Jean-Claude drew me through the warm water, until my body rested against his. I laid my head back against his shoulder and said, "Didn't we just do this?"

"Not precisely, ma petite " he whispered against my wet hair.

Micah moved through the water until he knelt beside us. His hair was plastered to his head, looking straight and black. His chartreuse eyes were startling in his tanned face without the hair to distract from them. He moved in close enough that a strand of his hair touched mine, and the illusion of blackness faded, because even wet his hair was not as dark as mine, or Jean-Claude's. Impossibly rich, dark brown, but not black.

I whispered against Micah's cheek, "No, not precisely."

Micah kissed me, then leaned back enough to see us clearly. "Now that we're clean, why couldn't we wake you and Jean-Claude?"

"I thought Jean-Claude was awake the whole time," I said.

"Not at first; at first he was as out of it as you were."

"How did you know he wasn't just dead to the world like normal?"

"He was breathing."

I felt Jean-Claude stir against me, as if that fact had startled him. "Breathing. How . . . interesting." His voice was very careful.

"Shouldn't you have been breathing?" I asked.

"No," he said.

I turned around in his arms until I could study his face. That face showed me nothing. It was as beautiful and unreadable as a painting, as if instead of a face with movement and breath, it were just a moment caught in time, a single lovely expression. He was at his most careful, hiding, when he was like that.

"Why is your breathing more surprising than your not dying at dawn?" I asked.

"I also dreamed," he said.

I frowned at him. "You were asleep. You dream when you're asleep."

"I have not dreamed in almost six hundred years."

"What did you dream?" Micah asked.

"A very practicial question, mon chat.'"

I looked from one to the other of them. "Am I missing something?"

Jean-Claude looked at me. "What did you dream, ma petite} Who did you dream of?" His voice never changed from diat friendly lilt.

"You ask like you already know," I said.

"You must say it, ma petite."

"The Mother of All Darkness," I said, softly, and just saying it seemed to make the room not quite bright enough.