yer, mate." 

"I know, Screed," the other man said, placing his jar on the floor and
unscrewing its lid with his one attached hand.  "Figures that the
high-and-mighty Knight finally gave in and asked his daddy to take care of
his little mortal problem."  He pulled out the pickled hand, placed it on
his wrist, and wriggled his fingers.  He grinned.  "Know me now, Trace?" 

"No." 

His face fell, slightly, and he seemed to ponder a moment.  Then he came
and stood directly in front of her, gently replacing her own hand on her
wrist.  She wriggled her fingers, and he placed a ripe apricot in her
palm.  "Know me now?" he breathed on her cheek. 

"No." 

He sighed, kissed her quickly, and stepped back.  "Maybe not today, and
maybe not tomorrow," he recited.  "But soon, and for the rest of your
life."

"Vachon!" she blurted out, her eyes going wide.  She moved as if to
embrace him, but stopped midstep and wrapped her arms around herself
protectively.  "Why did you leave me?" 

"Why did Rick leave Ilsa?" 

"This isn't a movie." 

"Is it not?" asked Death urbanely, appearing next to Vachon with his empty
goblet still in hand.  "I think it rather depends upon which reel you are
watching."

"Telly," Screed voted shortly, disengaging for a second from the mouthful
of rat he had found somewhere. 

"Ah, and baby makes three," Death noted, his eyes suddenly narrowing. 
"But he was subtracted by the plague on our house, crossed out of the
equation like the Spaniard's brother.  Who is missing, Detective?" he
asked grimly.  "One, two, three; minus the carouche leaves two.  The sum
should be three.  Who is missing?" 

"It's the last piece of the puzzle, Trace, I promise," Vachon said. 
"Who's missing?"

Tracy looked at each one in turn, and then helplessly back at Vachon.  He
spread his hands, as if to say he had done all he could.  Screed looked at
her pityingly over his rodent, and Death sneered and began to walk away.
That stung her pride, and she looked down to find herself wearing her
leather coat, with her badge and gun underneath.  Vachon, she knew. 
Screed, she knew.  Death . . . . 

"Hold it right there, Lacroix!" she drew her gun on him.  "The Kharam
decapitation case is still unsolved."  Lacroix is the owner of the Raven,
she thought.  Lacroix is the Nightcrawler.  Nick is a big fan of the
Nightcrawler.  Nick . . . . 

"Omigod."  She pulled up her aim.  "It's Nick, isn't it?" 

And with that, Tracy awoke. 

The dream did not stay with her intact -- dreams never do -- but as she
had promised herself through her image of Vachon, she finally had all the
pieces in front of her.  Whatever had been blocking her memories all these
years had at last collapsed under the onslaught of the past week, and she
felt as if someone had scattered a million-piece puzzle on the floor and
then taken away the box.  She had no picture, no plan, but for the first
time in four years, she had her life, and she meant to hang on to it.

Tracy paced back and forth, thinking.  First in front of the couch, then
in a horseshoe shape around the bed, then around the entire perimeter of
the apartment.  It got her thoughts flowing, but they kept flowing in
circles.  Still thinking, she started cleaning, scrubbing and sweeping and
dusting everything that came to hand.  By the time the apartment was in
order, so should have been her thoughts -- they always had been before.
Tracy had not been able to remember a time when she could not organize her
way into mental security and emotional control -- until then.  Finally,
she sat down in the center of the couch and began examining the fluffy
pillows her father and Elizabeth had given her and Paul at Christmas,
turning each one around and checking the seams, her thoughts four years,
one species, and an entire lifetime away.

When Paul came home, he dropped a perfunctory kiss on her forehead and
strode straight through into the kitchen, diving into the refrigerator for
a Pepsi and clinking the cookie jar on the table as he surfaced.  "You
won't believe what Janice did today," she heard him say, and stilled her
hands for a moment as she tried to place the name: oh, the new assistant
editor.  "Cavewoman Editor Strikes Again," he gestured out the headline
melodramatically.  "Unbelievable.  I'm going in deep with the comfort food
here, Tracy; do you want an orange Shasta or something?"

She started to shake her head, but changed her mind.  "Yeah.  Thanks.  So
what did Janice do now?" 

"Well, to start with, she told Tony that from now on . . . .  Tracy? 
What's wrong?"

"What do you mean, 'what's wrong?'" 

Paul leaned on the kitchen counter and stared across the room at her with
concern.  "Not only is the entire magnetic poetry set alphabetized, which
you haven't done since before your mom went back to AA," he observed
carefully.  "It is subdivided into parts of speech, right down to
prepositions and interrogatives."

"I . . ."  Unable to find any words, Tracy suddenly felt all the hours she
had spent mining her own memory condense like a rain cloud.  She tried to
blink back the tears she felt battering the backs of her eyes, and grabbed
up the next pillow so fiercely that it split its seams, the stuffing
suddenly bursting out in a huge, undifferentiated mass, the way she felt
her memories had done.  It was too much, and the tears began streaming
down her face in complete defiance of her orders to them: so many deaths
she had not been able to mourn, so much time lost, so many tears owed.
Paul came out and sat next to her on the couch.

"Shhhh, it's okay, Tracy," Paul smoothed her hair and cradled her against
him as she cried. "Whatever it is, I promise, sunny-girl, we'll work it
out."  The huge couch pillows got in his way as he tried to pull all of
her long body into his embrace, so he gave up on that gesture and rubbed
her shoulders soothingly instead.

As the tears turned into sobs, Tracy tried to choke them back; but they
refused to stay inside, and finally ended up as a ridiculous case of
hiccups.  As soon as she began to laugh at herself, Paul laughed with her,
and as she sat up on the couch, he slid to the floor at her feet.  "Want
to talk about it?" he asked quietly, and took her hands in his.

Tracy sniffled, shook her head, and leaned down to kiss him.  "Not just
yet, but thank you for asking."  She smiled half-heartedly, and then
winced at seeing her pain and confusion reflected in his eyes.  She
clutched his hands as if she could explain just by the pressure of her
fingers, and certainly she wished she could, that her knowledge could be
transmitted whole for him to believe.  After a long moment, she began to
speak, her words murky, but her voice knife-edged with a tense certainty
as she vocalized her conclusion for the first time.  "It's the nightmares. 
I think -- I think maybe they're real.  I think maybe they belong to the
year I lost after my head injury from the shooting, and I think . . . I
think I didn't lose my memories, Paul."  Tracy dropped her voice as if she
was afraid she would be overheard.  "I think they were taken from me." 

Paul leaned back against the coffee table.  "How?  By who?" 

"I had another nightmare shortly after you left."  Tracy played absently
with the pillow stuffing.  "Only this time, everything made sense.  Paul . 
. ." she looked at him, as if evaluating him for the first time.  This was
dangerous ground she would be leading him onto, but without his help, she
doubted she could make it out herself.  She wavered for a moment, and then
said, "I think I have all my memories back, now.  All of them.  And it's a
very long story, and not one you're going to want to believe." 

"Tell me." 

She did.  She told him what she had never been able to before, from memory
instead of report: what it had felt like to watch that plane explode in
the sky, to doll up for that TV talk-show, to have to kill a man to save
her own life, and, within days, to have to kill again to save her
partner's.  She told him what it had been like to work with Nick Knight,
such a good man and such a lousy partner; what it had been like trying to
come to terms with Natalie Lambert, whom Tracy believed had never quite
forgiven her for not being Don Schanke; what it had been like to work for
Reese when he was insecure in his job, when he knew the worst of her
father through his covering for Bruce, and yet still fawned over him at
every opportunity; what it had been like to meet a young-looking man who
introduced himself as Javier Vachon, and the turn her life had taken after
she proved resistant to his attempt at hypnotism. 

She told Paul about vampires, about coming across and first hunger, about
hypnotism and Enforcers, about blood connoisseurs and bottled blood.  She
told him that Vachon was Fowler's missing corpse.  She told him everything
she had learned about that wrinkle in their reality -- everything, except
that her own blood spoke of apricots and calla lilies.  For now, she kept
that to herself.

She told him about the unsolved Kharam decapitation case, and how Vachon
had called her up claiming to have information but, instead, had only
wanted to tell her goodbye.  It was time to move on, the vampire had told
her, time to finish the plane trip Vudu had interrupted.  The very
sparseness of his explanation had seemed typical of Vachon, and she filled
in his motivation herself without a second thought; she supposed he did
not want to stay where Screed had died.  He had been a good friend, a
vampire who had decided it was time to move on, and she told Paul how, so
soon after that, the last thing she had seen as Dawkins's bullets had
smashed her back against the locker-room wall, was Nick, fangs extended
and eyes glowing. 

And she told him that the man from her dream might or might not represent
death, but certainly bore a pronounced resemblance to Lucien Lacroix, the
last owner of that defunct nightclub, the Raven, and that she believed her
dream a memory, after all; that Vachon had lied in denying Lacroix was a
vampire, and that Lacroix must have been the one to hypnotize away her
memories, invading her mind while the hospital thought her dead.

Why he had done that instead of simply draining her, she did not know. 

Tracy's recital was followed by a long silence, as both she and Paul lost
themselves in their respective thoughts.  Eventually, she asked: "What do
you think?"

"I think, sunny-girl," Paul answered, standing up and kissing her on the
forehead, "that it is way past midnight, and that if we're smart, we'll
eat a couple of sandwiches, brush our teeth, go to sleep, and talk about
it in the morning."

"Paul, I'm not crazy," Tracy said, standing up and hugging him for
reassurance.  If she had doubted herself before beginning her tale, the
act of sharing it with him had made it clear; this was the world as she
had known it, and now knew it again.  "And I needed you to know." 

He held her in silence until she moved to step away, and then followed her
into the kitchen.  She put two knives and four pieces of bread on the
cutting board -- plastic: wood is more sanitary, she had insisted
stubbornly, and refused to let his plastic "germ trap" near her food . . .
until she had found his high-school shop-class signature painted on the
bottom -- and retrieved the peanut butter from the cabinet while he went
into the refrigerator for the jam. 

"I'm trained to be a reporter," he began as they each covered two pieces
of bread with the condiment they held.  He stated it slowly, as if she
could have forgotten that fact somehow.  "That's just another word for
'detective,' Tracy, and you have to consider what your story sounds like
without corroboration or evidence." 

"And what does it sound like?" she asked, slicing her sandwich corner to
corner and his from side to side.

"It sounds," he said evenly, "as if your memories have resurfaced and
accidentally brought most of your subconscious along with them.  I think
you should call Doctor Kadlec, and see if she can help you sort out which
is which." 

Tracy leaned back against the cabinets and munched on her sandwich
contemplatively.  There was something weirdly appropriate about eating
lunch food for supper in the wee hours of the morning, as if life could
get any weirder at this point.  "Based on the evidence you have, that's a
reasonable conclusion.  You don't have tomorrow off, do you?" 

Paul shook his head.  "But since I put in an appearance today, I can take
it off.  No problem." 

"Good.  I'll make you a deal.  Tomorrow, we will go looking for
corroboration.  If we don't find anything, I'll call Doctor Kadlec.  If we
do, you'll help me find Vachon . . . and Lacroix.  Deal?" 

"Deal." 

Tracy smiled distantly, her thoughts occupied measuring the span between
the world she knew and the one she had just recovered, checking off which
signposts still stood by the roadside of the long route she had traveled
from one to the other.  The two of them finished their sandwiches, brushed
their teeth, and got ready for bed, as Paul had suggested.

"Paul?"  Tracy asked, after they had lain in the dark for a few minutes. 

"Mnnn-hnn?" he responded, sleepily. 

"I never told you why I went to Doctor Kadlec in the first place, did I?" 

"You didn't use to remember, and she wouldn't tell you." 

"It was after the LoPietro case.  She was helping me with regression to
see if I had been killed by a vampire in a former life," Tracy informed
him, and wondered if he could hear her smugly ironic grin in her voice.
"Good night."  She turned over, promptly falling into a peaceful,
dreamless slumber; those memories that had fought so hard to regain their
rightful place in her conscious thoughts were content with the spoils of
their victory, and her subconscious was surprised to find itself no longer
cramped in its corner of her mind.  She slept well. 

Tracy suspected that Paul, on the other hand, had ended up tossing and
turning for a good while over the news that Doctor Kadlec was very
possibly not going to be as much help as he had supposed. 

---

In the morning -- very late morning, admittedly -- Tracy and Paul set off
in her car, she driving while he used her cel phone to call in and book
off work, both of them wearing jeans and sweaters under their winter
coats.  Shutting the phone and setting it on the seat between them, Paul
noted that they were headed away from the water rather than toward it.  "I
thought we were going to start by checking the, uh, carouche's grave?" 

"We are," Tracy answered.  "If Vachon is at the church, he's not going
anywhere until after sundown -- and probably not even then, knowing him,
if some place isn't functioning as a replacement for the old Raven.  And I
want to start where I *know* something is to be found.  But first we're
running by the new Loblaws to pick up some garlic and stakes." 

"Garlic and stakes?"  Paul echoed.  "Accusing you of being prepared is
like accusing a fish of being wet, but, legends aside, what makes you
think those will be any good? And what about crosses?" 

"You're wearing your little crucifix around your neck, right?  You always
do, so that should cover any possibilities on that end.  Garlic, I know
for sure," Tracy said, flipping on her turn signal as she approached the
intersection.  "I once had a pizza delivered to the church, and they
brought garlic sauce for the breadsticks.  Vachon refused to be in the
same room with it: said it gave him a headache."  She pulled into the
store parking lot.  "I don't think it's deadly, like in the movies or
anything, but no one is going to bite us if we've smeared garlic butter on
our necks, believe me." 

"Oh, I don't know," Paul leered mildly at her as they got out of the car,
and then winked before heading toward the building.  "So how about the
stakes?  You said that you'd seen both him and his brother -- the Inca? --
survive bullets, so your gun's logically no help, but I don't remember
anything specific about stakes." 

Tracy stopped for a second, unintentionally holding open the automatic
door by occupying its sensor.  "That's funny," she said quietly.  "I'm
absolutely positive that a stake through the heart is fatal, but I can't
remember why I think that."  She pondered for a moment, and then went all
the way into the store.  Keeping her voice low, she continued, "But we
*really* shouldn't be talking about this in public, anyway, daytime or no
daytime."

Paul nodded, and offered to fetch the garlic butter, leaving the stakes to
her expertise; Tracy asked him to pick up some whole cloves, too, and then
headed back to the newly-expanded hardware and garden departments; Loblaws
had bought into the US "one-stop shopping" trend two years before, and
begun expanding.  The store seemed to have more products under its one
roof every time she came.

It bothered her that she could not attach her confidence in the efficacy
of a stake to any solid incident.  She had dismissed word-of-mouth on
vampires ever since the first night she saw Vachon's reflection in her
bedroom mirror, so she was sure it was not some remnant of popular
culture, but, then, what was it?  For almost four years, she had been used
to her memory holding back on her, but that just made this more
frustrating, as she had thought herself finally free and completely in
possession of her past.  It nagged at her, too, that the waterfront felt
so indisputably like the proper place to start searching for Vachon. Logic
proffered the church, and instinct swatted it aside with Screed's final
resting place. 

A boy with a nametag and blue apron directed her to where the plant stakes
were kept, next to the grass seed that would certainly sit unsold for the
next month or two, at least.  Pointed in blunt little triangles for
pushing into soil, the rectangular wooden shafts were hardly sharp enough
for Tracy's purpose, and they seemed ridiculously flimsy.  She wandered
out of the garden section over to the lumber aisle, finding another boy in
a nametag and blue apron to direct her to the sturdy stakes used to secure
frames for concrete pouring.  These looked much more as she imagined a
vampire-killing stake should.  Hefting one, Tracy shivered under an
intense feeling of deja vu.  She lashed out with the stake experimentally,
as if to stab at the level of her own heart, and the feeling disappeared
with the movement.

"Who are we planning to stab, anyway?" Paul asked, coming up behind her so
unexpectedly that Tracy whirled on him and knocked the groceries out of
his hands.  They both knelt on the floor to pick them up, and Paul
continued, "I mean, except for this Lacroix, all the va--"

"Don't," Tracy interrupted him, shortly.  "Public." 

Paul changed horses without missing a beat: "--people you've mentioned
are, or were, anyway, actually friends of yours."

Handing the bag of garlic cloves back to Paul, Tracy picked up three more
stakes and nodded her head to indicate they would do.  As they approached
the check-out counter, she said, "Of my friends, Paul, two are dead and
one hasn't seen in me in four years, and as far as I might have trusted
them, I don't for a minute trust those who might have taken their places."

"Good point," he acknowledged, and handed over the garlic so she could pay
for everything at once.

On the way to the shore, Paul stared at the small tub of garlic butter in
his lap.  "Is this really necessary, Tracy?" 

"Probably not," she replied serenely.  "But on the off chance that someone
with extra-long eyeteeth is wandering around in forty-million-SPF sunblock
this lovely winter day, we'll do it anyway.  Besides," she grinned without
taking her eyes from the road.  "We'll just have Italian for dinner and no
one will know the difference; there are Luigi's coupons in the glove
compartment."  She hesitated, the grin lapsing.  "I know you're mostly
humoring me so far, Paul, and that's really why I'm trying to take
precautions.  Until you understand what you might encounter . . . ." 

"You want to protect me from the consequences of my own ignorance?"  He
stretched his arm behind her and gave her left shoulder a quick squeeze.
"I appreciate that.  And," he sighed exaggeratedly, "I'll put the butter
on my neck now."

When they found a parking space on the land side of Cherry Beach, Tracy
rubbed some garlic butter on her own neck, and left long, greasy marks
where she wiped her fingers along the seams of her jeans.  As she and Paul
strolled toward the shore, Tracy thought that they would have looked like
any other young couple with their arms around each other during a romantic
walk in the park -- that is, if it hadn't been a weekday afternoon in the
middle of winter, and if they hadn't each been carrying a wooden stake in
their free hand.

"This is it," Tracy announced, stopping a few feet from where she knew
Screed had been buried, on the border of the grass-bearing soil just
before the land sloped down to the water.  "I suppose we're lucky there's
been so little snow, lately.  It's been years, so this is really a
longshot, but . . ."  She paused, and continued more contemplatively.  "It
just felt right to start looking for Vachon here, somehow.  I wanted to
pay my respects, I guess.  Screed scared the heck out of me a few times,
but in between, he was always nice, and even polite, in his own, strange
way.  And Vachon loved him like a brother."  She squatted down where she
knew the foot of the grave to be, and traced out a border that existed
only in her memory.  Any mark of Screed's burial had long since dissolved
under the wind and rain and traffic of four long years.  "Well, not like
*his* brother, perhaps," she smiled to herself.  "Brothers by choice, and
to him, much more deeply bound because of it."

Paul stood quietly behind Tracy for most of her reminiscence, but toward
the end he moved off slightly to her left.  "Tracy," he called for her
attention.  "We can't tell if Screed is there without digging him up, and
I don't know what might or might not be left after four years, but look at
this."  He gestured to the ground at his feet, sweeping his arm along to
indicate a large, oblong area.  It was fairly unremarkable to casual
examination, but with her attention drawn, it was clear that the ground
had been disturbed, and the sod replaced in frozen chunks.  Tracy strode
several yards away to make a comparison, and then returned. 

"It's been dug up," she said, meeting his eyes.  "Those are spade marks." 

Paul nodded his agreement.  "Within the last two weeks or so, I'd say. 
Maybe a bit less.  Do you know anyone in forensics you can get to look at
it?"

Tracy shook her head.  "They might find Screed's body, and if it hasn't
gone to ash, there would be an awfully unusual dental structure for the ME
to explain -- and if the ME does his job right, he could bring down the
Enforcers on himself.  And maybe us.  We couldn't risk it." 

"Well, there isn't supposed to be any digging around here, much less
burying, so whatever happened here is somehow out of line," Paul noted.
"We just don't know exactly how.  Is there any chance that you could have
mistaken Screed's grave by a few feet, that it's over here instead?" 

Tracy folded her arms across her chest and began pacing the length of the
disturbed ground.  "No.  I marked it by the angles from the lightpole and
the bench here, and the CN Tower across the water.  Believe me, Screed's
plot is undisturbed.  So the question is, whose plot is disturbed?  And
were they buried, or unburied?  And why next to Screed?"  She continued to
pace for a minute in silence, and then walked up several yards to the park
bench and sat down.

Paul joined her.  "What is it?" 

"Nick," she answered quietly.  "I just thought to myself that I wished
Nick were here.  I've never thought that before, you know, because I
didn't use to remember him, really, and it brought me up short.  Then I
thought, the reason I wished he were here, was that he always had the most
amazing instincts about these kinds of problems.  And then I realized, it
wasn't instinct at all; he was a vam-- person.  And then I thought I'd
better sit down."

They sat for a while, undisturbed except for the occasional call of a gull
headed inland toward a fast-food restaurant's dumpster.  Paul broke the
silence.  "So neither of us are able to determine the status of the
disturbance here, only that there has been some sort of disturbance in the
vicinity of the spot where you believe Screed is buried.  Right?" 

Tracy nodded.  "And we're not likely to get any more information out of
the ground on our own.  Ready to move on?" 

As they headed back to the car, Paul joked, "Do you want me to drive? 
You've got that abstracted look on your face again."

"Don't be ridiculous," Tracy retorted, arching her eyebrows at him and
pulling out her keychain to flip off the car alarm.  "That's Nick, not
me."  She paused as she opened her door, leaning on the frame.  "I hadn't
thought of that before." 

"What?" 

"It's Nick's fault that I-- that *we* crashed into each other in the first
place.  He was always getting lost in his thoughts while he was driving,
and just barely pulling out of collisions, even with vam-- personal senses
to depend on."  Tracy came out of the memory and grinned up at Paul. 
"Something you and I don't have.  I blame him.  Entirely.  Tell the
insurance people to raise *his* premiums and put mine back the way they
were."

"Well then," Paul responded, putting his arms around her waist and pulling
her close.  "All thanks to your deceased partner's ghost.  We might never
have met if he hadn't ruined your ability to drive."

Tracy narrowed her eyes and swatted at his shoulder; they both laughed,
and then kissed very briefly before stepping back and getting into the
car.  Tracy wrinkled her nose.  "Italian?" 

"Italian," Paul confirmed, stifling a sneeze. 

"Two more stops before dinner, though," she informed him as she backed out
of her parking space and got them back on the road.  "First, the deBrabant
Shelter -- the old Raven -- and then Vachon's church."

"But Bellevue Avenue is closer," Paul objected.  "Why not hit the church
first?"

"No matter what it is these days, I don't really want to be poking around
the site of the Raven after dark without one of its own kind on my side,"
Tracy replied.  "Do you?  No, don't answer that.  I know we're still short
on admissible evidence."  She sighed. 

"I don't believe in your vam-- people yet, sunny-girl, but we have seen
that *something* is up, right where they would be involved.  That much I
admit.  Does that help at all?" 

"Maybe," Tracy said.  "At least I know you're still with me, that I didn't
leave you behind the first time I said 'vampire.'"

"I thought we weren't supposed to use that word?" 

"We're in a closed car, traveling down Richmond Street in the middle of
the afternoon.  If we're not perfectly safe, we're absolutely doomed, so I
don't think using that word will make any difference."

"Complex rules to this game." 

"Don't blame me," Tracy said, pulling into a parking space and gesturing
for Paul to leave the stakes in the car.  "I just picked them up as I
went."

The Raven nightclub had passed through several sets of hands since its
glory days in the early nineties.  Shut down temporarily after the
unsolved Kharam decapitation, the owner had disappeared, and it had then
passed into the hands of a conglomerate of developers, apparently at the
peak of market value.  After a few months, it had reopened as part of a
club chain based in the US, and had promptly gone bankrupt, dragging down
the conglomerate with it in less than a year.  For a while after that, it
had functioned as an outlet clothing store, but that, too, failed against
all expectation, barely surviving into a second holiday season.  And as
went the Raven, so went the neighborhood surrounding it, right down to
zoning legislation.

In the last year, the building had been purchased by the deBrabant
Foundation, a private charitable organization known -- among those who
paid attention to such things -- for its eclectic projects, and its upper
story turned into a kind of second-level women's shelter, a stable and
public place from which it was possible to relocate those who needed
immediate protection, and to care for those who were not actively
threatened from without.  The main floor, on the other hand, had been made
to house a general-practice clinic heavily subsidized by the Foundation. 
While the clinic functioned through all the normal OHIP channels, the
administration overlapped with that of the privately-funded shelter, and
the Foundation provided it with not only a rent-free location, but the
most modern equipment and the ability to provide free any prescription
medications approved by its doctors -- things well beyond the reach of the
government rate schedule. 

Like any other Toronto resident who watched the local news now and again,
Tracy had heard reports of the Raven's fortunes over the past four years. 
Now that her memory was back, however, Tracy, like few -- if any -- other
Toronto residents, was beginning to find a pattern in those fortunes.  The
Raven had served blood; Lacroix had owned the Raven; Nick had listened to
Lacroix; Lacroix and Nick were vampires; Nick's middle initial, undefined
in any of his personnel records, was "B" -- perhaps as in "deBrabant," as
in "deBrabant Foundation," as in "Janette deBrabant," missing suspect in
the unsolved Larouche homicide, whose ward had had a picture of a man he
called her brother: Nick. 

And Nick . . . Nick was dead. 

All these things ran through Tracy's mind as she and Paul walked up the
street to the heavily-remodeled front of what she suspected had once been
the beating heart of the vampire community in Toronto.  "deBrabant Clinic
and Centre" was painted in red letters on a large, double-paned window
where a concrete wall had stood the last time Tracy was inside the
building. 

"Non-specific enough for you?" Paul gestured at the label on the glass,
and held open the door for her. 

Passing in front of him, Tracy answered, "I suppose advertising isn't
really necessary."  It took her eyes several seconds to adjust to the
light inside; she had not realized how bright the winter sun was until the
door closed behind her and she found herself at the mercy of fluorescents. 
Similarly, she had not realized quite how cold it was until the indoor air
hit her ears; depending on her hair to keep them warm had not been a wise
move.  "I should have worn my earmuffs," she muttered under her breath,
and reached into her pocket for her shield and identification card as she
approached the receptionist, a short, brown-haired young woman who looked
to be in her late teens or early twenties. 

"Can I help you?" the young woman asked, wrinkling her nose slightly and
slipping the book she had been reading into a drawer with a strangely
guilty expression; why, Tracy could not guess.  It was not as if there was
anyone else there waiting for her attention.  The little lobby was
well-lit, well-furnished, and, at the moment, completely empty. 

"Yes, please," Paul spoke up. "I'm Paul Spartali, and this is Tracy
Vetter.  We're here--" 

"*The* Paul Spartali?" the girl snapped to attention.  "Oh my goodness: 
you are!  Umm -- what happened to your series on Superintendent Vickers? 
You never even commented on his arrest."  She blushed visibly and appeared
to bite her tongue; Tracy winced slightly on her behalf.  "I'm sorry.  I
did a project on your column last quarter.  The assignment was to read one
journalist every time he or she published for a month, and then write a
paper about it." 

"I would be fascinated to read it, Ms.--" he looked quickly at her
nametag.  "Shank." 

"Schanke," she corrected him.  "Jennifer Schanke.  The 'c' is hard and the
'e' says its name."  She hesitated for a moment.  "If you really wanted, I
could email a copy of my paper to you, at the address at the end of your
column; do you really read stuff sent there?" 

Paul nodded and offered his hand on the deal.  As the delighted Jennifer
took it, Tracy hid a smile.  She did not think that Paul had ever had a
teenage groupie before, and this girl seemed as close to one as the author
of a column on social issues and local politics would ever come.  This
girl . . . all at once the name registered on Tracy: Schanke, Nick's
partner before her. 

Finally releasing Paul's hand, Jennifer noticed Tracy again.  "I'm sorry; 
I know you didn't come here to meet me.  How can I help you?  Are you
doing a story?  Doctor Bromley is out at the moment, but should be back
soon; Doctor Pajot is upstairs with Ms. Burke, actually, our director. 
Would you like me to call them down?" 

"That would be great, thanks," Tracy answered, letting her wallet slide
back into her pocket.  It would be much better to play this out on Paul's
credentials than hers, it appeared.

Jennifer picked up her phone and pressed a button on a small console next
to it.  After a few seconds, she said, "Tara?  There are two reporters
down here, and they'd like to talk to Leslie, if they could."  She paused
a moment.  "No, I don't see any.  Mmm-hmmm.  Thanks." 

"She'll be down soon," Jennifer said, hanging up the phone.  "This is the
slow bit of the day, really, after I get out of school but before the day
people start getting off work and the night people start going *to* work,
so she has time to talk." 

"So this is your after-school job?"  Paul inquired. 

"Sort of," Jennifer answered, dropping her eyes.  She seemed torn between
the desire to talk to the columnist and the fear of imposing on him. "It's
after-school volunteering.  I used to work at the Fireweed Cineplex;  it
opened when I started high school, and I was one of the first employees.
But, umm, last fall, when I turned eighteen?  The deBrabant Foundation,
out of nowhere, gave me this trust fund for college."  She looked out the
window for a moment.  "My dad was killed in the line of duty as a police
officer five years ago, and that's all that the lawyer would say when she
signed it over -- that it was because of who my dad was, and that I had to
use it for college." 

"Was volunteering here part of the deal?"  Tracy asked. 

"What?  No," Jennifer seemed confused.  "With the trust, I have enough to
go through college anywhere, even in the *states,* if I want to, and so
since I didn't *have* to work anymore, my mom suggested I come up with a
way of, you know, passing it on."  She shrugged.  "Volunteering was my
idea." 

"And a very good volunteer she is, too," said a round, older woman in a
flowered dress as she emerged from the end of a partition.  She seemed to
be speaking through a terribly stuffed-up nose, and she over-pronounced
her words as if to compensate.  "I do not know what we would do without
her.  I am Leslie Burke."  She shook hands with Paul and then Tracy. 
"Jennifer tells me you are reporters?" she asked.  "She also tells me you
are not carrying cameras; that would not be allowed, you know."

"We understand," Paul said quickly, as if he was afraid Tracy would move
to correct the misperception about her profession.  She caught his eyes
and tilted her head just slightly to let him know she would not.  He
acknowledged that with a similarly oblique movement, and proceeded, on the
strength of his column, to get them a tour of both the clinic and offices
created by the labyrinth of partitions on the main level, and what Burke
called the "hospice" in the apartments upstairs.  Tracy trusted Paul to
listen to the statistics and stories as they poured over the visitors; she
was more interested in finding any remnants of the Raven she had known. 
There were not many, beyond the outer structure of the building itself,
and it discouraged her until, on their way back downstairs, her attention
was caught by an unusual pair of door handles left over from the original
decor. 

"What's back here?"  Tracy asked, pulling on one of the ornate handles
shaped like an Egyptian statue. 

"Oh, that goes down into the basement," Burke sniffed, descending the
stairs more slowly than the younger couple.  "There is nothing down there
but storage, and I really do not think it is a very safe place, all in
all.  There are no windows and this is the only real door.  We keep it
locked.  I do not wonder but that it was originally designed as a bomb
shelter, or some such." 

"'*Real* door,'" Tracy pounced on the word and turned around to look up at
Burke. 

"Yes," Burke nodded stiffly.  "There were two bolt holes into the city
tunnels that we had to have closed up.  I assume the building had its . . 
. illegitimate . . . side in its days as a club." 

Tracy mentally rolled her eyes at that, while keeping a bland smile frozen
on her face; she felt Paul squeeze her hand behind her back.  "I'm
interested in precisely that angle, actually," Tracy began.  "The
transformation of the site from a service to the city's darker side, to
what it is today.  Could we possibly go down?" 

"I do not know about that . . ." 

Paul gave Tracy's hand another discreet squeeze, and smiled winningly at
the large woman.  "Perhaps your young receptionist could take my partner
down for a quick look, and you and I could talk more about the management
of the facility, and your place in the deBrabant organization." 

With that invitation, Burke couldn't get rid of Tracy and Jennifer fast
enough.  Tracy was relieved to get out of the presence of the officiously
competent woman, but Jennifer was obviously disappointed at not getting to
speak to Paul some more. 

"So," the girl asked as she unlocked the doors to the basement with the
keys Burke had given her.  "You're Mr. Spartali's partner?" 

Tracy considered a minute, starting down the stairs.  "His fiancee,
actually." 

"Oh."  Jennifer's face fell just slightly, and Tracy tried to remember
where she had pinned her idolatrous affections when she was eighteen: some
actor who had played a cop in a US television show, she recalled, though
she could not for the life of her remember his name.  "Congratulations," 
Jennifer picked up.  "Do you think he'll write about it at all?" 

"I'm sure he will," Tracy grimaced, and Jennifer looked at her aghast as
they wound down the concrete and stone steps.  "I love his writing," Tracy
explained defensively.  "Don't get me wrong.  It's just that it can get
tiring, always being the case study for the issue of the week, and as for
the engagement," she sighed, "we've hardly had a chance to think about it
yet, but eventually we're going to have to figure out a path between his
passionately Catholic family and my stiffly Anglican one.  They'll care
more than we do -- no doubt more than God does -- and Paul is bound to put
it on paper for the benefit of the world at large." 

Jennifer nodded understandingly, and unlocked the door in front of them at
the bottom of the stairs.  "I don't know where the light is, actually, umm
. . ." she trailed off, looking into the dark doorway. 

Tracy stepped through in front of her, and ran her hands over the cool
wall until she found a switch.  "There we go." 

"Thanks.  Now, the, umm, extra supplies are over this way, in what used to
be the wine cellar, I guess, and then there're these other rooms that
Leslie always keeps shut because they used to have the exits in them." 

"Can we look at them first?"  Tracy asked. 

Jennifer held up the key ring and winked.  They went over the cavernous
rooms, but in whatever she had hoped to find, Tracy was disappointed.  The
outlines of the bricked-up doors were easily visible, but only because the
rooms were otherwise almost entirely bare. 

"Such a lot of space, to sit unused," Tracy noted, sitting down on the one
piece of furniture in the second chamber, a bed-frame without a mattress. 

"Well," Jennifer said, sitting down beside her.  "Anita -- she's the night
receptionist three times a week, and she's been here since we opened --
says that the reason Leslie doesn't like it down here is because when the
building was bought . . . .  You won't put in the paper that I said this,
will you?"  Tracy shook her head, and Jennifer dropped her voice, even
though they were at least a full story below the main offices.  "Anita
says that when the building was bought, there were still weird things down
here, coffins and chains and stuff in addition to normal beds and tables
and chairs." 

Coffins? Tracy thought, but only said, "Well, it takes all kinds." 

"I suppose," Jennifer allowed.  "Umm, if you don't mind me asking, did you
and Mr. Spartali have, like, a lot of garlic bread at lunch or something?" 

Tracy's hand rose involuntarily to her neck, and she hid the move in
adjusting the collar of her coat.  "Or something," she smiled.  "Is it
that noticeable?" 

Jennifer laughed.  "Yeah.  It is.  Sorry.  Leslie's got a really rotten
cold, but I don't think anyone else in your vicinity could miss it." 

Tracy shrugged, and changed the subject.  "What about the wine cellar?" 

"Oh, that's only supplies, like I said.  There wasn't one single bottle
left, Anita says, when the hospice moved in." 

Jennifer unlocked the old wine cellar, and Tracy had to agree that there
was nothing unusual there, just a long room full of medical and office
supplies, with empty bottle racks still climbing the walls where they had
been bolted on.  Tracy sighed, and they switched off the lights and headed
back upstairs. 

As Jennifer locked the bottom door behind them, she seemed to begin to say
something, and then stopped.  Tracy paused on the step above her.  When
Jennifer caught Tracy looking at her, she blushed again and then reached
up to briefly squeeze Tracy's hand.  "It's pretty presumptuous, I know,
but I just wanted to say, you know, your families will work it out.  My
mom and dad were a really mixed marriage, religion-wise, Catholic and
Jewish, and I've never known a happier couple.  And I'm not just saying
that because they're my parents."

Having said her piece, Jennifer hurried up the stairs past Tracy, but
Tracy stayed where she was.  "Ms. Schanke?" she called after her. 

"Yeah?" 

"If you don't mind me asking, was your father Donald Schanke, Metro PD,
homicide?" 

Jennifer nodded, her expression unreadable to Tracy, who then pulled out
her identification card and handed it to the girl.  "Tracy Vetter," 
Jennifer read.  "Oh.  Oh!  You're . . . you were Nick's partner, after
Dad.  I didn't make the connection, before."  She handed the wallet back
slowly, after turning it to trace her fingers over the familiar shield.
Tracy felt tears gathering behind her eyes, and berated herself for
tormenting the poor girl; she was the daughter of a cop, and she could
have been in Jennifer's place so easily so many times.  She should have
known better.

"Thanks for telling me,"  Jennifer quirked half a smile at her, though it
didn't light her eyes quite the way a smile should.  "Did you ever, umm,
meet my dad?" 

Tracy shook her head. 

"But you knew Nick."  Suddenly, Jennifer started crying -- not sobbing,
but with tears streaming quietly and continuously down her face.  "We
never believed it, you know, Mom and I, that Nick killed Natalie.  He
would never have done that, not Dad's best friend.  The papers didn't know
what they were talking about, calling him a suspect."  She sat down on the
step, and Tracy sat beside her, hesitantly putting her arm around her
shoulders.  "Mom tried to have Dad's funeral at night, you know, because
of Nick's allergy?  But Nick said it would be too tough on everyone else,
and wouldn't let her.  And that night, I ran off and rode my bike all the
way down to the cemetery, and Nick was already there, and we just sat
there for hours and talked about my dad.  He held me while I cried," 
Jennifer looked up at Tracy and laughed through the tears, "and he drove
me and my bike home in his big, ugly car, and excused me to Mom so I
wouldn't get in trouble when he found out I didn't have permission to go." 

Tracy hugged the girl, and they sat there for a while longer, reminiscing
about Nick.  Finally, Jennifer remembered that she was ostensibly at work. 
"Oh my goodness, Leslie'll be so upset," she exclaimed, springing to her
feet. 

"Naah," Tracy disagreed.  "She's been talking to Paul all this time; I
doubt she's noticed a minute on the clock."  They both laughed, and
started up the stairs. 

Before opening the door at the top of the flight, Jennifer turned again to
Tracy.  "You know, my dad used to call me 'Jenny,' and so did Nick.  I
never let anyone else call me that anymore.  But, umm, you can, okay? 
It's sort of like you should have inherited it from Nick." 

"Thanks, Jenny," Tracy said, and wished she could think of something to
offer in return.  She stood four years from her partner's death, and yet
only one day from the memory of the loss, and to be able to share that
with someone who had known Nick had straightened her out inside, where she
had not yet even realized her soul was so painfully knotted. 

"Look," Jenny grinned ruefully.  "I've got to run to the bathroom and wash
my face.  Can you tell Leslie where I am?" 

"Sure," Tracy answered as they stepped back onto the main floor.  "And
Jenny -- when you email Paul?  I'll get your address and write you, okay?" 

"Great," Jenny grasped both her hands briefly, and then dashed off around
a partition.  When Tracy stepped back into the receptionist's area, Paul
flashed her a relieved look, and concluded his conversation with Burke
immediately on the heels of Tracy's information of Jenny's whereabouts. 

Stepping outside, Tracy was surprised to discover that it was full dark. 
"What time is it, anyway?" 

"Seven-oh-nine," Paul answered without looking at his watch, and then put
his arm around her shoulder as they headed down the street to the car. 
"What on earth did you find that kept you so long?" 

"Well, there weren't any coffins in the basement -- anymore," Tracy
answered, smiling.  "I'll tell you about that in the car.  And we still
reek of garlic, by the way.  But your fan?"  Her smile faded wistfully as
her voice rose into the question.  "She's the daughter of Don Schanke,
Nick's partner before me.  That's what we were on about so long: people
we've lost." 

Paul kissed the top of her head as they reached the car, and opened the
glove box as soon as he settled into his seat.  "Luigi's then?" he asked,
pulling out Tracy's coupon envelope. 

"Luigi's," she agreed, starting the car and pulling into traffic.  "I
suppose it's too late to go by the church tonight." 

"I'm game, if you don't mind being there in the dark." 

"You're up for it?  I was sure Ms. Leslie Burke would have soured you on
the whole project by now." 

"She certainly tried," he laughed.  "And you owe me for that hour alone in
her company.  But -- hey, I did get something out of her.  Tell you over
lasagna." 

"Spaghetti." 

"Who owes who here?" 

"You can have lasagna and I'll have spaghetti," Tracy insisted
pedantically, and then related the history of the Raven's basement as told
by Jenny, as heard from Anita.  "I know it's not much," she concluded, as
they looked for a parking space in the restaurant's lot. 

"But, again, it's something," Paul acknowledged.  "Something odd, right
where you believe there should be something odd, vampires or no. Actually,
I'm more interested in your partner's partner's daughter being there, and
her mysterious bequest from the deBrabant Foundation."  He smiled
slightly.  "You know what Ms. Schanke was reading -- what she chucked out
of sight when we came in?"

Tracy remembered that gesture, and the slightly-guilty look that had
accompanied it.  "No.  What?" 

"One of Emily Weiss's old _Vampire Sagas_ novels.  It's the closest we've
really gotten to the v-word all day.  Ironic, isn't it?  Burke looked fit
to blow a blood vessel when she opened that drawer, but then said, 'girls
will be girls,' and went back to telling me how she was hand-picked to run
the clinic.  From what Jennifer told you, I guess we know that vampire
fetishists are an easily-pushed button for her." 

Turning off the car, Tracy asked, "Can you tell me the rest of this story
inside?" 

"Sure.  Why?" 

"Because I'm starving." 

"Good reason," Paul answered, and they walked up to the restaurant as
quickly as they could, dodging other cars looking for a spot.  During the
twenty-minute wait for a table, Paul sketched out the column he planned to
write from this, mostly ignoring the capable but annoying Ms. Burke, and
speculating on the story of the sad-eyed young mother they had been
briefly introduced to in the lounge upstairs.  After they were seated,
with bread and soft-drinks on the table, and lasagna and spaghetti
ordered, Paul began to lay out the pieces of the puzzle he had extracted
from Burke, in between the lines of her hagiography of herself. 

"Apparently," Paul resumed telling Tracy after their meal had been
delivered and their waiter assured that they had everything they wanted. 
"The deBrabant Foundation made bids on the Raven property each of the
other times it was sold since immediately after this Lacroix guy
disappeared in '96, but was edged out.  Burke thinks it was divine
justice, the previous businesses failing so her hospice could get its just
desserts, but . . ." 

"But you don't?" she supplied. 

Paul shook his head.  "It may just be the way Burke told the story, and it
certainly needs to be investigated further, but no; I don't.  It's just
too pat.  I can't help but think that it sounds an awful lot like someone
who knows the place very, very well has been behind the deBrabant
Foundation's involvement with the old Raven from the beginning, someone
like, say, the previous owner." 

"Lacroix." 

"Lacroix," he agreed.  "Burke believes that the Foundation has been in
existence for decades, perhaps over a century: that it's some sort of
hereditary trust.  And she firmly believes that she was hand-picked for
her job by the current heir to that trust." 

"Did she tell you who that is?" 

"She has no idea, Tracy.  She thinks the Foundation is run out of New
York, but she doesn't even know that for certain; her paycheck is signed
by an intermediary here in Toronto.  She can be so full of herself that I
doubt she even sees the holes in her story, and it certainly isn't as if
it's illegal to go around being mysterious when you're donating huge sums
to the public good." 

"Unless it isn't really for the public good." 

"But what would a . . . person . . . want with a clinic and shelter?" 

"I can't imagine," Tracy said, in a way that implied she certainly could
imagine.  "Unless something is *flowing* out of the clinic the back way." 
Paul laid down his fork for a minute to stare out her, and she stared
back, speaking very quietly.  "We said a game, before, Paul, but it's
never been a game.  I thought it was, once, but I was wrong.  It's always
life and death for someone; that's the nature of the beast." 

They sat silently for a moment, eyes locked, and then Paul dropped her
gaze and took up his fork again.  "We should probably save the rest of
this conversation for the car.  Why don't you tell me what you and
Jennifer Schanke talked about?" 

Tracy did, and they passed the rest of the meal primarily with
reminiscences of Nick, her own, and Jenny's, second-hand.  With the bill
paid and their after-dinner peppermints on their tongues, they walked out
to the car.  While Tracy went into the trunk for her industrial
flashlight, to match the plastic one in the glove compartment, Paul
checked his watch. 

"It's almost nine, Tracy, and we both have to be at work tomorrow." 

"We can be home by midnight.  Easy," she answered, shutting the trunk
firmly and handing him the light before walking around to her door.  "I've
been stalling this all day, and I don't know why.  I'm actually rather fed
up with myself for it, and want to press through to the end.  Are you
still game?" 

"Why not?" he asked rhetorically, and slid into his seat.  "Do we take in
the stakes this time?" 

"We take in the stakes." 

---

The drive to the church was not a long one, but it was long enough for
both of them to lapse into the silence of their own thoughts.  Tracy
tallied up the day, and resigned herself to calling Doctor Kadlec sometime
the next afternoon.  She had found so much, emotionally, but so little, in
the eyes of objective truth.  Of course, she noted to herself, the letter
of the promise was only to *call* her therapist, not to bring up anything
in particular with her, and certainly this whole phenomena of recovered
memory did need to be explored, vampires or no vampires.  On the other
hand, she also knew what Paul believed the promise to be in spirit, and
she was not going to lie to him, no matter what.  She only hoped she could
convince him of what she knew more clearly to be true the more clearly she
was able to access these prodigal memories: it was just too dangerous to
tell anyone, anyone at all.  The Enforcers would not blink at
doctor-patient privilege, nor would any other vampire enforcing their
code.  She had only told Paul because, well, he was *Paul,* and not
telling him would be like denying it to herself.  She hoped he understood
that.  And she prayed with every breath that the Enforcers would not call
in their price on the knowledge she had given him.

The silence lasted after she parked, and even after they had gotten out of
the car and approached the church.  On the threshold of the building,
however, with a flashlight in one hand and a stake in the other, Paul
stopped her.  "Tracy, the guy who used to live here, Vachon, your friend
-- how . . . close were you?  I mean, if he hadn't left . . . ?" 

"Would I be here with you tonight?"  Tracy supplied softly when he trailed
off.  She put her arms around his waist, and pulled him as close as their
winter coats would allow, as if to hold him in place for the answer to his
question.  She wanted to say that Vachon had been a good friend, and that
while she had been infatuated with him for a while, in the end they would
never have worked.  She wanted to say that while she would always love
Vachon for opening her eyes to his world, there was nothing more to it.
She wanted to say that, but something stopped her, and instead she said,
"I would hope I would be *somewhere* with you tonight."

"Good to hear it," Paul whispered, and then brushed her lips in a quick
kiss.  "Shall we go in?" 

They went in down the stairs, to the lower part of the building where
Tracy had always found Vachon in her later visits to the church,
flashlights picking out their path a few steps in front of them as they
descended.  Tracy shone her light quickly over the walls, trying to match
her view to her memory and determine if anything had been moved.  Her best
hope for evidence of vampires would be a crate of bottled blood; her best
hope for a lead to Vachon, similarly, would be something he had not meant
to leave behind.  Not that he ever had much to leave behind. 

"Do you mind if I light these?" Paul asked, pointing his flashlight at the
iron candelabra next to the couch and setting down his stake to pull his
keys out of his pocket; he had both a lighter and a Swiss-army knife
attached to the chain, to the point where the accessories outbulked the
keys by half again. 

"No, that's fine," Tracy said.  "That's the light I was always accustomed
to in here, anyway."  She sat down on the couch and contemplated the room. 
"I didn't expect him to be here, you know, though I thought it was worth a
shot.  And it makes perfect sense that there isn't anything here to find
-- I mean, after all, he must have taken his guitar with him four years
ago, and if he didn't sell his motorcycle and helmet, it's not like they
wouldn't have disappeared by now, but there's still something that feels
slightly . . . off . . . down here." 

"What's this doing here?"  Paul asked, gesturing at the blue and white
graffiti on the wall with his turned-off flashlight. 

"I don't know," Tracy grinned.  "He wouldn't tell me.  I suspect he didn't
know, either." 

"Hnh," Paul snorted, and began to poke around behind the empty boxes and
random junk that seemed to occupy all the fringes of the room.  "So what
exactly are we looking for, as Vachon doesn't seem to be home?" 

"Bottled blood.  The crates are about so big--" Tracy gestured with her
hands.  "By so big.  About the size of two boxes of printer paper.  He
used to have them piled up everywhere.  The bottles look just like wine
bottles, except that they don't usually have any labels on them."

"Well, I don't see anything like that down here.  You want to check under
the couch?"

"He's a slacker," Tracy protested.  "Not a *slob.*"  But she looked under
the couch anyway, and then out across the floor from that level.  "Nope,
nothing down here.  Wait a minute!" 

"What?" 

"*Nothing* down there," she repeated, climbing to her feet and pointing at
several spots on the floor.  "Almost nothing, anyway.  The couch kept much
dust from accumulating under it, but look here, and over there -- why are
these spots dust-free?" 

"Dust."  Paul pondered.  "I wouldn't say the place is clean, but the dust
has been pretty well stirred up in places, like someone was moving things
around."  Shaking his head, he added, "That's a hard thing to see in
candlelight."

Tracy flipped her flashlight back on, and began to trace the footprints
she and Paul had left on the floor.  There were long, clear streaks around
the few pieces of furniture, and evidently there had been prints in the
dust down the center of the stairs, prints which they had already obscured
with their own.  Tracy returned to the two square patches which had first
caught her attention, undisturbed around the edges but completely clear of
dust themselves.  "What do these look like to you?" Tracy asked. 

He squatted next to the nearer square.  "It looks as if someone lifted
something straight up, and carried it away." 

"That's what I think, too," Tracy agreed.  "Any idea how that was
accomplished?" 

"You're not suggesting that someone *flew*," Paul objected.  "We have no
idea what was sitting here -- they could have been two boards, or even two
pieces of paper of no weight at all.  And what about those streaks, by the
couch and by the stairs?  Something was dragged, there anyway." 

"I'm not suggesting anything," Tracy shrugged.  "Except that someone has
been in here recently enough that the dust hasn't erased the proof of
their passage.  Say, within the last two weeks or less?" 

"Sounds reasonable to me." Paul stood up. "Is there anything else to be
deduced from this site, Detective Vetter?" 

"Why no, I don't think so, agent-of-the-press Spartali.  You want to head
upstairs?" 

Paul picked up his stake and flashlight, turning on the latter before
blowing out the candles he had lighted just a few minutes before.  Tracy
preceded him up the stairs, to the attic where she had first met the Inca,
so nearly disastrously.  It suddenly occurred to her to wonder why the
heck Vachon's vampiric brother had interrogated her in Spanish in the
first place; the man had been perfectly capable of speaking English, and
they had been in Canada, for crying out loud.  French, she could have
excused, though still not understood, but Spanish?  Either he had been
particularly upset with Vachon, or he had not wanted her to be able to
answer.  The second possibility made her shiver, and Paul, seeing that as
he came up behind her, asked, "Are you ready to go home?" 

"Not quite yet.  We have to look around up here, too.  The dust seems
undisturbed, so we may be in luck." 

Paul found another candelabra and lit it, while Tracy walked over to the
window and ripped down the black blanket that had been tacked over it four
years before.  Between the candles and the moonlight, the contents of the
attic were much more clear, but she found her attention being drawn more
to the moon than to the scraps of uncompleted projects and discarded
dreams that had occupied the building well before Vachon, and, apparently,
well since.  The moon was on the wane, which surprised her; she always
associated the full moon with Vachon, probably because it had been full
the night they met. 

"Tracy," Paul called her over.  He shone his flashlight under the eaves by
the stairs.  "Is this what you're after?" 

She came over to look, and then got down on her hands and knees to pull
the dust-covered crate out into the open.  "Looks like a forgotten stash
to me," she remarked, dislodging the unbolted lid and pulling up a bottle
for his inspection: green glass, no label, something liquid inside.  "Got
a cork remover?" 

He gravely opened out that attachment on his Swiss-army knife, and popped
the cork.  He sniffed the bottle, and then moved it quickly away from his
nose.  "I don't know what it is, but I promise I won't be drinking any of
it." 

Tracy took a more careful whiff.  "It doesn't smell quite like the wine
and blood mixture I remember Vachon drinking, but, then, it's been sitting
up here four years.  I don't know what kind of preservatives they do --
and don't -- put into it."  She replaced the cork and set the bottle on
the ground, then began pulling up bottles at random, as if checking for
labels.  "Come to think of it, Nick always kept his in his refrigerator. 
At the time, I assumed he just liked his wine chilled, but now knowing it
must have been blood, I wonder if maybe he did that to extend its shelf
life.  Maybe he didn't drink as much as Vachon." 

"And maybe this is just a bad batch," Paul offered.  "Can I see that
again?" 

Tracy handed back the first bottle, and Paul poured a little out on the
wooden floor.  He watched it dry for a few seconds, and then cautiously
smelled the bottle again.  "I would guess there is a good deal of blood in
this mixture," he decided.  "But my expertise is only as the Toronto
Star's Employee-Hockey Stupid-Accident Champion.  How much do you want to
take with us?" 

"None." 

"None?" 

"What good would it do us?  We can't risk sending this to the lab, either. 
The point was for you to see it."  She replaced the bottles in the crate
and pushed it back into its odd little nook.  Standing, she rubbed her
dusty hands on her jeans and then crossed her arms.  "Finding any clues to
Vachon's whereabouts was a longshot, and it looks like we've come up dry. 
What about the existence of vampires, Paul?  What do you see?" 

Paul looked out the window.  "Even if it is blood, what do you think I
should see?  Objectively." 

Tracy sighed and leaned on the doorframe.  "Objectively," she repeated. 
"There is something going on with the old Raven, the deBrabant Foundation,
my deceased partner, and his possible relatives.  There has been digging
on Cherry Beach, recently.  Someone has been in this church, recently. 
Bottled blood has been stored in this room, undisturbed, for some time. 
But there is no necessary relation between any of these facts." 

"And as far as the blood -- cults and other human weirdos come to mind
well before supernatural creatures of the night."  Paul walked over to the
stairs.  "I'm sorry, Tracy, but I still think you should call Doctor
Kadlec tomorrow.  I'll see what I can find out about this deBrabant
Foundation, but it still sounds to me as if this vampire business is a
side-effect of your memories resurfacing." 

Tracy nodded noncommittally, and blew out the candles.  She lingered at
the window a moment before following Paul downstairs.  As she had
promised, they were home by midnight -- easily. 

---

The first thing Tracy did when she arrived at the precinct the next
morning was to inform Captain Reese that her memories had returned.  He
seemed cautiously delighted, and asked if she had told her father yet.

"Ummm, no, actually, Cap," Tracy answered.  "I've told my fiancee, and now
you.  I'm going to tell my partner when I sit down at my desk, and later
I'm going to call my shrink.  My dad's not exactly on the A-list for this
news."

Reese raised his eyebrows questioningly, but when she did not expand on
that, he seemed to accept it.  Tracy compared the Reese of today with the
Reese who was unexpectedly promoted into the celebrated Captain Cohen's
shoes four years before; she appreciated the way he had grown in the
position, and wondered briefly how much losing Nick and nearly losing her
had had to do with it.  "You know your own business, Vetter," he closed
the subject.  "When you get a chance, though, I'd appreciate it if you'd
take another look at the files on Natalie Lambert's murder.  You may see
something that will ring a bell now, even if it didn't before."

Tracy nodded, and walked slowly across the room to her desk.  She had no
intention of looking at the files, actually, now less than ever.  She had
pored over them for weeks after the shooting, as soon as she had been able
to convince her doctors she was up to such work, and she knew them like
the inside of her own eyelids.  With her memory intact, she knew she could
solve the case in an instant; and with her memory intact, she knew it was
better left as it was.

The body of Doctor Natalie Lambert, coroner for the city of Toronto, had
been found lying in concentric pools of sunlight and blood on the floor of
the main room of the apartment of Metro PD Detective Nick Knight.  Her
throat had been torn open, but the wound was formed in such a way that her
colleagues concluded that she had died -- they did not know how -- before
it had been inflicted, and that it had been meant to disguise something --
they did not know what.  She had been found covered in a certain quantity
of ashes, determined under the microscope to be the remains of some animal
matter, and with a long, carved, scorched, wooden staff lying across her
torso, tangled with the clothes in which Detective Knight had last been
seen.  The windows and skylight had been found open, but all doors had
been locked from the inside.  The media had had a field day, feasting on
cults and conspiracies and, most of all, the missing Detective Knight.
When week after week of investigation had turned up nothing, the press had
abandoned the story, and the police had eventually moved it to the back
burner.  As weeks had turned into months, even Lambert's sister-in-law and
niece, her only living relatives, had slowly ceased to press for an
answer, and the case had been declared unsolvable, the situation
incomprehensible, a motive impossible. 

But while the motive still eluded Tracy, she thought she comprehended the
situation as well as anyone could.  Natalie had been drained by a vampire,
and a vampire's body had been exposed to the sun and reduced to ashes over
her.  Believing that Nick would never abandon Natalie, dead or alive,
Tracy deduced that the ashes had been Nick's; believing that Nick would
never kill himself, Tracy concluded that someone else had killed him.  The
only question that remained was whether Nick's killer and Natalie's were
one and the same.

Well, that and whether she ought to stake the vampire who had killed her
partner.

"What's up with Reese, Trace?"  Jason asked, looking up from a sheaf of
papers and prying her out of her reflections as she reached their desks.

"Something happened that I thought he ought to know about."  She shrugged
slightly and sat down on the edge of his desk.  "While we were off, my
memories came back -- you know, from the shooting."

"That's great!  Isn't it?" 

She shrugged again.  "It's a lot to take in all at once.  Not everything I
was told about that year matches up with what I now remember of it."

"Like what?" 

"Oh, little things.  How was Becca's birthday?"  Tracy reached out her
hand for the file he was holding, and Jason turned it over with a
noncommittal shake of his head.

"Forensics still hasn't turned up anything on that one," he informed her. 
"Becca, though, was pretty good.  She wouldn't let her brothers come out
of their room for the duration of the party, and she banished Lilly and me
to perpetual servitude over the pizza and ice cream in the kitchen, but
for a just-turned-thirteen-year-old, she was pretty good."  He smiled. 
"Another two years and Ryan and Jacob will be teenagers, too.  What is
this world coming to?" 

Tracy answered the smile, and then handed back the file.  "How did we get
stuck with this one, anyway?  We'll be out all day running down the
coworkers, and we don't even have anything to ask them."

"On the up side, it's nice to have the day clear to run down the coworkers
in.  If this homicide drought continues, maybe we can take two consecutive
days off every week.  Which reminds me, Becca said to thank you very much
for the hair-thingies." 

"Please tell her she's very welcome," Tracy responded. 

"Abrams, Vetter," Reese called, stepping out of his office.  "A body has
been found in an alley off Cherry Street Main, just beyond Unwin Avenue. I
want you two on it." 

"On our way, Cap," Tracy answered immediately, winking at Jason and
tapping the file they were determinedly leaving behind.  When they arrived
at the alley above Cherry Beach, they found the immediate area cordoned
off with plastic tape and monitored by uniformed officers.  The body of a
woman in the remains of a jogging suit had been found that morning in a
cardboard-recycling dumpster behind a row of shops, during the normal
collection of that bin's contents; since there were as yet no civilian
hangers-on, Jason set the uniformed officers to help the Forensics people
sort the cardboard that had been sharing space with the body, and then
went to interview the woman and man who had uncovered it.  Cecile
Lawrence, the ME on duty, informed Tracy that the victim had been dead
about a week, probably a bit more, and that while it was hard to make any
preliminary judgments through the mess various winter-hungry vermin had
made of the corpse, the neck was broken and it was notably exsanguinated. 

"Exsanguinated?"  Tracy repeated. 

"Drained of blood," Cecile informed her. 

"I know what it means.  I just wondered . . ."  Tracy shook her head. 
"Never mind.  You say the level of decomposition indicates death occurred
over a week ago?  But that would mean someone must have moved the body
some time after the death -- they empty these things every week, don't
they?"

"Every two weeks," Jason corrected her, joining Tracy and Cecile from the
back of the BMI Paper-Reclamation van where he had been interviewing the
two people who worked the recycling route.  "They hit this row every
second Wednesday, and they say -- no-brainer -- that there was no body in
the bin the last time they were here.  And can you believe that the
victim's CD player and headphones were still on her?  Strange stuff." 

"Well, that matches the best I can tell you here, detectives," Cecile
replied, glancing over her clipboard.  "Let me get this body back to the
morgue and properly autopsied, and hopefully something else will turn up."

"You mind if I take a look at it before you do, Cecile?" Tracy asked. 

"No," the ME shook her head in surprise.  "But it's not pretty sight, I'm
warning you."

"Don't expect it to be," Tracy answered as Cecile unzipped the black body
bag in which the corpse had already been placed.  Holding her sleeve over
her mouth and nose, she made a show of looking carefully at everything
there was to be seen, but all the information she needed had been
available in her first glance at the neck.  Fang marks -- human, not rat,
dog or fox.  "Thanks," Tracy said, gesturing to the ME that she could
close the bag.  "If no one has had a sketch artist on the victim yet,
could you make that a priority before you start cutting?" 

Cecile raised one eyebrow.  "Bone structure is bone structure, Tracy, and
I doubt the artist can do much with the flesh left on this one.  I'm lucky
to be able to tell you it was a female with Asian ancestors."

Jason intervened. "You're probably right, but without that we're gonna be
stuck matching missing persons anonymously again, Cecile.  Please?" 

"Sure," she acquiesced.  "I'll snag Stewart on the way down.  Funny
someone would bother to take the wallet and leave the CD player."

"Jogger," Tracy shook her head.  "She probably wasn't carrying a wallet in
the first place."

"Maybe not, Detective," a young woman in uniform said as she came up to
the trio from where the cardboard was being sorted.  "But we found these." 
She handed Jason a ring of keys; attached to the ring was a string of
lettered beads.

"Tiffany," Jason read solemnly.  He looked up to meet Tracy's eyes. 
"Somebody's daughter; somebody's sister; somebody's wife; somebody's mom;
somebody's friend.  Let's find out who's missing her, Trace." 

They did, almost before Stewart finished sketching a reconstruction of the
victim's face: Tiffany Sohn, 31, a banking associate reported missing by
her partner when her employer called to ask why she had not come in to
work the previous Tuesday, a call followed by her failure to come home
that night, and, of course, all the nights since.  Sohn's house was not
far from where her body had been found, and when Tracy and Jason tracked
down the partner at her office downtown, they learned that Sohn had been
in the habit of jogging along the shore in the early morning before
heading to work.  And early mornings this time of year, Tracy noted to
herself, were uniformly dark.

"So Fuller's trying to portray this one as a hate crime," Paul announced
conversationally when she picked him up after work that evening.

"Huh?"  Tracy asked, completely thrown.  It had been a long day.  "What?" 

"Your new case, " he answered.  "Janice got Gordon Fuller the Wonder Dweeb
reassigned back to criminal investigations -- I know; aren't you so
thrilled? -- and he's trying to put forward this theory that the reason
the victim wasn't robbed was that the murder was a hate crime of some
sort; the murdered woman was both Asian and a lesbian, right?"

"Fuller is full of it," Tracy snorted, and switched lanes.  "As usual. 
The victim was killed by a vampire."

"What?" 

"You heard me.  The V-word.  You know," Tracy turned to look at him as she
stopped the car at an intersection.  "I never realized it before, but
Natalie Lambert must have covered these things up all the time.  I mean, I
saw three vampire victims at crime scenes myself in that year, and there's
no way a good ME like her could have missed what even I observed."  The
light went green and she made a left turn.  "I wish she was here to do it
this time; we can only hope that the fang holes will be attributed to the
rodents that have been gnawing on the body all week."

"Tracy, why did you take that turn?" 

"We're going by the morgue so you can see what there is to see." 

Paul was silent for a moment.  "Don't take this the wrong way, but did you
call Doctor Kadlec?"

"I didn't get a chance.  I'll email her tonight instead, if you still want
me to."  Tracy sighed.  "So since Fuller has already told you all about my
day, how was yours?"

"The column on the deBrabant Clinic is set to go for Friday," he answered. 
"Though, actually, I've suggested that they hold it for Sunday and do a
bit of a spread on the relevant issues -- make a deal out of it."

"That would certainly please Leslie Burke," Tracy noted. 

"More importantly, it's giving me a chance to poke into the deBrabant
Foundation while everyone else is looking up statistics on battered women
and the health-care system.  They're tough, whoever they are.  All I was
able to find out is that their first-recorded activity in Canada was in
1951, as the intermediaries who paid the lawyers who worked for Katherine
Barrington after she disappeared."  He put special emphasis on the woman's
name.

Tracy caught it.  "Katherine Barrington, who emerged from hiding six years
ago, after the man who murdered her husband was finally stopped by Metro
PD detectives Schanke and Knight."  She parallel-parked the car just
beyond the fire zone of the Coroner's Building. 

"Exactly.  Oh, and I also traced back the money trail to New York; Burke
was right about that much, at least.  It vanishes without a trace in the
paperwork of an art gallery called 'The Last Man.' Apparently, the gallery
is just another charity of the Foundation, and the manager, or owner or
whatever, is an employee of theirs, a 'J.L. Cross.' Your Lacroix?  Big in
posh and exclusive art circles, whoever it is, but when you're *that* posh
and exclusive, you don't talk to reporters.  I got nothing but a polite
run-around on the phone.  And everything fuzzes out and bends back on
itself in double payrolls and tax receipts, so it's impossible to tell
anything more than that it is the end of the line.  As I said, they are
tough."

Getting out of the car, Tracy asked, "Anything more on Nick, then?" 

Paul shook his head and followed her into the building.  "Everything is
circumstantial.  You have reason to believe he was mixed up with Lacroix
and the deBrabant woman, and we've three times seen the Foundation
spending its largesse in his wake -- the Raven, his partner's daughter,
and Katherine Barrington.  Though, of course, Barrington was before he was
born." 

"That depends on when he was born," Tracy said, pausing to check the duty
roster on the bulletin board outside the elevator, and then heading down a
side hall.  "You know, Patrick McDonagh, the boy who was with the suspect
in the Larouche homicide?  He as good as told me that Janette deBrabant
was Nick's sister, but he and his aunt both said she died in that fire,
and forensics didn't contradict them.  I rechecked the file today.  A
vampire's sister, a fire?"  She shook her head. 

"Well, regardless, there isn't hide nor hair -- nor ash -- of Nick Knight
since 1996.  This Cross, on the other hand--" 

Tracy waved him to silence as Alice emerged from the double doors at the
end of the hallway.  The intern's arms were full of papers, and she had
apparently opened the door by backing into the handle and pushing through
bodily.  She jumped just slightly when she saw that she did not have the
hallway to herself. 

"Oh!  Detective Vetter!  Hi!  I thought I was the only one in this wing
just now.  How are you doing?" 

"I'm fine, thanks, Alice," Tracy answered, turning to follow the girl back
the way she and Paul had just come.  "Actually, we're here to check out
something with the Sohn body.  Do you know its status?" 

"Sure.  It's in the freezer in Dr. Fowler's lab.  They're ready to release
it to the family as soon as the routine tests come back tomorrow morning.
Why?  What's up?" 

"I want to reconfirm the animal marks."  Tracy told herself it was not
technically a lie.  "I suspect that maybe something bigger than a rat was
at her, and maybe the neighborhood should be worried."

"You mean wild dogs?  Or something else?"  Alice stopped outside a door
and Paul held it open for her as she stepped through and set her stack of
papers on top of a waist-high filing cabinet.  "No: never mind.  Curiosity
killed the lab assistant as easily as the cat, and if you keep talking to
me, I'll just start offering my unauthorized opinion again."  She flashed
a brief grin and then squatted down to pull out the bottom drawer.  "I'm
half convinced I'm on night shift a week before I was due because I had
the gall to suggest, in Doctor Fowler's hearing, that it looked almost
like that body just got up and walked away on its own.  He was already
upset because someone had stolen his coat."

"I'm sorry, Alice," Tracy offered. 

"Oh, never mind me.  I'm just grousing because I'd only just gotten
readjusted to the day shift."  She stopped filing for a minute and looked
up at Tracy.  "Am I keeping you?  I don't mean to.  Doctor Lawrence hasn't
gone home yet, I don't think, but you'll have to hurry if you want to
catch her."

"We'll do that.  Alice," Tracy turned back for a second before following
Paul down the hallway. "Umm, hang in there, huh?"

"No problem, Detective Vetter," the intern smiled.  "Good luck with your
case."

"What was that all about?" Paul asked as they headed for Fowler's lab. 

"She was there when I fainted," Tracy informed him.  "And she's all too
right -- the body did just get up and walk away.  I wish I could tell her
that."

Tracy was relieved to have to switch on the lights when they reached their
destination.  It meant they had missed Cecile and beaten whomever would be
coming on for the next shift; there would be no awkward questions to
answer.  The morgue freezer was almost unoccupied, and having the gurney
in the center of the room as Tracy slowly unzipped the body bag made the
occasion seem almost ceremonious.  Without touching the corpse, she drew
Paul's attention to what she knew to be fang holes, still distinct among
all the other markings, almost as if something in the tiny wounds had
instinctively repelled the scavengers that had made so free with the rest
of Tiffany Sohn.

Paul stared silently for a moment, and then reached up with his left hand
to measure the space between his own canines.  Unsatisfied, he bit into
his forefinger just enough to indent the skin, and then held it next to
the marks on the victim's neck.  Meeting Tracy's eyes, he admitted
gravely, "It could be."

"Good."  Tracy did not realize that she had been holding her breath until
she let it out in that word.  Paul smiled at her obvious relief, and she
smiled at herself.  She promptly zipped up the bag and exited the freezer,
waiting only for Paul before flipping off the lightswitch.  "I really want
to go home now.  It's been a heck of a day." 

While Paul slept that night, Tracy tossed and turned and finally got out
of bed, cracking the window a couple of inches and wedging herself between
the walls of the broad sill, her knees folded up to her chest under her
flannel nightshirt and the old heater banging itself awake against the
wall below.  The moon was only a tiny sliver, and as far as she could see
at all, it was by the light of the streetlamps and the occasional passing
car.  The air was freezing on one side of her, and carried the burned-dust
smell of steam heat on the other.  She kept the curtains closed behind
her, for whatever good that would do in insulating Paul from the chill as
he slumbered under their quilted spread.  As far as she was concerned,
however, the cold seemed to wake something in her, crawling into her bones
and caressing her skin from the inside out.  She felt restless without
reason or recourse; she felt like a battery that had been sitting in its
charger too long and could neither take anything more in nor put anything
out.

She looked at the sleeping world from her third-story window and wondered
why Vachon had never taken her flying.

It had been an ostentatiously normal evening.  Paul had started making
some Rice-a-Roni and chicken while she watched the local news, and she had
finished making them while he watched the national news.  They had turned
off the television while they ate, and conspicuously talked about
everything but work: the grocery list, the neighbor who had lost her cat,
Paul's little brother's new job in Ottawa.  Paul had not said that he
believed in the existence of vampires, but neither had he mentioned
calling Doctor Kadlec again.  On the surface, everything had slid smoothly
into its accustomed groove, and she had expected that to soothe her into
hers.  It had not. 

Tracy could pick out a few stars from the glare of the city lights, and it
seemed to her as if they were terribly far away, further than they had
ever been, as if they were deliberately withdrawing from the earth and its
doings.  It seemed as if the cold was a consequence of their departure, a
just recompense to those below.  Tracy believed in her job, in the path
she had chosen, in the necessity of finding out the truth and putting
killers behind bars on its strength.  She believed in her job, but,
sometimes -- sometimes -- it just sucked.  Sometimes.  Like today.  It had
not been telling the partner that the woman she loved was dead; it had not
even been telling the parents that they had run out of time to tell their
daughter they still loved her.  No, it had been the little niece who
opened the door at the parents' house, and asked tearfully if her aunt was
dead as soon as Jason said he and Tracy were detectives.  Tracy wanted to
rail against the media, against whatever television show had taught that
little girl that the police mean death.  She wanted to rail against the
world for making her, herself, a harbinger of death.  She wanted to -- but
it was not the world's fault.  She knew what had killed Tiffany Sohn, and
she could not even tell those who were mourning her, not even give them
the tiny solace of the truth. 

It went against everything she believed in, letting the killer go, and
with every minute that passed in the precinct with Vachon's name unspoken,
Tracy retreated further into herself, demanding an explanation from the
person she had been.  What had made her think, four years before, that his
bottled blood was somehow innocent?  What had made her believe, when she
had seen him kill Vudu with her own eyes, that he was still somehow above
the vampires who had murdered Don Eckhart and the two arsonists in Union
Station?  What had she seen all those nights when she had looked into his
wide, brown eyes?  Whatever it had been, it did not shield her now from
the inescapable assembly of the puzzle pieces which pictured him as Sohn's
murderer, on the beach near Screed's grave, before dawn of the day she had
seen his body in the morgue.

She was considering killing Lacroix. 

Did logic dictate, then, that she should be considering killing Vachon,
too?

Tracy suddenly pushed the window up all the way and swung her legs
recklessly out over the ledge, ducking her neck just under the sash.  If
she fell, she thought, she would die.  The ground was very far below; the
sky was very far above; and as her breath froze into crystals in the air
before her face, she discovered that she had been trying to occupy a
middle ground that did not exist.  Vachon had killed Vudu outside the law,
but as she had told Bruce, that kind of thing was never justice; it was
murder.  She did not want to die; she did not want to kill.  She wanted
only the truth.  She put vengeance firmly aside, and crawled back onto the
warm side of the window. 

"Tracy?" Paul's voice came sleepily from the bed, and she supposed she
must have woken him as the lock clicked the window shut.

"I'm here," she responded quietly, giving the still winter night one final
glance before rejoining him under the covers. 

More asleep than awake, he rolled over to embrace her as she got into bed,
waking up almost fully at the first touch of her skin.  "You're ice!" 

"I've been outside, sort of," she whispered.  "Thinking.  Go back to
sleep."

"No," he teased, poking her so she turned onto her side, placing her back
securely against his chest.  "Like you said earlier, Fuller told me about
your day; I want to hear your version."  He rubbed his hands up her arms
as if to warm her, and blew gently on her shoulder before kissing it.
"What have you been thinking about?"

Tracy closed her eyes and shivered at the feel of his lips on her skin, a
response even the freezing cold had failed to muster.  "Too much," she
answered him.  He was so warm, and his breath was the spirit of life.  She
pulled his right hand up to her lips and kissed his palm lingeringly, a
tribute to that, and had the pleasure of feeling him almost shiver in
return.  "I'll tell you in the morning," she promised, reversing herself
in his embrace and enthusiastically seeking out his lips to indicate how
she would like to spend some time before then.

---

Over breakfast the next day -- her Kix and his Lucky Charms -- Tracy lined
up the dominoes of the last week for Paul as she had done for herself, and
told him that she had decided to go to New York to see the proprietor of
The Last Man gallery. 

"Literally, 'to see,'" she repeated, adding milk to her coffee.  "No
appointments, no chances for him to deceive or deny, and no trouble if it
isn't who we think it is.  But I have to see him; I have to know the
truth." 

"On the practical side," Paul offered, "when I was doing my poking around
yesterday, I found out that they are having a big opening for some
up-and-coming painter named Darwin Bellon today." 

"Today?" 

"Tonight, really," he corrected himself.  "Scheduled to open at eight. 
Hop a flight out of Pearson as soon as you get off shift, take a red-eye
back; you may be completely wiped on the job tomorrow, but you'll have
your answers.  That," he gestured emphatically with his spoon, "is the
practical side.  The other side, the
I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-taking-vampires-seriously side, is that this
is the guy you think hypnotized you, stealing your memories of an entire
year, goodness-knows-why." 

"Because humans aren't supposed to know about vampires," Tracy said.  "I
told you that." 

"You told me that," Paul acknowledged.  "You also said that you didn't
know why he hadn't just killed you instead.  My point is, what makes you
think he won't do it this time?" 

Tracy stood up and took her bowl to the sink, washing and rinsing both it
and her spoon before turning back to Paul.  "I have a theory, about the
hypnotism.  I don't think he could tamper with my memory again, even if he
wanted to.  Vachon always gave me to understand that a resistor was just
something I *was*, more-or-less like being blond and female -- that it's
built-in.  I think that whatever part of my brain has this
anti-vampire-hypnotism function was damaged when my head smashed into the
locker-room wall on the recoil from Dawkins's bullets.  After all, none of
the doctors were surprised at my memory loss, so something must have
happened to my brain; but it's healed now, obviously, and I don't think I
can be whammied again." 

"You didn't answer my question," Paul prompted her.  "That's all fine and
good, but what makes you think this Lacroix isn't going to try to kill you
when he finds out he can't manipulate your memories?" 

"I'm getting to that."  She refilled her coffee mug and sat back down at
the table.  "The first time, you know, I was in the morgue, apparently
dead, I guess.  He could have left me that way; he could have killed me so
easily.  But he went to the trouble of reaching through the coma and
rearranging my mind.  He said . . . he said, 'I promised him,' and that he
always keeps his promises."  She stirred her coffee idly.  "My theory is
that the 'him' was Nick.  I think that my life, like Jenny Schanke's
college fund, is a legacy from Nick." 

Paul took that in.  "What if you're wrong?" 

"I'll keep a stake up my sleeve."  Tracy smiled.  "Don't worry; I'll be
fine." 

"Yes, you will.  I'm coming with you to make sure of it." 

"Paul, I'm a cop.  What can you do that I can't?" 

"I can watch your back," he answered seriously. 

"You can get yourself killed," Tracy retorted, but in a concerned tone
that blunted its edge.  "We don't know if you're a resistor, but we can
pretty well bet that Nick didn't extract any promises on your behalf. 
Paul, I don't know what I'd do if I lost you; I can't let you walk into
that." 

"But I'm supposed to let you?" 

Tracy tightened her lips and briefly shut her eyes.  A fair question, for
which she had no answer but, "This is something I have to do." 

Unwilling to drop the question, Paul tried another track.  "What about
Vachon?" 

Tracy glanced at her watch, and then dashed for the bathroom to brush her
teeth.  They were both going to be late, and with only two of them, they
would not even be able to take the carpool lane. "Let's talk about it
tonight before I leave, okay?" 

But when evening came, Tracy instead found herself dropping off her car in
the lot outside the Toronto Star building and taking a bus home.  Paul had
called the precinct a few hours before to say that an emergency meeting of
the editorial staff had been called on the heels of another
Janice-initiated debacle, and that he had no idea when he could get loose.
He'd had to leave the message on the voice-mail system; Tracy and Jason
had been out hopelessly following the slightest of leads on people who
might possibly have held a grudge against Tiffany Sohn.

On the bus ride, watching all the other people with all their
anonymously-interlocking vampire-less lives, Tracy felt the day's sense of
surreal isolation stretch out infinitely.  The futility of pursuing the
Sohn case as she and Jason had to do, the truth already known but
eternally unpresentable, had pushed her to the sidelines of her own
consciousness, and as she had watched herself go through the motions, she
wondered how often Natalie Lambert had stood in a similar place, halfway
between worlds and feeling more like a rope in a tug-of-war than a bridge
to any reconciliation.  She wondered if Nick had stood there, too.  She
wondered if his life had been his cover, or if his cover had been his
life. 

The bus dropped her off about a block from her apartment, and she covered
the intervening distance a good clip faster than it would have, even if it
had taken her directly to her door.  Inside, she called to confirm the
round-trip plane ticket she had ordered over the Net that afternoon,
futilely tried to cancel the one Paul had ordered, and quickly changed
into the peach silk pantsuit she had worn to the most recent charity
dinner her father had insisted she attend.  She smiled over the
pointlessness of fancy clothes as she incongruously covered the outfit
with her leather coat and defiantly kept on her warm, tan, dress boots in
place of the suit's matching pumps. 

Halfway out the door, rummaging in her coat's large pockets to confirm
that she was carrying a stake as well as her passport, garlic as well as
mace, and wishing that she had time to go through the trouble of taking
her gun with her, Tracy remembered what she was forgetting.  She went back
into the apartment, flipped on the kitchen light, and recorded a message
for Paul on the answering machine:  "Paul, it's 6:34 and I'm taking your
car to the airport.  I CCed you a copy of my ticket reservations at your
work account.  If everything goes well, I'll be home by two.  I know I
said we'd talk about Vachon tonight, but he'll hold till tomorrow; 
whatever he's doing, I think it's local.  Wish me luck."  She lifted her
finger from the machine, and stared at the blinking red light for a moment
before pushing down the key again.  "I love you." 

The apartment seemed very silent after that, but Tracy did not have much
time to think about it as she dodged traffic, paid for parking, dashed
through the terminal, and made it through the required red tape and onto
Air Canada flight 724 without a moment to spare.  Fastening her seatbelt,
she reflected gratefully on the convenience of no-luggage commuter flights
and stared dutifully at the attendant's rote informing of the passengers
that none of the safety precautions had changed one iota from the last
million times they had flown.  The plane flight, like the bus ride, seemed
somehow surreal in its complete normalcy, with the dull magazines she
could not bring herself to read and the over-salted peanuts she could not
bring herself to eat.  Tracy had the little row to herself, and so once
the plane was in the air, she shifted to the seat at the window and
watched the illuminated network of civilization roll under the plane.  She
just wanted it all to be over, whatever it was she might find on the other
end of this jaunt, whatever the answers were to what had happened to her,
to Nick, to Vachon, whatever had been the reality of that incredible year. 
She just wanted it to be over, so she could put her life back on "play" 
from "rewind." 

But as she stared out the window, shaking her head at the flight attendant
as the beverage cart rolled past, Tracy wondered whether that was even
possible, whether reel two of her life belonged to the same film as reel
one.  She wondered if they counted, every one of the moments she had lived
since that intermission in her memories, or whether they were thin shadows
of what she might have felt and done and been had Lacroix not had his way
with her mind.

That was why this encounter was something she had to do; and it was why a
part of her now wished, more than anything, that Paul was with her. 

Tracy disembarked in LaGuardia around 8:30; the plane had been almost
precisely on time, and she had been sitting close enough to the cockpit
that she had managed to maintain a facade of patience until the passengers
in front of her had all exited and she could swing out into a
ground-eating pace.  She had been through this airport her share of times
-- though more often than not with at least one of her parents -- and she
knew exactly where to find a taxi to take her up to fifty-seventh street
and The Last Man.

Normally, knowing where to go and getting there quickly would do Tracy
little good, as she would lose all the time she had gained to working up
the decisive appearance of someone who wanted a cab, rather than someone
who just coincidentally happened to be in the vicinity.  Of all the forms
of transportation in the world, Tracy despised taxis. Something about
getting into a car alone with a stranger had never ceased to make her skin
crawl and her imagination dredge up gruesome, unsolved homicides for
comparison.

But tonight, with her mind firmly on the logistics of getting herself into
the presence of a vampire, she gave few thoughts to her conventional,
mortal paranoia, and snapped up the first driver available, a genial,
grizzled man whose inescapably-yellow New York cab smelled strongly of the
pine-tree air-freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror.  "Oh, I know
that place," he informed her as they set out.  "Precisely.  They always
work the night shift there, same as me, which seems a bit strange for such
a fancy-dancy gallery, but," he shrugged his shoulders, "to each his own,
don't you know.  Or her own, as the case may be." 

Tracy smiled noncommittally, and turned to stare out at the city crawling
by as the older man kept up a stream of chatter to her, to his dispatcher,
and even to himself, when all else failed.  She tried to look up at the
night sky, but the angle of the car windows and the intrusion of the
buildings conspired to keep it hidden.  It occurred to her that the city
was really the natural habitat of the vampire -- the concentration of
humans, the perfect camouflage, the ever-deepening shadows as the
buildings reached ever higher -- and it made her wonder where and when the
species could have evolved, if it evolved, if it was not simply an
embodiment of the primal evil she had sensed the night Vachon had told her
he had decided to move on.  She wondered if that was a question she dared
ask Lacroix, and she wondered if he even knew the answer.

Tracy paid her garrulous driver with her Mastercard when he dropped her
off in front of her destination, and wished she had remembered to change
some of her cash for US currency when she'd had the chance.  The
skyscraper holding The Last Man looked just like all the others up and
down the street, accommodating human scale for only a few feet around the
door before shooting out to giant, mirrored panels that strove to dwarf
the human imagination as well as the human body.  This skyscraper looked
just like all the others, except that its lights were on for patrons, not
janitors, and when Tracy disembarked from the elevator on the twelfth
floor, she