he raised it again he looked like a man coming out of deep water, shaking his hair back from his face. "Insult to injury, damn it."

"Did I say something wrong?" Sampson asked.

"No, nothing wrong," Richard said. He sighed, and his arms started to unfold, stiffly, as if it hurt him to let go of the anger. "No, I just didn't want to like you."

Sampson looked puzzled. "I don't understand."

"If I can hate you, I can get angry, and storm out. If you'd acted like some kind of lustful asshole, I could have just gone. Wrapped my injured righteousness around me, and gotten the hell out of here."

I stood up and faced him; Jean-Claude kept my hand lightly in his. "I've already told you, Richard," I said, "you don't have to pick a fight to leave."

"Yes," he said, "I do. Because I know that I cripple us as a power by simply not being here when you need me. If I'd been here, Auggie wouldn't have rolled you. I have no one but myself to blame that you and Jean-Claude fucked Auggie." His voice held the edge of warmth, and the first bite of his power flickered through the room.

I took a few steps, leaving Jean-Claude's hand behind. "Why are you responsible for everything?" I asked. "I deal with more undead than you do; I should have been able to protect myself. And maybe I should have seen it coming, but I'm not beating myself up about it. It happened, and now we deal with it."

"Is it really that easy for you, Anita? It happened, now we deal with it, we move on?"

I thought about it, then nodded. "Yes, it is, because it has to be. My life wouldn't work if I wallowed in every disaster, every moral quandary. I can't afford the luxury of self-doubt, not to that degree."

"Luxury," Richard said. "This isn't luxury, Anita, it's morality. It's your conscience. That's not a luxury item, that's what separates us from the animals."

Here we go again, I thought. Out loud I said, "I have a conscience, Richard, and my own set of morals. Do I ever worry that I'm a bad guy? Yeah, sometimes I do. Do I wonder if I've traded away pieces of my soul, just to survive? Yeah." I shrugged. "It's the price of doing business in the real world, Richard."

"This isn't the real world, Anita. This isn't the normal workaday world."

"No, but it's our world." I was facing him now, almost close enough to touch. He was controlling himself, because his power was only a warm pressure in the air.