Justin jumped, slammed the ring on his finger in his surprise at hearing the voice. He turned to face the mirror above his chest of drawers.

The Dragon stared back at him. Its dusky scales were obscured by smoke, but its burning eyes were clear, glowing behind the haze.

“After all this time, you still doubt me.”

Justin swallowed, but he said nothing. He could not deny it.

“Have I not made you privy to my plans? Do I not strive with every ounce of energy I have to guide this world to the point where it might be safe for my return?”

“Yes, my master.”

“You know my mind. You know that our activities must be kept secret from the people until they are ready.

You know this. And yet you suffer this witness to live. I 224

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin care not what you do with your time, Justinian. But do not choose to consort with those who endanger our cause. You know your race is not yet ready for my presence. They are still too fearful, too superstitious. We have guided them closer, closer every day, but they are not ready yet. Be patient, Justin. You can see the truth of my words. Look at their books and films about the unexpected, the unknown, the impossible. Soon they will be ready for me again. Just a few more generations.”

“I know, my master.”

The smoke from the glowing eyes spiraled upward as the Dragon’s gaze held him captive.

“Then do my bidding. I know you fancy this woman. But I also know there have been many women in your life to fancy. I would like to be merciful to this one, as I have wanted to be merciful to each before this, but mercy is a weakness for those who care more about themselves than the difficult task at hand. You have chosen yourself over me. You have put your personal gain over the good of all. And you must be punished for that.”

Justin swallowed.

“Do you accept your punishment?”

“Yes, my master.” Justin bowed his head.

“Open your mind to me, Justin.”

Justin obeyed, and the Dragon’s powerful psychic claws dug in. Searing flames enveloped him, burning him inside and out to the point of madness. Justin did not cry out.

The price of disobedience.

The flames rose higher. The pain intensified.

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The price of dissension.

Yet the pain felt better than contemplating Sandra’s death. It distracted him from contemplating that awful task. From that, at least, he was free for this one moment.

He burned until his flesh bubbled and popped, purifying him in the Dragon’s fire.

The price of freedom.

4

t h i r t e e n

Wet leaves slapped her face. Sandra ran as fast as her aching legs could carry her. She stumbled around tropical tree trunks and thrashed through wet bushes.

Yellow rays of oppressive sunlight flickered through the thick foliage overhead.

The black fox had been tracking her. It remained at a distance, watching calmly, sprinting to keep up with her, loping alongside sometimes, stopping with her when she had to rest. In contrast to her own noisy progress, it never made a sound, slipping through the dense rain forest like a dark ghost. Or perhaps she simply couldn’t hear it over her own ragged breath, over the blood that pounded heavily in her temples.

A golden crow cawed overhead and she ran past a white gorilla shaking the banana tree. She had to get away. He was back there, somewhere, and getting closer. Of that she was sure. If she didn’t run faster, if she didn’t get out of this accursed jungle, he would catch her.

An unseen root smacked her in the shin. The root was a DARK HEART

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trash can and it clanged loudly as it tangled up in her legs.

She cried out and tumbled to the forest floor. The black fox moved closer.

“No!” she screamed, warding it off with her hands, but the fox stopped a few feet away from her and sat on its haunches, watching.

Her chest rose and fell like a bellows. Her jeans and T-shirt were soaked with sweat, pulling at her as she tried to twist to her feet—

Too late.

She screamed again. The sun illuminated him. His red hair flamed. His trench coat was dry, despite the wet forest, and it rippled lightly around his ankles. Each pimple, each freckle, was a diseased spot on his face. He raised the knife over his head.

She forced herself to roll out of the way. The blade plunged into the earth. She dragged herself to her feet and tried to run.

No sooner had she lurched away from him than she stumbled again, clipped by a bush.

She fell . . .

. . . and fell . . .

. . . and landed on the hard, flagstone floor of the Cathedral of St. Joseph. The jungle noises stopped. No tropical birds cawed overhead. No chameleons took slow, careful strolls across scaled trees. The leafy ceiling had been replaced by high, ribbed vaults. The hot sun had given way to the cool, tomb-like echo of the church.

Her breathing reverberated around her. Slowly she rose to her knees, hampered by the white dress she now wore. She looked down at it. The gown was floor-length, had no belt, 228

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin and was made of a heavy fabric that was threatening to suf-focate her. Already the sweat of her body was wetting it, causing it to cling to her skin.

A slight scuffling sound caught her attention and she looked up at the altar. The black fox stood there, watching her.

Her breathing had begun to slow. Her heart had begun to calm.

“Oh, God, no . . .” she whispered.

“Did you think you could escape me?” The voice came from behind her.

She spun around, stumbled back against a marble column. The redhead in the green trench coat moved closer. He was fully seven feet tall. His shoulders were powerfully wide and the hands protruding from his coat were veined and gnarled. A knife shimmered at his side, clenched tight in his massive fist.

“Did you really think that, bitch?!”

She pushed harder against the column, wishing she could somehow push herself through it, somehow escape this horror.

She closed her eyes. Her feet scrabbled against the stone.

“Please, God . . . please . . .”

A hand closed around her throat. Her eyes opened and she looked at the face so near hers.

Slowly the features of the teenager melted away and reformed.

“Chuck . . .”

“Did you really think you could escape me?”

Sandra struggled to escape his iron grip, tried desperately to remember her training, all those years of lessons that had taught her to deal with this sort of thing. But the memories wouldn’t come. Her skills had abandoned her.

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“God . . . no . . .”

“Your god is nothing here. You’re nothing.”

The knife sliced into her chest.

The pain was excruciating. Sandra gasped, choked.

Hot blood burst from her mouth. Chuck’s hand twisted the knife. Sandra felt her body jerk reflexively as her life ran out of her veins.

The bloody knife clattered to the floor.

“One more thing,” he said. “Your heart is mine. It will always belong to me.”

Chuck’s hand reached into her chest . . .

“ No,” she screamed. Her hand pressed hard against her breastbone. Her heart was still there, securely inside her unmarred chest, still beating. Her sheets were covered with sweat.

For a moment, in the darkness of the room, she’d thought she was still in the church. Early morning light filtered through her white gauze curtains. She closed her eyes and opened them again.

No, she was not in the cathedral. She was safely in her bedroom. It had just been a dream.

She heard a door open not far away. Rubber wheels rolled down the hall. A knock on her door . . .

“Sandra?” It was Benny’s voice, concerned and hesitant.

“Yeah.” She tried to control her breathing. Pulling the sheet up, she spoke again: “Come in.”

Benny opened the door and wheeled in. He immediately rolled to the side of her bed and looked deeply 230

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin into her eyes. He didn’t say anything, just took her hand in his.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Are you okay?” His voice was soft and low.

“Benny . . .” she started to explain, but couldn’t manage to get the rest of the words out. She pulled away from his reassuring handclasp and put both hands to her face. Dammit. The tears started to come and it was too late to do anything about it. Benny waited patiently until she cried herself out.

“I can’t believe it,” she mumbled.

“What were you screaming about?” he asked.

“It was Chuck. Another nightmare about Chuck.”

“Shit, Sandra,” Benny swore. “I’m so sorry.”

“I just can’t believe it.” She started to cry again, “It’s been ten years since I left him. Ten years! I haven’t had a bad dream about him in more than two years, and now they’re back.”

“Same ones? He’s holding you under the water until you drown?”

“No. He chased me with a knife this time. It’s never been that way before.”

“With a knife?”

“Well, it wasn’t him to start with. It started out being a black fox, then this asshole junkie who’s been following me around, and then it changed into Chuck. I don’t know why. Why would I still be afraid of him?”

“They say it sticks with you, Sandra. He beat you almost every day of your married life. Even if you can wipe up the floor with him now, it doesn’t matter. You’re still remembering that time when you couldn’t.”

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“But not for years. Why now? I think it’s this case.

This stupid case. It’s got to be.”

“So drop the case.”

“No.” She shook her head adamantly. “You know I can’t do that.”

He reached out and touched the sheet she had gathered to herself. “Your sheets are soaked with sweat. You were screaming loudly enough to wake the dead.”

“Sorry, Benny,” she said. “I don’t run anymore. I don’t run, and I don’t back down. Forget it.”

“Sandra . . .” he started, took a good look at the uncompromising lines on her face, then sighed in defeat.

“Okay. I just think—”

“I know.” She smiled, reached out, and lightly traced a scar on the left side of his ravaged face. She spoke more slowly, more softly. “I know. And I thank you. If it weren’t for you—”

“Flip sides to everything.” He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “You’ve been there for me at least as often as I’ve been there for you. I just wish you’d listen to me more often than you do.”

“I listen,” she whispered. “I really do.”

“Yeah. But do you act on what I’m saying?” He sighed. “All right.” He shook his head and began to back his chair out. “I’m going to make some breakfast.”

It surprised Sandra that he’d said nothing about how late she’d come home last night. He had to be curious about what she’d done, but he said nothing. It was Benny’s way. He needed his space to survive, and he respected other people’s need for space, as well.

232

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin He left the room, shutting the door behind him.

I could probably learn a few lessons from Benny, she thought.

Sandra went to the shower and washed the physical evidence of her adventures from the night before—both the good and the bad—from her body. She dried off and dressed, trying to shove the dream out of her mind.

When she finally emerged from her room, Benny was just putting the finishing touches on some eggs and toast, and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee filled the kitchen. She poured herself a cup and sat down at the breakfast table with a sigh of contentment.

“You’re a saint,” she said as he wheeled himself up to the other side of the table.

“I know.” He smiled at her.

“You’re too good to me.”

“I’m saving up for a time when I’m going to be really shitty to you.”

She smiled back at him and began eating her breakfast.

“Oh,” he said. “Some guy called for you last night, a Dr. Dawes, I think. I wrote the name and number down next to the phone. He said you could come talk to him today. Said he didn’t find much, but that he’s got someone you might call.”

She sighed again, but with a different tone. “Damn.

I was hoping he’d be able to figure out something for me.”

“Well, he’s got someone you can call.”

“Yeah, but I’m not too hopeful. He was supposed to be the best.”

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Benny shrugged.

“It beats going into the office, I suppose,” she said.

“Damn. I think I’ve got another lead if I can just find that redheaded punk. But if I can’t, and Dawes can’t help, then I’m at a standstill with this case. I just—”

The ringing of the phone interrupted her sentence.

Sandra looked down at her scrambled eggs, half eaten and cooling quickly.

“You want me to get it?” Benny offered.

She shook her head. “No. It’s probably for me.” She crossed the room and picked up the phone.

“Yeah?” she answered.

“Bruce?”

“Hey, Mac. What’s up?”

“We got another one.”

Her body went cold. “Another ripper? Shit!”

He paused. “You okay, Bruce?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s the same MO?”

“Mostly,” McKenzie said. “We don’t have access problems this time—it’s pretty obvious how our psycho got to the victim—but there’s a kid with a hole in his chest the same size as the others. The crime scene guys are still looking for the heart. The evidence seems to indicate the killer tossed it to the ground, just like always, but that some scavenger, probably a dog, made off with it.”

“The victim’s a kid? Jesus, Mac . . . how old?”

“Eighteen.”

Sandra swallowed. “Why a kid?”

“I don’t know. Who the hell ever knows? Not till we nail some bastard—and maybe even not then, huh?”

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“Who was he?”

“Name’s Zachary Miller. The killer got him with his pants down. Literally. Kid was humping a girl in a parking lot in Burnham Park down near Soldier Field. The killer hauled him out of the car and did him right there, right in front of his own car. It looks like the killing was slow this time, like it lasted for a while. Both Baxter and Madrone were pretty much instantaneous, but it looks like this kid got thrown around some first. There was blood on the car and all over the blacktop. Maybe our guy is starting to get a taste for—”

“Wait, in Burnham Park?” she said.

“Yeah, why?”

“What time, do they think?”

“Early. Just after sundown. About seven o’clock, why?”

“Jesus, Mac, I was right there last night!”

“You were there?”

“I mean, close. I was at a blues club a few blocks from the entire thing.”

“No kidding! What were you doing there?”

“Blowing off steam.”

Sandra swallowed, thinking of the redhead she and Justin had chased.

Into his thoughtful silence, she said, “Any witnesses?”

“Kind of. Well . . . it’s strange, Bruce. We got someone who saw the whole thing . . . and then some. The girl our victim was trying to boff. A girl named Tina Danforth. Seventeen. A nice, normal kid—good stu-DARK HEART

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dent, caring parents, no signs of substance abuse. She and the victim were dating. But her story’s just too fucking weird. I mean bad weird.”

“Why?”

“She says she knows who the murderer is, but every time she starts talking about it, she starts raving about monsters and angels or something. I think you need to talk to her. You’re a woman, and maybe . . .”

Sandra’s blood went cold. “Monsters?”

“I don’t understand it, either, Bruce. Like I said, you’re going to have to talk to her.”

“Who called the cops?”

“A waitress at a cafe near the park. She heard screams, but didn’t see anything. So the uniforms took their sweet time getting there. They found the girl nearly naked, beat up, covered in blood, just standing there on the street waiting for them. She led them back to the car where the murder took place. The crime scene’s a zoo. We got footprints everywhere, at least five different sets in the victim’s blood. Strange thing is, they tally with the girl’s story. Well, sort of.

“By the way, our witness says the victim was the one who trashed her, not the killer. She says the kid was trying to rape her, and the monster yanked him out of the car and killed him.”

Silence stretched on the phone line.

“You still there?” McKenzie asked.

“God, Mac.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think it could be her? Could she have killed the kid?”

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“No, I don’t think so,” Mac said. “She’s a flyweight.

Monsters would be more plausible than that.”

“Yeah? I know some girls who could put up a pretty good fight. I could.”

“Maybe so. But the victim looks like he got put through a meat grinder before his heart got ripped out.

Cut up, choked, beaten, tossed at the car hard enough to half mash it, then thrown all over the place. No way the girl could pull that off. You see her, you’ll know. No way.”

“Okay, but that leaves us with another problem.

This doesn’t track with the other two our psycho’s killed.

“I know. So he’s nuts. Freaks do freaky things.”

“I mean, you’ve got to figure he went after Baxter for reasons of his own, then went after Madrone because Madrone stumbled onto something that might lead to Baxter’s killer. Or because he hates cops. So why go after a kid?”

“Beats me, Bruce.”

“Mac?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Where you at?”

“I’m at the scene. The forensics guys are just getting started.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you there.”

•

•

•

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The crime scene had been cordoned off and uniformed officers were doing their best to keep the rubberneckers back. Fucking ghouls. People bitched about crime and violence, but they couldn’t resist a bucket of blood.

And there was blood everywhere. Sandra squatted, getting a better look at the scuff marks on the blacktop, the blood, the footprints both in the pooled blood and leading away from the site. Five sets, just like Mac said.

The congealed blood was still thick and faintly sticky in the damp morning air.

She looked at the dents in the Camaro. That little cheerleader type might be strong for her size, but there was no way she was up for smacking around the victim hard enough to put deep impact craters in the sheet metal of the car.

She moved to the edge of the parking lot, where the blacktop gave way to rough grass scrub along a slope that descended to the water below. Lake Michigan was dark under the gray sky.

Mac wandered back from where he’d been chatting up one of the forensics techs, a young woman with a nice rack and dancing blue eyes.

Men.

“You shoulda let me know about Madrone’s snitch last night, Bruce,” he said seriously. “Maybe there’s some kinda connection. Same general neighborhood and all, where you ran into him . . .”

She shrugged, walking along the edge of the dirt,

“No way, Mac. That eaten-out junkie probably isn’t even in as good shape as the girl.”

Narrowing her eyes, Sandra knelt by a couple of 238

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin marks in the mud. They were tracks—like an animal’s footprint. A damn large animal. Something with three splayed toes. Damn large toes. And they looked a lot like that unexplained print in Jack Madrone’s carpet.

“I wonder how he left the scene with no one seeing him. After doing the Miller kid, he had to be covered in blood,” she mused aloud.

“Dark out, Bruce. And the park’s usually pretty empty. Wouldn’t be that hard.”

She looked around. About a half block down the street there was a big storm sewer pipe. Given the weather the past few days, it was—not surprisingly—

gushing water in a steady stream. If he was willing to risk five or six major diseases, the killer could have washed off in that. A man soaked head to toe wouldn’t seem very out of place in Chicago, what with all the rain lately. And these tracks seemed to be heading right for the pipe.

“Take a look at these,” she told her partner, pointing at the imprints in the mud. “What do you think?”

He crouched down next to her. “I don’t know.

What do you think?”

Sandra swallowed and looked around. She suddenly felt as if she was being watched. Was this the same kind of discovery Madrone had made before he died? “Shit, I don’t know. Looks like the same thing we found with Madrone. But like an animal track, you know?”

She peered around at the shadows beneath the trees, at the thickets and shrubs. Lots of places to hide.

“Something maybe wandered down from the ’burbs? Or further?”

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“Yeah. And climbs the sides of condos and unlocks windows.”

“Well, the girl claims she saw something. Dragons, right?”

Mac shook his head in disgust. “Yeah. Dragons.

You know what, Bruce? This whole case stinks,” he said as he stood up. His knees made sharp popping sounds.

His eyes never left the animal tracks. “It just keeps getting creepier.”

“Yeah. Gets your blood pumping, doesn’t it?” Sandra said, still feeling the chill. She couldn’t believe some of the things she was thinking. “You want to be the one to tell the captain that we’ve maybe got a man-shaped reptile running around stalking people and ripping their hearts out?”

“Oh, man, that’s not funny at all. And you know what, Bruce? It worries me. I feel like we’re stumbling around, blind, in a mess that just keeps getting bigger and uglier.”

“So what have we got so far, Mac? One scale, two sets of very weird footprints, and a missing redheaded snitch. All somehow connected. Maybe. If the snitch wasn’t lying in the first place.”

“Not much,” Mac said.

No, it wasn’t much. She knew that. But it didn’t matter. Shit like this was why she’d become a cop in the first place, spent the long years working her way from the academy to patrol and finally into investigation and homicide.

She knew she needed to test herself, to see if she was tough enough to take down the worst the city could 240

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin throw at her. If she couldn’t prove herself—and keep on proving herself—she was afraid that her fears would catch up with her, that she’d hide from the world forever.

She’d done it for a while after her husband nearly killed her. She knew that darkness was still with her, waiting to fill her up again.

The only way out of that arena was to take a path straight through the things she feared the most. To do it anyway. Turn her face to the fire and believe she’d live through it.

So she would rather die than turn away. It kind of limited her options. Not that they were all that wide to begin with.

Mac twisted uneasily. “One more thing,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“This freako scrags Baxter. Who was a rent-a-cop.

Then he guts Madrone, who was a cop. And now we’re investigating Madrone. Does that . . . ?” His voice trailed off.

“Does it put us number one on his hit parade? I dunno, Mac. What do you think?”

He stared at her. “I think I’ll be real careful for a while. Watch myself, you know? And maybe you should think about it, too.”

“Oh, I have been, Mac.”

“Well, keep it up, Bruce. You keep it up, hear me?”

She nodded. “I hear you.”

4

f o u r t e e n

Looking at Tina Danforth was

like looking into a mirror, a mirror into her own past. In more ways than one. Physically, she looked like Sandra once had looked. But the mirror was an emotional one as well. How many times after Chuck had slammed her around had she looked just like this, tattered in spirit, battered in the flesh?

Sandra shivered as she watched the girl who lay hunched in on herself in the hospital bed. Bad, bad shit.

Tina was trying her damnedest to curl up, to occupy as little space as possible. The girl’s mother perched on the edge of the mattress, sobbing quietly into a wad of tissues.

Tina was wearing one of those ridiculous hospital gowns with a single tie in the back. Her legs were tucked up against her chest, her ankles crossed, her naked feet looking curiously vulnerable where they peeped beneath the end of the sheet, tiny blue veins prominent against shock-pale skin.

242

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Sandra knew what she was thinking, because she’d had the same thoughts herself. Tina was pretending that she was all alone in this room. Mac had been right. Sandra knew she could understand Tina better than anybody else, because she’d been there, too.

Tina’s expression was as familiar to Sandra as her own skin, even though it was a skin Sandra had shed long ago. She let the memories flow over her, memories of a time when she, too, had suffered at the hands of a man, and had had to tell a policeman the awful story.

And there was something else bothering Sandra.

Now that she looked again, ignoring the bruises and the bandaged scrapes, Tina really did look a lot like her. It wasn’t just the defeated, wary aura surrounding the girl—the look she thought of in her own mind as the Chuck look—that caused goose bumps to rise on Sandra’s arms. If Sandra had been several years younger, she and Tina could have been identical twins. Damned close to it, at least.

It was a weird déjà vu feeling to see herself as she’d once been. Then she shook off her uneasiness and stepped to the bedside. Tina looked up quickly, then shrank back from her. After what she’d been through, Sandra couldn’t blame her.

Tina would not look at her.

“I’d like to talk to you, Tina, if I could, about last night.”

Tina shook her head violently, her lips compressed.

“It’s important. Please?”

Tina closed her eyes.

Sandra tried again. “I can get you something to eat DARK HEART

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or drink. You need something in your stomach. It’ll make you feel better. Believe me, I know. And you don’t have to talk to me unless you want to.”

Apparently Sandra’s calm, patient voice hit a chord with the girl. She nodded.

“Okay. I’ll be right back.”

Sandra left the room, went down the hall to a tiny lounge, and bought five bucks’ worth of sodas and chocolate bars. She brought them back and watched as Tina ate in tiny, microscopic increments. Finally, when the girl was looking a little calmer, Sandra tried again.

“Tina, we need your help. You wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to someone else, would you?

We want to find the man who killed Zack. We want to stop him before he does it again.”

Tina looked up and Sandra got the eye contact she wanted.

“Can we talk, Tina? Just for a while?”

Slowly Tina’s eyes took on a haunted look.

“I know you don’t want to talk about what happened with Zack.”

Tina shook her head.

“But you’ll have to, and if we do it now, then it will be over with. I want to ask you some questions about before and after you were in the car with him. Did you notice anyone hanging around the parking lot when you drove in?”

Tina hesitated, then shook her head no.

“No one parking their car and pausing, seeming to do something, maybe check the trunk or the tires or something?”

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Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Tina barely shook her head, as if the question meant nothing to her.

“Tina—”

Tina mumbled something, too low for Sandra to hear.

“What was that?” Sandra asked.

“I-it wasn’t human,” Tina whispered.

“What?” Sandra said. “What do you mean not human?”

“I think I’m going crazy . . .” Tina said. “I must be going crazy.” Tears welled in her eyes and spilled over.

She looked up, trying to keep her chin from quivering. “I want to go home. Can I just go home?”

“Tina, don’t you think—”

“Please, how can I make you believe something I don’t believe myself ?” Tina said. “I don’t know what it was. It was big and green and it had claws and wings. It spoke my name, and it said it . . . it said it . . . had ‘punished’ Zack.” The girl began crying. Through her sobs, she continued speaking, although now completely to herself, not to Sandra at all.

“He said he was my guardian angel, but he wasn’t . . .

he punched the back window out. He grabbed Zack. He just tore Zack apart. He. . . had blood . . .Zack’s blood on his claws . . .” The soft words became incoherent sobs; Tina retreated into herself, closing her eyes and clasping her legs tight against her chest.

Sandra sighed. The story was not going to play well with her boss. The MO of the murders was bad enough.

Add in a story about inhuman monsters, and if the media got hold of it, the whole city would go nuts. Not that it DARK HEART

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mattered. It wasn’t her story, and it was the only story she had.

She sat back in her chair and watched Tina rock back and forth on the bed. The girl had seen something, but she was so shell-shocked by the ordeal that she wouldn’t make a good witness. Even if what Tina was saying was the absolute truth—and Sandra was starting to think there might be something to it—they were going to have a hard time convincing anybody based on this testimony.

She did have some corroborating evidence. The claw prints Sandra had seen in the mud—she’d had the crime scene guys take plaster casts of the tracks. She had a photo of the print in the carpet at Jack Madrone’s apartment. She had the scale that nobody could identify.

But it was all too thin to hang a wild story of a lizard man stalking the streets of Chicago on.

Maybe something more ordinary was going on . . .

Did the killer maybe get a kick out of wearing some kind of bizarre costume when he pulled people’s hearts out of their chests? That actually might make sense—Sandra had seen weirder stuff in her years with the force. But why embark on a series of murders in a costume? Still, psychos did do psycho things. John Wayne Gacey, the Clown-killer, had murdered young boys while wearing a clown costume.

So far all they’d gathered were a few tracks, a single scale, and the strong smell of Chinese food. And a snitch . . .

“Tina, did you smell an odor like burnt sesame oil?

Sort of an Oriental food kind of smell?” Sandra asked.

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Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Tina looked stunned, nodded, and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

Great, Sandra thought.

Sandra let out a slow breath. Where to now? She could press the girl, pump her for more information, but she doubted it would do any good. More stories of clawed, winged men? Guardian angels bent on murder?

Where was she supposed to go with that kind of crap?

Sandra turned to the door, saw Mac trying to hover unobtrusively just beyond the doorway. A hard thing for a guy his size to accomplish. She nodded at him and he winked. Then she turned around and looked at the girl.

Tina was still huddled in a tight, quivering ball. “We’re going to get someone to come in and take care of you, okay, Tina?”

No response.

A middle-aged Asian woman came in, dressed in gray slacks and a white blouse. A plastic photo ID card with the usual bad picture on it hung from her pocket.

Wide, oval glasses enlarged her dark eyes, and her straight, gray-streaked black hair was pulled back into a severe bun. Despite her crisp, professional appearance, she had the gentle eyes of a good mother. Something about her put Sandra at ease immediately.

“That was quick,” Sandra said. “I was just gonna ask Mac to get somebody in here.”

“Actually, it was the captain who sent me,” the woman said, her accent cool, restrained, and, surprisingly, upper-class British.

With a gentle smile, the Chinese woman looked past Sandra at Tina. “Perhaps your young witness needs DARK HEART

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something a bit different than an interrogator right now.”

“Whatever you say, doctor.” Sandra shrugged and moved to the door. Something niggled at the back of her mind, and she turned around. “Y ’know, I haven’t seen you before. Where’s the other psychiatrist?” Sandra thought for a moment and came up with the guy’s name.

“Parker. Where’s Parker?”

The Chinese woman said, “Parker is out right now.

I’m filling in from another precinct. Captain Mahoney asked me if I would help out here.”

Sandra shrugged again, “It’s the captain’s show. Tell me if she starts making sense. I’m Detective—”

“McCormick. I know,” the woman said. “Do not worry. I will take good care of the girl.”

“Right.” Sandra left the room still feeling a slight bit odd. McKenzie walked up to her just as she closed the door. He was short of breath.

“Hey, Bruce. Parker’s gone. Personal business or something.”

Sandra clapped a hand on McKenzie’s shoulder.

“Captain’s a step ahead of us. He already sent someone.

Never seen her before, though. Must be new or something.”

McKenzie opened the door quietly and looked in.

He nodded at the woman, closed the door. “She looks nice.”

“I’d agree with that.” Sandra sighed, thinking again of how little they had on the case. “Like she said, maybe that’s the only way of getting straight answers out of the poor kid.”

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“Being nice?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t feel like being nice, Bruce?”

“Not really. Anything about this shit make you feel nice, Mac?”

“Naw. But I’ll tell you what would. One of those large pizzas with everything from that joint over behind the Marriott.” He glanced at her. “You ain’t all that big, Bruce. But I gotta keep my strength up.”

She stared at his gut. “That your strength, that thing hanging over your belt?”

He tried to look hurt. “Come on, Bruce. I didn’t get no breakfast, and it’s already lunchtime. Gimme a break.”

“I’ll do better. I’ll buy. How’s that?”

“Now I feel nice,” he told her.

4

f i f t e e n

Sandra sat in an uncomfortable chair in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, listening to a bored voice announce the status of her flight. The plane was available for boarding, first-class passengers or those requiring special assistance only. The throng of people heading from Chicago to San Diego shifted and moved toward the gate.

She made one last check of the passenger waiting area, but saw no sign of the junkie in the trench coat.

Which was not a huge surprise. Maybe if she’d had a hundred dollar bill in her wallet then, she’d know now whatever the hell it was he wanted to talk about. She doubted he’d be chasing after her again. It wasn’t likely he’d enjoyed their meetings much. So now she’d have to track him down.

What a pain.

Mac had checked the jackets on all of Madrone’s cases, and in the Wheeler jacket he’d found a grubby, handwritten note that referenced a snitch, a kid Madrone 250

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin had listed only as Maxie—had to be the same guy. The first-name-only dodge wasn’t all that strange—a lot of cops were secretive about their snitches. At least there had been a phone number, but the phone turned out to be a hot-sheet welfare hotel. They found one Pakistani clerk who, based on the kid’s description, thought he’d seen him around.

No, he hadn’t seen him around lately, though. As for the phone, it was in the lobby of the hotel, and was obviously a one-stop communications shop for dopers and their dealers. No help there.

And Dr. Dawes had been a disappointment. He had nothing for her. Or practically nothing. His only contribution was the name, number, and address of some herpetologist who lived in southern California, a little town called Fallbrook. According to Dawes, if anybody could identify that scale for her, this would be her guy.

“I should warn you. Dr. Simmins. He’s a little . . .

odd,” Dawes had said.

A little odd? What the hell did that mean? Another loony? She’d just about had it up to here with loonies.

As she watched the first-class passengers trudge onto the plane, she thought about what she had. One weird scale, several weird footprints, a weird method of murder, and three connections.

Baxter, Madrone, and Zack Miller had all been brutally murdered, their hearts ripped from their chests.

That was one connection. The second possible connection was that Baxter and Madrone had been cops, or Baxter at least sort of. But the dead kid named Zack wasn’t a cop, so maybe that pattern didn’t hold. Or DARK HEART

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maybe it did, and Zack had been a murder of opportunity.

A further, even more tenuous connection involved methods of access. The killer, in the cases of both Baxter and Madrone, had gained access in apparently impossible ways—high floors, no obvious entrance.

And Madrone had been investigating a high-profile case with a similar access problem. But with Madrone’s case, the victim had been shot, and his heart left untouched inside his rib cage. So was that a real connection or just smoke? Mac was probably right—it was a hell of a reach. Still, a hell of a reach was better than nothing at all.

She made a mental note to take a look at the Carlton Wheeler jacket, maybe even check out for herself whether there were any mysterious scratches or gouges in the walls beneath his windows.

In the end, all of it added up to not much. She had the scale and the prints. And the junkie. If she could find him again.

Every homicide cop knew that the vast majority of killings either were solved more or less on the spot, or through somebody—the killer, a friend or relative of the killer, or some other informant—dropping a dime. And all of Sandra’s instincts told her that Maxie, the junkie, might have something. But what? He claimed to know who killed Carlton Wheeler. But beyond her own gut feelings, there was nothing solid to link Wheeler to her own psycho killer. The mere fact that Madrone had been investigating Wheeler’s murder, and had gotten scragged by the ripper, wasn’t much to hang her hat on.

252

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Madrone had been investigating a lot of other cases, too.

Still, similar access problems, and Madrone’s murder. Maybe something. Not much, but maybe something . . .

So find the kid. Find Maxie. It shouldn’t be too hard. Junkies were junkies. They had a limited world-view. The world was junk. Watch the junk, find the junkie.

Mac was working on that while she hauled her small glass vial off to California. At least the scale, whatever the hell it was, was something real.

She also had high-resolution digital photos, both disk and prints, of the weird tracks they’d found at both Zack’s and Madrone’s murder scenes. Forensics said they were of the same type, but they had no idea what type that was.

Some big animal. Maybe a lizard. Maybe something else. Maybe a setup . . . she was inclined in that direction herself. If Dawes hadn’t been able to identify the scale—and also hadn’t recognized the prints as belonging to any reptile species he knew about—then maybe it was just a psycho playing games. She’d read stories about Bigfoot, about how hoaxers deliberately left fake footprints around to bolster their scams. She did have a witness, though. Tina what’s-her-name.

And Tina said a big guy with wings and claws. And scales. Some kind of dragon-like monster. Not a real dragon, of course, but a dragon man. And some weight-lifting bozo wearing a Godzilla suit, complete with claws and big feet, would account for what Tina thought she’d seen. That is, if Tina hadn’t been smoking some-DARK HEART

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thing really serious before she climbed in the backseat with her former boyfriend . . .

Another mental note. The hospital had taken blood samples from the girl. That was standard. If the samples were still around, run a check for drug traces. The girl—

and her mother—had claimed she wasn’t a doper, but who knew? Kids didn’t tell their parents everything, and parents sure as hell didn’t know everything about their kids.

She hauled out her cell-phone, dialed the District, and left a message for Mac to call the hospital and take care of it.

Still, even if the girl had actually seen what she claimed she’d seen, it didn’t answer why. Why off some punk kid? There was no connection between the crime scenes. Two were indoors, in hard-to-reach places, with absolutely no witnesses. This was outdoors, in the open, and the killer had left a witness behind. One he didn’t have to leave behind.

And what about that other guy? The one Tina had said sounded like an Arab? Who’d also tried to kill her, or at least threatened to? And the Asian karate kid.

Where the hell had he come from?

Jesus. Smoke, mirrors, and no idea in the world why.

Still, did why matter?

No. Why mattered only if it would help her catch the scumbucket. Means, motive, opportunity. She had problems with all three. How did the killer, even if he was immensely strong, manage to rip out the hearts with one punch? Forensics said the kind of strength those wounds demanded was beyond even the most powerful 254

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin man. So he used something, maybe some kind of home-brew weapon . . .

Motive. Who knew? With a real psycho, it might be anything from the voice of the devil to a conviction that his victims were possessed by Martians. As for opportunity, how the hell did this clown, complete with lizard suit, get into Madrone’s apartment, Baxter’s museum, and maybe . . . into Carlton Wheeler’s apartment?

That was a thought. Wheeler had died before any of the others. Was that the first strike, before the killer put on scaly long johns and figured out how to keyhole punch a major cardiac arrest?

Still one hell of a lot of smoke. And there was only one thing to do when you had a lot of smoke. Take what you did have and work it as hard as you could.

She had a scale and some photos of weird footprints.

And she had a name of some guy in California who might be able to identify them.

It was worth a trip, even if Captain Mahoney hadn’t been real enthusiastic about signing off on her travel voucher. But he knew how thin everything was, and he was also painfully aware he couldn’t keep a lid on this thing much longer.

“Push it as far as it will go,” he’d muttered, his eyes bloodshot, his thick white hair rumpled. “Once it comes out, then the mayor gets involved. All the pols. And we’re in a shitstorm up to our eyebrows.”

Shitstorm . . .

That was a fair enough description of what the media would generate as soon as they got hold of the DARK HEART

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details. With sweeps week coming up, the local TV stations would throw armies of hysterical reporters at the case. And at her . . .

“Passengers in aisles one to fifteen, please board now.”

The bored voice of the airline attendant cut through her revere. She gathered her things, stood, and walked onto the plane.

The flight was a direct one, lasting about four hours. The kid sitting next to her spilled his juice on her lap, nearly ruining her expensive woolen slacks. She’d brought a book—the latest thing in murder mysteries—but the cops in it were so unrealistic she finally put it aside. How come bad mystery writers always made their cops idiots?

The flight landed on time. She lugged her carry-on to the rental car desk, then got on the shuttle bus and went to a parking lot at the outskirts of the airport to pick up a cramped little Dodge, all the Chicago P.D.

would spring for by way of transportation.

Dr. Simmins’s home was an hour’s drive north on I–15 to the small, inland town of Fallbrook, not too far from the Marine base at Camp Pendleton.

She spent her drive admiring the scenery and listening to the stereo. At times the terrain between San Diego and Fallbrook was stunning—rocky highlands and lush green hillocks. But much of it had been what they called developed. She passed more than one golf course, seen through distant trees, and thousands of tract homes, each so like the next that it was a miracle the 256

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin owners managed to find the right house every night.

Finally she hit the freeway exit for Fallbrook. Her directions sent her on a winding road that took her through fruit groves. She recognized the orange trees, but some of the trees hid their fruit behind large green leaves. Limes, maybe? Avocados? Whatever they were, the surroundings were idyllic.

And almost without realizing she did so, she found herself thinking about Justin.

He had not called her asking why she’d left in such a hurry, without waking him. Despite herself, she liked that. He hadn’t needed to chase after her, didn’t seem to expect anything from her in particular. Had he assessed her desires so correctly that he’d figured out trying to hold onto her was exactly the wrong course of action? Or had it just been a one-night stand for him?

She wished it had been a one-night stand for her. It would be so much easier that way. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the way he smelled, about how his eyes glistened as he looked down at her, the feel of his body pressed against her.

She frowned unconsciously and looked out the window.

Puffy white clouds floated across the blue sky, their shadows sliding over the land. Beautiful country. She wished she was visiting California on a vacation, rather than on business.

Dr. Simmins lived off the beaten track. She’d left the freeway, and now she turned off a twisty, gravel lane onto a dirt road. She guided her rented car up the side of one of the larger hills, climbing through groves of fruit DARK HEART

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trees whose trunks looked as if they’d been whitewashed.

After fifteen minutes of bumping and pounding along, she began to wonder if she’d taken the wrong turnoff. The further she drove, the rougher the terrain became. She almost got her car stuck twice but finally made her way to the top of the hill.

The road ended in a parking area of sorts. There were three old 4x4’s in various stages of disintegration sunk into the ground and grown over with grass.

As she got out and shut her car door, Sandra stretched and admired the view. As Mac put it, anything—and anybody—that wasn’t nailed down too tightly tended to roll to the West Coast. But standing here on this hilltop and looking out on paradise, she could understand why people flocked here. There was a windswept wildness to everything that was appealing to her city-bred heart.

She looked up at the sky. The clouds were turning gray, and darker still along their heavy, bulging bottoms.

Rain in Chicago didn’t bother her much, but that dirt track she’d come up on, as bad as it was dry, was likely to be much worse in a downpour. She decided to make sure she wound things up and got the hell back to a real road before the storm broke.

The house sprawled out across the entire east side of the plateau, expansively if not elegantly. Wood-slat siding curled away from the studding in places. Where the paint had not been completely stripped by the ele-ments, paint flakes hung tenuously to the boards. Most of the structure was hidden by foliage. Dozens of lush trees formed a barricade around the house. At least one 258

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin of every kind of fruit tree she’d seen on the way up seemed to be planted here. Ivy carpeted the ground, climbed across the windows, and reached up into the sagging eaves.

She walked toward the house, looking for a path to the front door. She saw flashes of a wraparound deck, also sagging, through the luxuriant greenery. Broken pavement blocks partly covered in green moss were half buried in the ground, but they seemed to lead in the general direction of the porch.

The trees closed in on her immediately. Between the increasingly dense cloud cover and the thick, leafy canopy, it felt as if she had gone from day into night. She stepped under a low hanging branch. A chirping noise off to her left caught her attention. Something scuffled next to her left ear and she turned around.

A chameleon was making its slow journey across a branch, its thin legs releasing their long-fingered hold one at a time, stretching and looping around to grasp the branch again and pull itself forward. Its tail curled slightly and uncurled, as if it were some horizontal periscope, sensing her position. It stopped for a moment.

Large, scaled eyeballs swiveled, focused on her, studied her.

Sandra stared back at the little jeweled lizard, fascinated. Things were alive in here, she realized. Probably a lot of things. Now that she listened, she could hear them moving.

She continued on, and finally emerged into the roughly cleared space surrounding the old house. The deck and yard—if you could call the jungle of weeds that DARK HEART

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surround the house that—was enclosed by a rusty chain-link fence. A sign on it warned NO TRESPASSERS.

A tremendous splash sounded from somewhere out of sight. What the hell?

Following the fence line, Sandra trekked along the edge of the yard, burrs scratching at her hose. Damn.

They were new, too.

Another stretch of chain-link bisected the space between the house and the original perimeter, and within that was a swimming pool.

Lounging in and around the pool were a half dozen alligators. The one who had just splashed into the pool opened its long, toothy snout and swiveled its head around, searching for prey. Sandra stared at it. What kind of nut-case kept alligators in his yard? The sign on the fence took on new meaning. She suddenly felt very naked and exposed. What other little surprises might be hidden in the riot of greenery at her back?

Something brushed her shoulder. She let out a half gasp/half scream and spun about. Reflexively she struck out, hit something, and heard a muffled grunt as whatever she’d hit fell away.

“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry!”

She ran to help him stand up. “You startled me. Are you Dr. Simmins?”

“No, no. I’m the one who should apologize,” the little man said in a high, nasal voice. He shook himself, dusted off the seat of his pants, stuck out one hand. “Yes, I’m Simmins. And you are . . . ?”

He was just under five and a half feet tall, wiry and thin. He wore baggy Hawaiian shorts and a tight tank 260

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin top that hugged his pot belly, making it look like he’d stuffed a bowling ball under there. His stork-like legs stuck out from the gaudy shorts and his gnarled toes were crammed into old yellow flip-flops. His thick, black-rimmed glasses were askew on his long, triangular nose. In what looked like a habitual gesture, he immediately pushed them up on his face. His eyes, made tiny by the glasses, were coal black. He regarded her with a feverish intensity.

“I’m Sandra McCormick.”

She held out her hand and the thin man took it. His grip was soft, damp, somehow tentative.

“Doctor, I really am sorry. I got spooked. The alligators . . . I’ve never seen them outside of a zoo.”

“Just some of my pets.” He smiled. Sandra noticed how his nose, long and pointed, twitched when he spoke.

They stared at each other. With the introductions out of the way, he didn’t seem to know what to do next.

He kept smacking his lips. After an awkward moment he nodded toward the house.

“Come on in,” he said, stepping past her and walking along the fence.

“Uh, sure,” she said. She followed him through a corroded but still sturdy gate, keeping one eye cocked nervously in the general direction of the alligator pool.

As she followed him along, she noticed a double set of indented scars in the back of his left calf. Probably a souvenir from one of his pets. She grimaced. Ugly thought . . .

He opened his front door and ushered her inside.

“You probably think my setup here is odd,” he said.

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She remembered Dr. Dawes using the same adjec-tive to describe Simmins. Well, he’d been right about that.

“I had to install the fence systems a few years ago to avoid any further contamination of the local ecosystem.

I’d misplaced a Burmese python. The locals weren’t amused.”

“No,” she said faintly, “I guess they wouldn’t be.”

His living room held a few benches and innumerable National Geographic s and scientific magazines stacked on every level surface, including the floor, most of them featuring reptiles on the covers.

She pretended not to notice the three geckos clinging to the wall by the light switch. As he led her deeper into the interior, she almost stepped on a lizard.

It scurried under a nearby table where it did a series of quick pushups as it stared at her with calm, lidless eyes.

The enormous house seemed to be buried in clutter. Posters of dinosaurs, snakes, lizards, alligators, and jungles plastered the walls. Bookcases burdened by all manner of scientific texts were piled high in disarray.

“Come on through here,” he said, negotiating a path between teetering stacks of mud-spattered magazines on the floor. He led her though the kitchen, a part of which was cordoned off with a fine mesh wire cage. Sandra began to get the unnerving feeling that she was in a huge cage, as well.

“I put up the wire to keep the larger ones from getting into the cupboards.”

“The larger ones?”

“Iguanas.”

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“Oh.”

“They like the saltines.”

They exited the kitchen and entered the den. More pictures and posters of reptiles, real and fictional, covered the walls, though the clutter was marginally less. She eyed several posters from the movie Jurassic Park that seemed to be mostly huge white teeth.

“So,” he said, gesturing for her to sit, “Dr. Dawes said you had something that stumped you. Something weird.”

“Yes,” she said. She opened her bag, reached in, and withdrew the vial containing the scale. She handed it to him. He raised it to the light and squinted.

“Um,” he said, “where did you get this?”

Sandra told him, explaining how Madrone had it in his sleeve when they’d found him murdered.

Simmins stood up, eyeing her sharply. “Do you know what this is? What it might be? I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time.”

“Do you recognize it?” Sandra asked.

“Well, it’s a long story, but I used to have one. Well, a lot of them. An entire skin.”

“What?” Sandra stared at him.

“Uh-huh. A skin found in London in November, 1888. A human-sized lizard. Larger than human sized.

The scales were this same color, translucency . . . the same size, texture. No doubt about it.”

“Did they find the animal it belonged to? What was it?” Sandra tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice.

“For a couple of days, the London papers suggested that Jack the Ripper was a giant reptile. But that didn’t DARK HEART

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last for long. Anyway, a cold-blooded creature could never have lived in a climate as cold as England in autumn. Unless,” he shrugged, casually gesturing to one of the dinosaur posters, “Bakker’s theory about dinosaurs being warm-blooded is true.”

“What about the skin?” Sandra persisted.

“Well, I learned about all of this when I was study-ing in the Sorbonne in Paris. They had it in one of their archive drawers. A shame. No one ever paid much attention to it, and the skin was just rotting there, forgotten.

So I . . . well, I . . . they let me have it.” He shifted uncomfortably on the couch.

Sandra shrugged. She didn’t care how he’d acquired it. “So do you still have the skin? Can I see it?”

“Well, um.” He shifted again, brought one of his skinny legs up to cross the other. His thin, gnarled fingers clasped his shin. “Not exactly. I sold it.”

“You what?”

“I know, I know.” His eyes were downcast. “I was young and foolish and, well, you know how the saying goes. You never know what you have until it’s gone. I had the skin for years. I had only told a few of my closest col-leagues about it. For, um, certain reasons I didn’t want it to be public knowledge that I had it, but . . . then he showed up.”

“He?”

Simmins stared up at the ceiling. “Now that’s the strange thing. I can never remember his name. I have a hard time remembering his face, too. He was a very polite, very well-dressed Chinese gentleman. He visited my apartment in Paris and we got to talking. We must 264

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin have talked for hours about my theories. In the end, he told me he wished to purchase the skin. Of course, I immediately said I didn’t have it any longer. But he insisted and finally I admitted that I might be able to put a hand on it. He told me the price he was willing to offer and, well . . .”

“You sold it.”

He nodded. “For a lot of money.”

“How much was it?”

“Enough to buy Jurassic Park. Or at least this research laboratory. And then some.” He paused. “You have to understand, Detective. I was poor. I thought about all the research I could do, all by myself, with no sponsor, with the money that he offered.”

He sighed. “I’ve never been able to decide whether I regret parting with the skin or not. Obviously it was the type of thing a person stumbles across only once in their lifetime. But then, so was the offer the Chinese gentleman made me.”

“So you don’t have any of it? Not any part of it?”

“No.”

“No photographs?”

“I didn’t think about that until it was too late. I can tell you basically what it looked like, though, if that will help.

It was almost eight feet long. It had roughly the same shape as a human, except it had six limbs. Two that looked like legs, I suppose. Two that were arms, and then two that were wings coming out of its back. That’s what I assumed, at least. There were no wings along with the skin, only ragged holes in the back of the skin that suggested it. It was really the only evidence of a six-DARK HEART

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limbed reptile ever discovered. There isn’t even any fossilized evidence of such a creature. Of course, such a large creature could never fly. The condor principle, you see, times four. Never fly, unless, of course, my theory about the creature’s bones is right. They could have been formed of hexagonal protein crystals, and that would’ve made them light enough. That would explain any lack of fossilized evidence, if in fact these creatures existed in large numbers long ago.”

Silence fell again, and Sandra watched his face as he watched hers. She had no idea if he was telling the truth, lying, or delusional. Her private opinion was that he was a nut-ball and had been one for years.

“Could this scale have come from some large, trained lizard?”

“But . . .” Simmins looked puzzled. “I told you where it came from.”

She sighed. “Yes, an eight-foot, six-legged reptile with wings. A lizard man.”

“Well, that’s not completely sure. I mean, it’s only supposition that it was a lizard man. It could have been a completely separate evolutionary strain that just happened to be shaped very much like a human.”

“I see.”

“There may be one other possibility mentioned in the literature,” he said thoughtfully.

“Oh?”

“They’re called the Drakkers.” He scrunched up his face. “No . . . that’s not it. Drakmers . . .” Again, his face contorted into a disappointed frown. “No. The Drokpas!

That’s it—the Drokpas.”

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“The Drokpas?”

“It’s been well reported by those who have traveled there that there are dragon men who live in China. High up in the Himalayas. I’ve never seen photos, mind you, but there’s been enough talk for me to believe the story’s true. And there are many cites in respected journals.

Older ones, of course, but . . .” His voice trailed off.

There was a noise to his left and they both glanced in that direction. An iguana was making its way across a line of stacked books on the shelf under the window.

“Dragon men. In the Himalayas,” Sandra said. Her voice was flat.

He spread his hands. “Perhaps it’s a bit tenuous . . .”

he said. “But I’ve told you everything I can think of.”

She rummaged in her purse and brought out the digital prints. “We found these at two of the crimes,” she said, handing them over.

He stood up, took them over to the window, and brought them close to his face. “Yes, yes. The same. See the triple claws, the way the arch is twisted slightly?”

She stood up, walked over, and joined him. He pointed out anomalies in the prints, how one claw was somewhat larger than the others, equivalent to a human heel. “This is no crawling lizard, Detective. Whatever it is, it stands on its hind legs.”

She shook her head in frustration. “But you don’t know what it is.”

“Well, the Drokpas I mentioned . . .”

“Right. Them.”

They stared at each other again. Finally his watery gaze dropped.

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“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” he said softly.

She retrieved the scale and the prints, put them back into her bag. “Oh, you’ve been a help,” she said.

He brightened. “That’s good. Isn’t it?”

She felt a wave of sudden pity for this misfit living with his cold-blooded reptiles in the back of nowhere.

“It’s a help,” she said. “I just don’t know what kind of help.”

He nodded. “Will you keep me informed? If you actually find anything?”

“Of course,” she said. She glanced out the window.

The clouds beyond were now a vast purple bruise across the sky. “I’d better get going,” she said. “Looks like rain.”

He escorted her as far as the front gate. “Be careful now,” he called. “It’s not a good road.”

The last she saw of him, he was standing and watching her, one hand slowly waving good-bye.

She waved back, then plunged into the gloomy thickets that barricaded his house from the rest of the world.

“Chinese dragons,” she said. “Drokpas. Lizard men with wings.”

Some sort of sticker bush scratched a long tear in her already tattered hose.

“Jesus!”

It was three o’clock when she left her mad scientist’s lair.

She drove down five miles of winding highway before she came to Fallbrook’s main street. The highway entered the town, weaved back and forth a little and then 268

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin abruptly turned to the left onto a straight drag.

She stopped at a small Chinese restaurant, surprised but pleased to find one in such a small town.

The place was practically deserted. The food was good, though nothing to compare with the best of Chicago’s Chinatown. She ate mechanically and stared out the window into the parking lot. It had finally begun to rain.

As she watched the water pour from the heavens, she allowed herself to think of Justin. She remembered his hands on her. How good it had felt to be touched.

Maybe to be loved, if only a little, if only for one night.

Still thinking about her options—first, whether she had any options regarding Justin, second whether she wanted any—she glanced out the window next to her table. A man was looking at her car. He seemed familiar.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Where had she seen him before?

And then she had it. He was the middle-eastern man who had tried to dance with her at the blues club.

The one who had stepped out of the bar and maybe caused the redhead to bolt.

What the hell was he doing staring at her car in a parking lot in Fallbrook, California? She’d come here almost on the spur of the moment. How had he gotten here?

Sandra watched him. She couldn’t see his face full on, only his profile, indistinct through the rain-blurred glass. Suddenly he seemed to sense her attention. He turned and vanished toward the side of the window, in the direction of the entrance.

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A moment later he walked into the restaurant. Up close, it was him. He turned to face her, his gaze boring into her.

What had been a dismal failure of a day as a detective had suddenly turned into something else. What it had turned into she wasn’t sure. Not anything good. The hesitant, boorish persona the man had shown before, at the blues club, had vanished. Now he radiated danger.

He walked straight toward her, his eyes burning.

Hidden beneath the edge of the table, her hand worked the catch of her bag and came to rest on the butt of her pistol.

“Hold it right there, pal,” she said to him. “No closer.”

The man—hadn’t he said his name was Omar?—

wore a wide-collared shirt—a fad Sandra could’ve sworn had died in the seventies—and baggy bell-bottoms.

He looked down at her and snorted contemptu-ously.

“And if I don’t? Are you going to shoot me, Detective?” His voice was as dry as the desert, heavily laden with that piping accent. He stopped just in front of her.

Sandra suddenly, desperately wished she had stood up before he blocked her in the booth. She didn’t show it. “Stay right where you are and we’ll get along fine,”

Sandra responded coldly. “I don’t—”

The man lunged for her.

She jerked out the pistol and pulled the trigger.

The gunshot cracked and the man stumbled back, crashed into a glass-topped table. The glass shattered, scattering across the floor.

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Sandra slid from the booth, took a shooter’s stance.

Both hands gripped her pistol and she locked her elbows, staring straight down the barrel at the man.

He was lying on the ground, not moving.

Had she killed him? At that range she couldn’t have missed.

She remained cautious, keeping her distance. The restaurant had become deathly silent.

“Call 911,” Sandra commanded the terrified lady by the bathroom, coming around to where she could see the inert man’s face, never taking her eyes off him.

Then his eyes snapped open and he grabbed for her leg. Sandra fired again, but the man’s speed was unbe-lievable. She’d shot him again, she knew she had, but he kept coming after her, and she stumbled backward, careening into another table. It rocked and the glass plate slid off a bit, but did not fall over.

And then he had a grip on her arm, twisting with frightening power. She felt her bones grind together.

Christ, he was fast! How had he gotten to her that fast?!

Sandra leaned into him, trying to dislodge his hand, but he let go and shoved her away from him, not with any fancy technique, just with raw power. His hand snaked out, chopping at her wrist. Sandra’s gun clattered to the tiled floor. She gasped at the pain raking across her wrist.

She lashed out with a low kick at the man’s kneecap, following it up with one to the balls. But what would have put any normal man on the ground, curled up, DARK HEART

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holding his groin and trying not to puke, didn’t faze him at all. He grunted softly and, without pausing, launched himself into the air. His feet rammed into her chest at the crest of his jump. The air exploded from her lungs and she smashed into the side of a table like a wrecking ball. The table went over with her on top of it. Glass shattered all around her.

She struggled to breathe, tried to raise her head.

There was a vast ache like a vise around her chest, choking off her breathing.

Omar straddled her, then sat down hard on her belly, pinning her to the ground. His hands wrapped around her throat and squeezed. She struggled desperately, pounding at his face, but to no avail.

Seconds later, as she felt her consciousness ebbing, the man relented, relaxed his grasp on her throat.

“Listen,” she croaked, “you know I’m a cop, the police are on their way, and you’ve got witnesses, lots of them, watching through the front window! Get out while you still can!”

With one hand, the man kept her neck pinned against the floor. He used his other hand to spring the magazine from her gun and toss it away.

“If you have no gun, you are no longer the big cop woman, are you?” His Arabic accent was guttural and very pronounced.

“What do you want?” Sandra asked.

“I want you to stop looking for things you know nothing about,” he said.

“Thanks for the tip,” she said. “I didn’t realize I was getting close to something.” Sandra wanted to keep him 272

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin talking, wanted to start a dialogue. The longer she kept him talking, the longer she stayed alive—and the more chance the local suits would come riding in to save her.

She shifted her body a little, hoping to gain a bit of lever-age she might use to throw him.

He pulled her head up by the hair. Sandra gritted her teeth from the pain. His mouth descended close to her ear.

“I want to kill you slowly,” the man murmured, his voice insidiously intimate. “I want to treat you like the whore you are. You cannot beat me. Your gun is nothing. Compared to me, you are nothing. Stop looking, or I will find you again. I will kill you. This is my first, last, and only warning. If you—”

There was a loud shout and someone slammed into the killer from behind. Suddenly free of his weight, Sandra rolled to her feet, crunching glass. It was the busboy! He stood lightly on his feet, facing the middle-eastern man, who was glaring murderously at the young Asian kid. His dark hair was tied back. He wore a grease-stained white apron.

“Get out, kid,” Sandra said. “It’s not your fight.”

The kid ignored her. He was staring intently at Omar. “My uncle would say you are being unwise, good sir,” the boy murmured to the man. “You have chosen a poor path, he would say. What would your uncle say?”

The man looked at the boy curiously. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I think he would disapprove of what you are doing.

He would think badly of you, as any good uncle would.

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Do you wish to bear the disapproval of your uncle?”

The wind seemed to go out of Omar’s sails. He looked around nervously, then looked back at the boy.

“Who the hell are you?”

“We all have uncles, sir. We must be wary of their disapproval, mustn’t we?” the boy answered.

Sandra stood in mute bewilderment. What in the world was the boy talking about? Why was the man listening? Sandra eased slowly closer to her gun. The man had not removed the bullet from the chamber. She’d kill him this time. This time, she would make sure he did not get up.

“Fuck you!” the man raged suddenly. “Fuck this!”

He turned and sprinted toward the bathroom.

With a grunt, Sandra lunged for the gun, snatched it up, and chased after him. She flung the bathroom door wide and stepped in, crouched, ready for anything.

And found nothing.

Omar was gone.

Sandra looked at the tiny window just to the left of the toilet stall. Closed. She whipped her gun around the edge of the stall and—

—empty.

“I don’t believe this!” she muttered, feeling fresh waves of pain rise from her battered wrist to meet her crushed ribs. She looked over at her reflection in the mirror and nearly dropped her gun in shock. The mirror’s surface seemed to be liquid, shifting like a receding ripple on a pool of water.

“Christ . . .” Sandra shook her head, closed her eyes, and rubbed them gently. Her eyes were playing tricks on 274

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin her. Probably shock. He’d hurt her enough for that.

When she looked again, the mirror was stable, normal, as smooth as if the liquid ripples had never happened at all.

A siren sounded outside.

Where was the cavalry when you needed them?

And now that they were here, what the hell was she going to tell them?

4

s i x t e e n

Justin woke with a start, sweat standing on his brow, a rotten taste in his mouth.

For a moment he had no idea where he was. Then he began to recognize the gloomy outlines of his shuttered bedroom. His bed.

He raised one hand and stared at it. The impossible dream was still fresh— burning fresh—in his mind.

But he never dreamed. Not when he was truly asleep. He’d lost that ability seven hundred years ago!

He’d gone two thirds of a millennium with never even the ghost of a dream to disturb his Dragon-bought rest.

He realized his hand was shaking, and with an effort lowered it and hid it beneath the bedcovers.

What did it mean?

He closed his eyes, but the details still danced behind his eyes. He had dreamed he stood on a high place. Behind him was a woman whose face he couldn’t see, but he knew her hair was dark. Like Gwendolyne’s had been . . .

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Margaret Weis and David Baldwin In his hands he brandished a great silver sword, a razor of gleaming light, as he stood beneath a sky livid with fire. And from that fire, stooping like an avalanche, a vast, glowing form surged down upon him in a tsunami of terror.

As he raised himself to meet it, bearing up his own silver flame, his battle cry came rushing to his lips:

“Strike for the Sword! For the Light!”

Now his lips moved silently as he shaped the words in the dim confines of his room.

Once again he felt the fear of the dream, the terror and, somehow, the exhalation as he waited to do battle with—

Surely a nightmare. A fantasy. For he knew that dark shape thundering down the sky, knew it as well as he knew his own form. And he would never oppose that one, never. Had he not proved himself over the endless centuries?

So why had the Dragon sent him this dream? He had no doubt the Dragon was capable of such a thing.

The Dragon was capable of anything. But why, after seven hundred years, had he chosen to disturb his disciple’s empty sleep now?

Perhaps as a warning . . . ?

But a warning of what?

Suddenly uneasy, Justin threw off his covers and rose from his bed. He padded about silently until he was dressed, then crossed to the far wall of the room. His hands moved against secret catches. Half a minute passed, and then he heard a sharp click, and a section of wall swung back, revealing a room beyond. The secret DARK HEART

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entrance in the wall moved slowly, ponderously, as if it was very heavy. It was.

Justin stepped on through, the last wisps of his dream falling away. Blessedly so. Nevertheless, the feeling that he was in danger still prickled at the base of his skull.

The room was long and narrow, about thirty feet by ten feet. The walls were cinder block. The only door into the room was made of steel a half-foot thick, set on hinges an explosion wouldn’t damage, and now, as he watched it swing shut with a soft thud, it was closed and locked tight. The only way to open the door from the outside was by punching in the correct code and waiting out a delay of thirty seconds.

The only way to exit the room from the inside was by getting past him.

Incandescent light bulbs in the I-beam ceiling shed a harsh light—a light that was reflected in each of the twenty-five mirrors that lined the room’s walls. The mirrors were of varying sizes and shapes. The largest were propped up against the far wall. Other, smaller mirrors hung on the wall. No mirror was smaller than half the size of a man. Each mirror had come from a different part of the world.

Justin knew of six other “Disciple Rooms” like this one. One was in Kalzar’s mansion in Saudi Arabia.

Another was in Lyon in France. There was one in Capetown, South Africa, one in Moscow, one in Rome, and the latest had been set up in Brasilia. Each of the mirrors in the Disciple Room connected to one of the Dragon’s disciples who had served him for more 278

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin than a hundred years. When the disciples passed that mark, they were given access to these rooms and could travel at will between their cities and the abodes of each of the seven Elder disciples.

Any disciple, or any trainee with an Elder disciple’s permission, could enter any mirror with ease—traveling through the master’s fiery realm to their destination.

Justin waited, staring unceasingly at Omar’s mirror, like a cat waiting for a very large mouse.

The mirror began to ripple.

Omar’s face slowly appeared, contorted with effort, frozen in time. Finally he moved. The watery surface of the mirror pulled away from his skin, and his flexed arms and clawing hands came through. He opened his eyes and began to prepare for the drop to the floor.

Omar’s mirror was a smaller one, and perched high on the wall, the sign of a younger disciple or a trainee.

He tripped on the border between worlds and fell headfirst to the floor of Justin’s room. Traveling through the Dragon’s world was difficult for the younger ones. Often times they remembered nothing of it. If they remembered anything, it was only a flash of fiery red and a droning, baleful voice. Their minds, unaccustomed to such a drastic shift of reality, com-pensated by putting them, for all intents and purposes, to sleep.

Slowly, wincing from the impact, Omar struggled to his feet. He rubbed his head, blinked a couple of times.

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Then he saw Justin, leaning patiently against the wall.

Omar was a disciple of the Dragon. He could not age. His immortal hands could crush bones and his eyes could see through the dark like day. No wound could mark him for more than a day; if Omar’s neck were severed, his body would grope for the head, re-attach it, and heal. With every decade that passed, he became more powerful, serving his master and hoping for promotion.

As Omar rose from his crouch, he appraised Justin, trying to keep his own expression hidden and secretive.

But Justin was an Elder, and a trainee disciple could not hide from an experienced immortal. Omar’s emotions flashed up and disappeared as fast as lake swells while reflecting the noonday sun. Surprise, bewilderment, curiosity, fear . . .

“It looks as though you had a rough flight,” Justin said.

Omar shrugged. “The mirror I used to enter the Dragon’s realm was smaller than the one I usually use.

I . . . was in a hurry.”

“Why the rush?” Justin asked.

Omar shrugged, glanced at Justin warily. “No reason.”

For the first time, Justin allowed himself a smile. It wasn’t a friendly one. “Omar, you fool. Don’t try to lie to me.”

“What do you want, Justin?” Omar asked. Justin heard the sliver of worry that was wedged in Omar’s heart.

’Tis well that you should worry, Justin thought.

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Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Omar looked longingly at the exit. Justin stepped closer. Omar would never make it unless Justin permitted it. They both knew that.

“What causes you to travel the mirror this day?”

Justin asked.

“My business is my own.”

Justin allowed his smile to lengthen. It exposed some of his teeth. “The master sent you to me to apprentice. To train. You belong to me. You have no business of your own. You keep no secrets from your teacher. From me.”

“I am certain that Kalzar—”

“Kalzar has no jurisdiction over you. Not any more.

Not in this place.”

“Don’t try to bully me.” Omar frowned, but he did not move toward the exit.

Justin’s eyes narrowed. “Where did you go, Omar?”

“To visit a friend.”

“Where?”

“In Arabia.”

Justin did not move. He did chuckle softly, though.

“If you lie to me one more time, Omar, I will rip your right arm off,” he said, his voice pleasant.

“You can’t harm me!” Omar said nervously. “We’re all immortals. I know the rules that govern us as well as you do!”

“Do you? I would ask yourself that question again, if I were you.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Not any longer. I issue promises, not threats.”

“I do not fear you.”

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Justin pursed his lips a little, as if he might laugh.

“Truly?” he murmured. “Truly you don’t?”

The space between the two immortals crackled with tension.

Justin’s voice was sharp in the silence. “Once more, where have you been?”

Omar hesitated, probably deciding whether or not he believed Justin’s promise. He shifted his weight to one foot, then to the other. His hands remained at his sides, but Justin could see them twitching.

“I was in California.”

“Detective McCormick is also in California today.

Small world.”

“Who?” Omar tried to look ignorant—it was one of his better poses.

“I told Kalzar to leave her alone,” Justin said.

Omar struggled with the lie, finally abandoned it.

“You toy with her to the point of danger, Kalzar says. She could find out things she should not know. She already knows things she should not know.”

“Did she see you?”

Omar shifted again, and Justin knew the answer.

“Yes, and thanks to your unsurpassed clumsiness, she now knows more than she ever would have had you left her alone. She has a focus for her investigation. She is not an idiot, as you are. She will find out about you, and she will track you to us. To me. Who knows what she will discover along the way?”

“You should kill her!” Omar snarled.

Justin raised an eyebrow. “You presume to give me orders?”

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“She should have died days ago. When she first discovered the scale.”

“When she discovered the scale? Am I to kill everybody, then, you fool? How many do you think have seen that scale? Her partner, the technicians, other police officers. This is not the primitive Arabian backwater of your birth. Killing her would accomplish nothing more than to call attention to her case. To the scale. To us!”

He paused, then sighed in disgust. “You have no imagination, Omar. You are stupid and dangerous to our order. You are dangerous to me. And to Him. And that I cannot permit.” Justin moved languidly away from the wall.

Omar’s eyes flicked around the room. He was openly nervous now.

“You cannot kill me.”

“Your belief in your own invincibility is touching.”

Justin walked toward Omar.

The trainee disciple looked longingly at the door Justin had abandoned behind him, and Justin knew what was going through Omar’s small mind.

Under Justin’s now scale-covered skin, muscles slithered like snakes from one thickening bone to another, lashing them tightly together with unearthly strength. His face elongated and the cracking noise of his teeth growing filled his head. His brow thrust out and up until it became a solid bar over shadowed, reptilian eyes.

Wings erupted from the ripping skin on his back, spraying a token amount of his blood as they unfurled.

“J-Justin!” Omar cried, backing up. “Kalzar ordered me—”

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“I have told you before.” Justin’s voice was the gravelly rasp of hell. “Kalzar does not rule here.”

Omar made his break. Dodging to the right, he tried to slip past Justin. But this pathetic attempt was yet another sign of his inexperience. If he had ever spent time in the dragonling form, Omar would know that Justin’s senses were now heightened threefold, as were his reflexes.

Justin allowed Omar the hope that he might actually reach the door. Just as Omar passed, Justin lifted one wing.

The blow knocked Omar completely off his feet.

Lying on his back, he stared, horrified, into Justin’s red-slit eyes.

Justin reached down and hooked his talons into Omar’s rib cage, lifted him off the ground. Blood spurted. Omar’s screams turned shrill but were swallowed by the thick walls of the room.

Dragonling muscles sang to Justin, begged him to crush those brittle bones.

“I told you to leave the detective alone. I trust we need not have this conversation again?”

Omar gagged on his pain. Justin could feel Omar’s heart pumping against one of his claws, which was buried deep in the writhing man’s side.

“You have disobeyed my commands. I consider myself a lenient teacher, but there are times when discipline must be enforced.”

Omar had regained some of his poise. Through gritted teeth, he looked down at Justin, still seeking some shred of defiance.

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“Did you talk to the detective?”

Omar shook his head, but Justin saw the truth.

“I told you, Omar. Do not lie to me.”

Slowly, so that Omar had time to watch, Justin brought his other claw up and grabbed Omar’s right arm.

“J-Justin! She—!” Omar’s response was cut off by his own scream as Justin began to pull. Justin’s muscles flexed, hardened, and strained. Omar’s scream ripped his throat ragged. Wet, snapping sounds thrummed through both their bodies as the muscles, tendons, and finally the skin in Omar’s shoulder pulled loose. Blood gushed onto the floor. The arm curled spastically against Justin’s claw and he held it up for Omar to see.

Omar’s scream became a groan, but he didn’t lose consciousness. It was that way with all disciples, even trainees. They could never lose consciousness due to pain. Justin knew that lesson well. It was something he learned often at the Dragon’s hands.

Justin brought his long, sharp teeth close to Omar’s ear. “Come with me,” he whispered. “You have failed as my apprentice. You have no place in Chicago.”

Turning, Justin walked through one of the full-size mirrors, leaving barely a ripple to mark his entry. He dragged the bloody, maimed disciple with him.

Omar’s groan elongated as they cut the surface of the mirror. The sound stretched and coiled around them. At the best of times, a trip through the mirror was intense and uncomfortable. Wounded, it was hell.

“You don’t sound so cocksure anymore, Omar,”

Justin cooed. The world became dark burgundy and crimson. Streaks of every red imaginable hovered in the DARK HEART

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air like water, splashing against Justin and his cargo, but never wetting him, never leaving a mark of any kind on his skin.

It was said that the Dragon had been driven from this world by Saint George. To escape the wily knight, Justin’s master fled into his own reflection in a lake. Saint George drained the lake, trapping the Dragon forever, and that was why everything behind the mirror seemed like fire trapped within water. Hatred caged in shifting droplets. Venom that burned.

There was no steady point within the Dragon’s world. There was no place to get one’s bearings from.

No horizon to keep the world upright. No land beneath the feet to walk or stand upon. Justin was not even sure if the world beyond the mirror was the Dragon’s world. He’d seen the Dragon’s reflection in countless mirrors, but he had never seen the Dragon while traveling the mirror world. Perhaps it was a midway station between the Dragon’s world and his own. Perhaps the Dragon had to travel it just as his disciples did. Justin had never thought it polite to ask.

Such small curiosities seemed utterly unimportant when facing the Dragon.

The floating globs of red splashed against them more quickly now. They whipped at Justin as if they would slash him to ribbons, but they had no substance.

Suddenly, they were gone. The whirling reds were replaced by a huge, cavernous space. Justin had always pictured it as the interior of some great stomach, like Jonah in the whale’s belly. The walls glowed red, glistened moistly. He floated in its exact center. Things 286

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin were more solid at this stage of mirror travel, but no more reassuring. Being surrounded by a heaving, fleshy crimson sphere still gave one no steadying point. The violent, bloody, and roiled waters through which they had already passed were only a trifle next to the oppressive weight of this prison.

“Kalzar,” Justin spoke, picturing the Arabian thief.

He knew he need not say Kalzar’s name. This space was sensitive to thoughts, not voices, but it helped Justin to speak the object of his desire aloud.

A blinding white light pierced the stomach’s wall, formed itself into a tall square. Justin floated toward the light. As he neared it, he could see through the opening into Kalzar’s Mirror Room.

From this place, Justin could spy on anyone he wished. At his thought alone, a mirror passageway would open up near to the person he sought. The function of the mirror world was travel, but disciples with strong willpower could prevent themselves from being forced through the doorway. They could hover for minutes, sometimes even hours, watching their prey. Such a wait was rarely worth it. The compulsion to go further, go through, to kill, hammered at the heart and the mind constantly. But Justin had stared at many of the models for his drawings from this place.

He had no desire to linger on this trip. He had business to tend to.

He stepped through the doorway.

Unlike Justin, Kalzar spent the greater part of his time in his Mirror Room. While Justin’s was a hidden vault, Kalzar’s sprawled in a high-ceilinged, palatial space.

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Fine divans and cushions dotted the white marble floor.

Silk curtains fluttered in the tall windows with their pointed arches.

Cool air hit Justin’s skin. Entering the mirror was an assault on the eyes, not the skin. It did not seem as if he were stepping into a furnace, and so it always puzzled Justin why leaving the mirror world was like stepping into an icebox. The real world hit him with mind-clearing clarity, and only then did the mirror world seem to be a place of stifling heat.

Kalzar lounged on a great, overstuffed divan, reading a book. He looked up, his expression mildly curious, as Justin came through. His features quickly tightened in outrage when he saw Omar.

Justin tossed the lesser disciple to the floor in front of Kalzar, as effortlessly as if he discarded a used rag, but he kept the arm. Omar’s blood spattered on the pristine marble as he landed sprawling at Kalzar’s feet. He tried awkwardly to rise. He groaned, looked up at Justin with naked hatred, and then over to Kalzar for help.

Kalzar, his face flushed, didn’t spare a glance for Omar. He stood up, faced Justin.

“What is the meaning of this?” Kalzar hissed.

“I warned you,” Justin said. “I warned him. Did you think I was joking?”

“The Dragon will flay you for this,” Kalzar roared.

He was on the verge of transformation. Justin’s muscles twitched in anticipation. He wanted a bloody free-for-all with someone like Kalzar. He lusted to rend and tear. If Kalzar transformed, there would be a fight.

“The Dragon would do much worse to you for your 288

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin direct disobedience of his edicts,” Justin roared back.

“What I’ve done to Omar is a mercy by comparison.”

“The detective needed death,” Kalzar said. “Do I have to remind you what happens to disciples who let personal interests override loyalty to the master?”

“The detective needs to be killed if I say so, when I say so, and most important, when the Dragon says so. Not when you say so, Kalzar, no matter how insane your pride has become. Stay in your own backyard, or you will suffer far worse than this. Do I need to remind you what the master does to those who discard the rules to serve their own ambition?” Justin paused. Kalzar shivered with the effort of keeping his rage muted. The tension mounted.

“Think on it, Kalzar,” Justin broke the silence.

“And then follow me into the mirror, if you dare.”

He paused for one final, disdainful glance at Omar’s ruined form, spat once, then turned and stepped through the watery surface. He took Omar’s arm with him.

4

s e v e n t e e n

It was close to eleven o’clock the next evening when the cab dropped Sandra off in front of her condo. She felt both fatigued and strung out at the same time.

She punched her code and started up the stairs.

What she really needed was a hot shower. She put the key into her door, twisted. Just as it opened, she realized there was someone else in the apartment besides Benny. Benny was talking, and not to himself. Carefully she peeked around the door and saw who was sitting across the kitchen table from her brother.

Her smile disappeared and her knees felt un-steady.

“What are you doing here, Justin?” she asked.

Her voice was low, emotionless and, thank God, steady.

She wasn’t ready for this. She was exhausted 290

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin from jet lag, she felt like hell, and she had so many bruises from her battle with Omar that she looked like a war casualty.

If Justin had thought to pick a favorable time to talk with her, he’d just struck out.

Unshouldering her bags and tossing them onto the floor, she closed the door behind her, trying to think of something to say. Benny coughed, started to say something. Sandra cut him off.

“I’m sorry. I know I should have called. My flight was delayed,” she said. “That was the one lucky thing that happened to me; otherwise I might have missed it. I slept on a couch in the Fallbrook sheriff ’s office last night.”

“I was worried,” Benny said. Then he got a good look at her as she stepped into the light. “What happened to your face?” he asked, rolling over to her. He gently touched the stitched-up cut on her chin where a piece of table glass had caught her, the bruises on her face and throat. She was grateful he couldn’t see the other, larger bruises hidden beneath her rumpled clothes.

Irritably she pulled away from his touch. “Hazard of the business.”

Justin was staring at the lacerations on her face.

She was pleased to find that his aristocratic English code seemed to preclude him asking her any shocked male questions. Questions she certainly didn’t feel like answering.

So how in the hell had he found her condo?

And why had he come here?

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Giving her a slight smile, Justin stood up, attempting to break the awkward mood and almost succeeding through the sheer power of his presence.

“Sandra, it looks as though—”

He’s standing, she thought. He’s going to come over here. He’s going to put his hands on me. Console me. Hug me. Something . . .

Memories of his hands on her body rose in her mind and she knew she couldn’t stand that. All of her resolutions to avoid him would crumble.

“I’m wondering just what the hell you’re doing here,” she said. He stopped, frozen between the chair and the table. Good, stay there, she thought, trying to convince herself that she meant it. Just stay there.

“I wanted to see you,” he said. “I couldn’t stay away any longer.”

For a moment, it was almost okay. Her heart wanted to believe it, but she balked.

“Sandra, please accept my apologies.” Justin’s sweet, low voice was soothing. Too soothing. “It was wrong of me to come here. But I was worried. However, since my presence offends you, I’ll leave.” He started toward the door.

“It’s all right. You don’t have to go,” she said tiredly, walking toward the hallway, trying not to look at him. “It seems you’ve made a friend. Benny invited you in. It’s not my place to tell you to leave.”

She heard Benny speaking quietly as she stepped into her own room and held the door a moment before shutting it softly behind her.

He was apologizing to Justin. Sandra snapped 292

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin the hair clip out of her hair and tossed it onto the dresser, a gesture of barely controlled violence. The clip skittered across the wooden surface and fell into a pile of folded clothes on the other side. She leaned against one wall, slumped, and ran her hands through her mass of curling hair, then closed her eyes and massaged her scalp with her fingertips.

Why didn’t I tell him to get the fuck out? What am I doing?

Somebody knocked at the door.

“Go away.”

Benny came in.

She glared at him.

“What’s wrong with you? What happened out there in California?”

“Is this an interrogation?” She pushed away from the wall. Crossing the room, she pulled the curtains and blinds open and looked out the window into the lighted city.

“I just want to know what your problem is.”

“My problem?” She snorted. “He shows up and says, ‘Hi, kid, I fucked your sister and it was great and I was hoping for a repeat, can I come in?’ And you just let him?”

“Of course, he didn’t say that.” Benny looked shocked. “You know he didn’t say anything like that.

He told me his name and that you’d gone on a date.

He said he really liked you and he thought you really liked him, but you hadn’t been returning his phone calls. He had no idea what he’d done wrong. I liked the look of him. So we got to talking. He’s inter-DARK HEART

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ested in you, Sandra, and he seems like a great guy.”

“What the hell do you know about guys, great or otherwise?”

“I am a guy!”

“You know what I mean.” She turned around.

“You’ve never been fucked over by—” She stopped, shook her head. “I take that back—I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m beat. I don’t need this right now. I don’t need him right now.”

“You’re not being fair to him.”

“To him!” she exclaimed. “What about me?”

“You’re not being fair to yourself, either,” Benny said.

“I don’t believe this,” she muttered. “My head hurts. I want to lie down.”

“I don’t think it’s healthy, what you do. I think it’s time you stopped being Chuck’s ex-wife and started being a woman again. For God’s sake, Sandra, it’s been ten fucking years!”

“Damn it, Benny!” she snapped. “You’re in no position to talk. When was the last time you went on a date that wasn’t off in cyber-land?” As soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t.

Benny flinched back as if she’d slapped him.

Slowly he nodded, and his jaw set. He swallowed and his voice was husky when it came out. “Yeah, well, at least I talk to every woman I meet,” he said. “The ones that actually look me in the eye, I ask out. So far, no one has accepted.”

He had a terrible dignity at that moment.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

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Margaret Weis and David Baldwin He brushed it aside. “Give him a chance.” He managed a smile. “Trust someone. Trust me. I’ll look out for you.”

Sandra deflated like a cheap balloon and collapsed limply on the bed. She stared up at him. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I like him. I do. That’s why I had to leave when . . . that night . . .”

“That night when you didn’t come home until dawn?”

“Yeah. It was some first date.”

“He told me.” Benny grinned.

Now she was the one who looked shocked.

“No, ya dingus,” Benny said. “Just the part where you chased down the guy in the trench coat.

The other part I guessed. You know, you may be a good detective, but other people can add two and two. Even stupid little brothers.”

“All right. All right.”

“I invited him to dinner,” Benny said.

“You did, huh?”

“Yeah. Will you go? I promise to watch out for you.”

She grinned. “All right, I’ll go. But if it ends up in the dumper, I’m going to erase your hard drive.”

“Deal.” He reached out and rubbed her shoulder. “It’ll be fun. You can tell us all about your trip.”

“Yeah, right, there’s an incentive. But”— she paused—“before I go anywhere, I’m taking a shower, DARK HEART

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so you’ll have to entertain him until I get myself cleaned up.”

“Got it covered,” he said.

She grinned at him. “My brother, Mr. Cupid.”

His expression grew smug. “Got that covered, too.”

She threw a pillow at him, but he was gone.

Justin said he knew a little place that was open twenty-four hours a day. Sandra figured him for something more posh, but instead he led them to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Venicci’s, a tiny Italian joint with checked tablecloths and candles in red glass globes. The place was wedged between a dry cleaner and an appliance store in Wicker Park, a part of town she was surprised Justin even knew existed. The restaurant was dark, with wood-paneled walls, rough-hewn rafters, and wooden booths.

Black, wrought-iron chandeliers hung low from the center rafter and the candle-lit tables gave the entire place a smoky, almost medieval feel. The food was marvelous. Sandra was surprised she’d never heard of it before. She thought cops knew all the good spots, but evidently she’d somehow missed this one.

The conversation started out slow, with Justin keeping a polite social distance from her and Benny, trying, she guessed, to ease the tension she felt.

They began by discussing simple things, like the weather and the wine. Benny flirted good-naturedly with the waitress, but it seemed to make her uncom-296

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin fortable, so he stopped after she brought their orders.

After the first bottle of wine, the meal turned into the mellow, glowing social event Sandra had half hoped for and half feared. Time slipped past quickly.

Justin was a skilled conversationalist whether he was talking about the weather or about matters of the heart. He kept them both smiling.

“So why don’t you tell us what happened on your trip?” Benny said finally. “Mac called twice, by the way. Sounded worried.”

Sandra winced. “Oh, God. Mac. He’ll go nuts when he sees—” She gestured at her face.

“So what happened?”

Slowly at first, but then with growing intensity, Sandra told them. She edited her run-in with Omar a bit, making him a random mugger, and leaving out any mention of having met him before. She wished she could leave him out entirely, but her face was chopped up badly enough to make that idea ridiculous. Not to mention that her bruised muscles had gone so stiff she stifled tiny groans almost every time she moved.

Justin sat back, his blue eyes glinting thoughtfully. “This Dr. Simmins sounds like a strange man.”

An amused smile played at the edges of his lips. “He has truly dedicated his life to this study? Of lizards, dinosaurs, even dragons?”

“Sure. If you believe in dragons.”

“Some people believe that dragons actually existed,”

Justin said. “It is a much more common belief in England than here. There, a few scholars even maintain that DARK HEART

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some of the bones which are thought to be dinosaur bones are actually the bones of dragons.”

“Are they saying that maybe dinosaurs were actually dragons?” Sandra asked.

“Sort of, but it’s not that simple. Legends speak interchangeably of wyrms, dragons, behemoths, fell beasts, and so on. One has to read between the lines, consider the subtle difference between this word and that, as used by Benedictine monks writing in Latin hundreds of years ago. However, when I looked very hard at the forgotten stories, and sought out the oldest Welsh storytellers to ask them what their grand-fathers said—” He paused, thoughtful. “When I truly come to live in the world of those moldy old books, then it all starts to become clear.”

“In other words,” Benny interrupted, a piece of bread still in his mouth—his words muffled as he chewed, “you’re pulling this out of your ass.”

Justin’s mouth twitched in amusement. He looked at Sandra. “As he says.”

“Well, pull away,” Benny encouraged.

“Not all the great fell beasts and behemoths of lore are dragons, in very much the same way that not all primates are humans,” Justin continued. “Dragons were simply a very intelligent variety of dinosaur.”

“Back up, here . . .” Sandra said. “If dragons are intelligent dinosaurs, then why don’t they have any wings on the skeletons in the museums?”

“Ah.” Justin smiled. “Our ever alert detective asks the pertinent question.”

Sandra sat back, done with her meal. She 298

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin crossed her arms and regarded Justin, feeling entertained by his fantasy. Benny twirled his pasta in mari-nara sauce, pleased that they were getting along so well.

“Ultimately the answer to your question lies in the tragic demise of dragons.” Justin paused again, staring directly into Sandra’s eyes. Sandra’s smile faded as she felt a tightening in the pit of her stomach. Those eyes of his . . .

“The deaths of the dragons were the single worst thing that has ever happened to our world.

Dragons were magical beings. They held within themselves great wisdom and beauty, as well as terrible powers of destruction. They spoke to the wind and knew the oldest thoughts of the oldest stars.

When they were around, anything could happen.

Nothing was impossible. They were like the gods, but gods you could see and feel. Not gods of words and ideas and faith, but gods of flesh and bone.

Gods that made love, gave birth, dreamed, fought, grew old, and died.” Justin sighed. “And they died mostly because we killed them. We killed them for their wings. You see, the power of a dragon is in its wings. Dragons were magical beings. Besides their intelligence, their skill in magic set them apart from their gigantic reptilian counterparts. The wings were the physical manifestation of this magic. Science tells us that nothing as massive as a human could ever fly by the force of its own muscles, let alone something the size of an elephant. And something the size of a castle? Ludicrous. Unless, of DARK HEART

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course, the rules of physics as we know them do not apply.”

“So what are you saying?” Benny asked. “That dragons had wings, but didn’t fly?”

“Not at all. Dragon flight was mystic. A dragon flies the way a painter captures an ironic smile with a few wisps of color. The way a great singer brings a tear to your eyes with a few words that, if merely spoken, would be bland, or even silly. Reality keeps us within a fence line, and dragons flew over that fence before it was even built.

“Dragons respected their own power and knowledge,” Justin continued quietly. “So when a dragon died, its children would always return to feast upon the wings. The wings were a final bequest, an act of love and hope.”

Sandra watched Justin’s face, mostly his lips. She tried to keep herself from thinking what it would be like to have those lips kiss her again.

It was a disconcerting thought. She pushed it away, and tried for lightness.

“No huge dinosaur corpses with wings ’cause the kids ate them? That’s an interesting theory, but it doesn’t explain what happened to the skeletons of the last generation,” Sandra said, and the moment she did, she winced.

It was a cop thing to say, a cold, analytical hammer shattering a beautiful story. What she wanted to say was that she liked the story, and she wanted him to continue. But she’d said something else instead.

Why did he make her so self-conscious?

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“I don’t see the tragedy,” Benny interjected.

“What did humans do that was so wrong?”

“What did humans do that was so wrong?”

Justin smiled, but his expression seemed somehow bitter. “We were jealous. It’s the oldest story in the world. In the Bible, a serpent told Eve that if she ate of the forbidden fruit, she would become like God.

Where do you think that story came from?

“Long before humans could write such things down, a foolish young dragon befriended a human woman. This young dragon, this serpent, told Eve of the power in a dragon’s wings. Eve was a jealous woman and convinced her husband to slay the dragon so they could eat its wings. Once the deed was done, there was no going back. They tasted the forbidden fruit, brought the shadow of evil into paradise. Eve, her husband, and the entire human race was cast forever from the Garden of Eden where man and beast could live in peace and harmony.”

“Are you saying that the reason there are no dragons now is because we killed them off ?” Sandra asked.

“Why didn’t the dragons stamp out humankind first, if they were so much more powerful, with their magic and all?” Benny asked.

Justin shrugged. “How can we be certain? Perhaps, at first, the dragons did not take humans very seriously. Being solitary, philosophical creatures, the dragons left the humans alone and expected to receive the same treatment. They expected better of us, and we killed them for their mistake.

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“Being what we are, we humans could not help ourselves. The lure of forbidden knowledge was too great. The power gained by eating a dragon’s wings was too real. Adam and Eve passed this knowledge on to their children, who in turn went off to slay their own dragons. Thus began the pharaohs, God-like beings who ruled the known world in that time.

“Once the killing of dragons started, it never stopped. There are examples in some of our more well-known legends. Tiamat in Babylon. Hercules killing the Hydra. Siegfried killing Lindworm. Beowulf and Grendel. Saint Martha and La Trasque in France.

“These people are revered as heroes, great men and women fighting great evil, but that’s all a lie. It’s history from the mouth of the victor. People must believe they are in the right when they commit atrocities. Otherwise their own guilt will destroy them. And so humans, out of their own necessity for self-justification, named the dragons evil. They were reputed to be linked with Satan, and thus we had to exterminate them, by the edict of God. That is how the unfortunate young dragon killed by Adam and Eve was recast as the voice of Satan in the Garden of Eden. If the same lie is told often enough, people begin to believe it. And then, of course, even lies can become self-fulfilling prophecies after many years.

“By the time of Saint George, no doubt some dragons had become enraged by the methodical extermination of their species and were determined to avenge themselves. But most dragons left Europe to escape the madness, rather than try to combat it.

302

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Their brethren in the East had no such problems with their human cohabitants. Humans in the East were no less violent than the shaggy Westerners, but they were certainly more respectful of dragons. It is said they admired their dragons and saw them as harbingers of power, fertility, and well-being.”

“So the dragons are all living in the East now?”

Sandra asked.

“Alas, no, none are.”

“None?” Sandra asked.

“Sounds like they just sort of curled up and died,” Benny said.

“Ah, that is a very Western perspective on the situation. An Asian would see it much differently. In the Orient, one must be very careful never to ask someone for something they do not want to give you.

If you ask for it, they are honor-bound to give it to you. Then, once the Asian has given it to you, he will hate you forever for asking for it.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Benny said.

“Perhaps, but it is also very polite. And the dragons of the East did the polite thing. When the day came that they were not wanted, they left. But I assure you, they were not happy to go. Ever since then the dragons of the East, also called by some the dragons from Beyond, have been plotting to exact their revenge.”

“Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me,” Sandra said.

“And what do you think of the state of the world today? Somewhat conspiratorial?”

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“It’s a bit shaky,” Sandra said.

“And how do you account for that?”

“Human nature?”

“Human nature with a bit of outside help from the dragons from Beyond.”

Benny laughed. “Good for them. I hope they wipe us all out.”

“Unfortunately I think they would have,” Justin said. “Except that we have someone in our corner.”

“Who’s that?” Sandra wanted to know.

“The last Western dragon. As I said, there were many dragons that were enraged by the idea of being driven off by these humans who had only just arrived upon the earth. By the time of Saint George, some dragons had become the evil we painted them to be.

George became a hero for slaying them, but he was hardly saintly. The older accounts of his life portray him as a greedy, ambitious man. He saw himself destined to rule the world and convert it to his religion.”

“No wonder he’s the patron saint of England,”

Sandra grinned.

Justin smiled, a warm sincere smile. “Touché, Yankee.”

Sandra’s skin tingled with the wine she had drunk. The warmth cradled her. She suddenly realized she was staring at Justin, caught herself with a slight start, and turned her gaze toward Benny.

“Go ahead,” Benny said to Justin. “I want to hear more.”

“The king of Libya asked Saint George to slay a dragon who was demanding the king’s daughter as a 304

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin human sacrifice. The popular legends say Saint George subdued the beast with the sign of the cross and stabbed the evil monster through the heart.

Other, older legends tell a different story.

“Saint George was a large, powerful, good-looking man. He had a voice that could fill an entire field. When he preached, people believed. When he gave orders, people followed. He traveled with a huge entourage of mystics, alchemists, Arabian magicians, and wise men from the far east. George had slain dragons before, but this dragon was not such easy prey. This dragon was the last of his kind. He was wise, and clever, and had thousands of years of anger burning in his belly. This dragon feared no man, but George was unlike any other man. And he had eaten quite a few dragon’s wings himself at this point.

“The Great Dragon escaped from the traps George laid for him and led the saint on a merry chase across Northern Africa. The dragon—perhaps the most powerful of its kind ever to exist—had no wish to fight Saint George. And this dragon had learned to disappear into its own reflection. When hunted by dragon slayers of the past, it would fly over a still pool of water and disappear without a trace.

“The dragon tried this on Saint George, but Saint George was not so easily fooled. If this last dragon was the strongest of its kind, then likewise Saint George was the strongest dragon slayer ever to hunt it. And so when the chase led to a small lake, and the dragon disappeared, Saint George was able to guess what had happened.

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“Then Saint George used his cross to agitate the waters so they could never form a reflective surface and the dragon could never escape its haven. While maintaining his vigil, Saint George had the king of Libya dig a huge trench to drain the pool, trapping the dragon there forever.”

They all sat in silence for a long moment. Justin did not move, except to swirl the wine in his glass around and around. Then he leaned forward, set his wine down, and placed his elbows on the table. He beckoned them closer. “Do you know what they say of dragons?”

“No,” Benny whispered, enjoying himself.

“They say that the last dragon did not die. They say it still lives within its own reflection on the far side of a pool that no longer exists, and for the last twelve hundred years it has lived there, influencing humankind, trying to steer it from its evil, barbaric ways in the hope that someday it will be safe for the dragon to return.”

“Well, I hope it succeeds.” Sandra raised her wine glass. “Let’s drink to the dragon.”

“To the dragon,” said Justin. They clinked their glasses together.

“Where did you learn to tell stories like that?”

Sandra asked Justin.

“Call it a childhood passion. I read everything I could get my hands on. When I told the best of the stories, I always had a large audience. I would make it my task to keep them riveted.”

Sandra scooted out of the booth, stood, and 306

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin stretched. Her muscles responded with a chorus of dull aches, and she winced. “Whatever you did, it works. Where’s the ladies’ in this place?”

Justin pointed.

She turned and left the table, skirting the returning waitress.

“Is there anything else I can get for you?” the girl asked, her voice a bit taut. She looked briefly at Benny, then focused her attention on Justin, something akin to relief on her face. He shook his head.

Benny stared up at the young woman’s face.

“I’d like something. A large helping of smiles.

I’d like some of that, if I could. Do you have any tonight?”

The girl hesitated. Then she grinned nervously and gave a forced laugh. And kept looking nervously at Justin, who ignored her.

“For Christ’s sake, the least you could do is look at me. I’m not that ugly,” Benny said abruptly.

The girl hesitated, obviously at a loss for what to do. Benny glared at her, waiting for a reply.

“Benny, don’t.” Justin put his hand gently on the younger man’s shoulder. He nodded for the girl to go.

She fled.

Benny slumped into his chair, fuming. Justin let the silence rest for a moment.

“It’s not her you’re mad at,” Justin finally said.

Benny nodded, but only looked more miserable.

“I know. I didn’t mean to explode, but it was like she would’ve felt more comfortable if I didn’t exist. Did DARK HEART

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you notice how she couldn’t stand to look at me?

And even when she did . . . I just get so sick of that fucking look in their eyes. They look at me like I’m some kind of a monster. You don’t know what that’s like.” Benny fell silent.

Justin realized that his own jaw was clenched.

He forced himself to ease it.

“I dream about it all the time,” Benny said softly.

“At night. Even daydreams. I picture myself walking up to a pretty girl and asking her to dance. And she smiles and I take her out there and dance until I . . .

we—we just float away. I almost never had the guts to do that before my accident. And now it’s too late.”

Justin said, without looking directly at Benny,

“You know, I was very sick once. I watched my body waste away, become swollen and hideously ugly.

Repulsive. I thought I was going to die. I would have given anything, paid any price to make it all go away.”

“Yeah.” Benny let out a long breath, shook his head. “That sounds like the beginning of a familiar story. Does the usual come next?”

Justin blinked. “The usual?”

“Yeah,” Benny replied. “The part where you tell me you sold your soul to the devil for looks, class, money, a killer accent, and a date with my sister . . .”

Justin grinned. He shook his head. “Fortunately, it wasn’t the devil who showed up that day.”

“Well, if he does ever show up, send him my way. I’ve got a hell of a deal for him.” Benny laughed suddenly, then reached for his glass and downed the rest of his wine.

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Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Sandra returned from the rest room in time to catch Benny’s last words.

“Send who your way?” Sandra asked Benny.

Benny smiled. “The devil,” he said. “But he ain’t here right now.”

“One can never tell,” Justin said.

“I didn’t invite him,” Sandra pointed out.

“He’s invited into our world all too often,” Justin said somberly. Then he looked up at her and smiled. “But I think you scare him away when you’re around. Your soul shines too brightly to let him in.”

When they got back to the condo, Justin insisted on walking them to their door. He and Benny exchanged mumbled pleasantries and goodnights. Benny then beat a strategic retreat, leaving the two of them standing alone just outside the door.

“Thanks for the dinner,” Sandra said. “And the story. Best I’ve heard in a long time.”

“Did you like it?” he said.

“Very much.”

They both paused. The silence grew nervous, exciting.

“Well, I’d better get some sleep,” she said.

He nodded. “Of course,” he said, but did not move. The last of Sandra’s restraint vanished. She moved against him, lifted her face, and kissed him, long and hard.

“Go to bed—alone, this time,” Justin said softly, as he finally stepped back from her.

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Sandra nodded.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

“I’ll look forward to it.”

He turned and headed down the hallway. She backed into the doorway, but watched him until he got into the elevator and the doors closed behind him. He walked steadily and didn’t look back.

She heard a click and turned around to find Benny frowning at her.

“What?” she said. “What’s that look supposed to mean?”

“Well,” he said, “at this point in the fairy tale, you’re supposed to get on your white horse and carry him away.”

“Given my luck with men, he’s more likely to turn into a frog.” Sandra ran an affectionate hand through his hair as she walked past him and headed for bed.

4

e i g h t e e n

Justin Sterling’s eyes closed slowly.

He nodded, caught himself, then looked out the picture window in his living room again. The city’s lights twinkled like jewels on black velvet, reflecting in the glass sides of the buildings downtown and far away on the waters of Lake Michigan.

It looked like a peaceful scene. Yet he knew that peace was an illusion—it was likely that somewhere in that glittering night, someone was murdering—or planning to murder—someone else. Maybe it was a junkie knifing his pusher. Maybe a terrorist mixing a bomb. Most likely it was two men in a bar parking lot, fighting over some imagined slight or a woman they both coveted.

Peace was what mortals thought they desired, but they lied to themselves. What they really wanted was wealth, power, and control over others. They would destroy peace in a heartbeat to get it.

Even those who lived solitary lives—who clois-DARK HEART

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tered themselves from the world—fought, even if it was only within their own minds. In fact, Justin was fighting now. He lacked someone to attack, so he waged war upon himself.

Justin looked out at the city, thinking of the millions of people living there. Their lives were so different than his.

He rose from his chair in silence, the raucous sounds of Chicago deadened by the expensive glass window. He lived forever—and his life was now safely insulated in a perfect, technologically engineered cocoon. A wonder of the modern age. He had the money it took to purchase the illusion of peace. He reached out and put a hand on the glass. It was cool and smooth—an illusion hiding the gritty reality of the city beyond the glass.

He turned away from the window. He must go into the city again tonight. The Dragon’s voice was quiet for the moment, but Justin could feel the master’s presence behind every reflective surface, watching.

Did the Dragon approve of Omar’s punishment? Was the master furious at Omar? At him, for punishing Omar? Or did the master simply not care one way or the other?

And that was a puzzle, wasn’t it? Why hadn’t the Dragon intervened to resolve the conflicts between himself and Omar, himself and Kalzar? What did it mean that Kalzar was free to approach him through the mirror, when he hadn’t been before? And now he too could enter Kalzar’s private domain, from whence he’d also been barred before.

312

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin It was difficult for Justin to tell where he ended and the Dragon began. Was his rage the master’s way of speaking to him without using the mirror? He had often wondered how much control he really had over his own life, even when he walked the earth in human guise. He knew full well that he had very little control, if any, in the Wyrm state. He’d built a life as a man here in Chicago. He had the club, his home, his art. But were they really his? Were each of the drawings he had created somehow manifestations of the master’s will? Was everything he felt somehow influenced by that quiet, powerful voice? Were his feelings for Sandra McCormick the product of his own heart or an obsession implanted by the Dragon?

He was drawn to her. He could not argue with that. She felt real to him. She glowed with the force of her personality, lit up every room she entered—

something he had not experienced in centuries, at least, and perhaps only once before in his life. He knew the original attraction was based on Sandra’s physical similarity to Gwendolyne. Like Tina, she had that classic bone structure, dark, glossy hair, a subtle smile, and fair skin. There had been many women in Justin’s long life. But very few of them touched him in any real way. Most never even knew he was watching them—as Tina had not, before he showed himself to her. And even Tina had no idea that beneath the monstrous form of the Wyrm lay a man.

Sometimes he had interacted with them. Most of the time he had not. But he had rarely been tempted to share all he was with them—and he had never acted DARK HEART

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on those urges. Sandra, after such a very short time, tempted him almost irresistibly.

Sandra had her own demons. And somehow Justin felt that she alone might understand his.

“So what will you do now?” he asked the glass.

He wasn’t sure whether he was talking to the Dragon or to himself. Certainly the master lacked a soft spot for the desires of one of his immortals. Justin knew what the Dragon thought. She was getting too close to the truth. And he was helping her. Telling her the old stories. What on earth had possessed him? Why was it so important that she know the weight of his burden? The source of his power?

Justin studied himself in the glass. He was human now. He wondered whether she would recoil in horror if she saw him in his Wyrm state.

He remembered his wife, Gwendolyne, as she’d been before the plague took her.

Despite their similar appearances, she and Sandra were nothing alike.

Oh, on the surface they could have been twins—

their long, tumbling hair, their dark eyes, their elegant faces and pointed chins, the slight upward tilt of their noses. But inside, they were as different as chalk and cheese. He wondered about his memories—was he seeing Gwendolyne’s face on Sandra now? Or Sandra’s face on Gwendolyne? He didn’t know anymore.

One thing he did know—the Dragon had good cause to fear her. Sandra had almost all the pieces of the puzzle now. She was fighting her conclusions—

and who could blame her? In the modern world, sto-314

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin ries of marauding, murderous, man-shaped killers were the sort of things sold to tabloid journalists, not Chicago detectives. But she knew in her heart what was going on. She might have figured everything out, even by now, even in the intervening hour since he’d left her, and decided to move her wild theories to the forefront of her murder investigation. It would take only one tiny lateral leap in her thinking. After all, he thought, he had more or less given her the last clues she needed to buy into the story at dinner.

The phone rang.

The club phone. Someone downstairs needed him.

He crossed the room, past the dais with the mirror. There were only two reasons his manager was supposed to call him. One was in the event of some cataclysmic emergency. The other . . .

“Mr. Sterling?”

“Yes, Edward.”

“There is a young woman here to see you.”

“I see. Is she as I described her to you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do not keep her waiting.”

“Yes, sir.”

Justin hung up the phone.

Minutes later, he heard a knock on his door.

Justin was sitting in his chair in the dark, waiting. He stood.

“Come in,” he said.

Sandra opened the door. He watched her every movement. Every subtle shift of her body under the DARK HEART

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white Angora sweater she wore, every firm muscle encased in her snug jeans. She carried a small back-pack in one hand and the wide neckline of her sweater had drooped over one bare shoulder. The hallway outside bathed her in soft white light. She glowed in it like an angel.

“What, no gentlemanly greeting at the door?”

Sandra chided him. Her voice sounded calm, but he could feel her nervousness. She lingered in the doorway, delayed entering the room.

Her eyes adjusted rapidly to the darkness, and she looked quizzically at him.

“I wanted to watch you enter my dwelling,” he said. “Watch you coming to me.”

“You make it sound like such a big deal. Like crossing the threshold. Well, do you want me to come in?” she asked. “Or don’t you?”

“I can’t decide.” Yes, he wanted her. No, he feared her. Feared for her. Feared for himself.

“I fought with myself before coming over here,”

she said.

“We have both been warring then. Has the war been won between us?” He got up and moved to greet her.

He was very close to her now. He could feel her breath. He thought he could hear her heart beating.

“Is this a war?” she asked. “Is that what we’ve got going here? Are we adversaries in some sort of battle?”

“Of course,” he murmured, so close to her, but still so far apart. “The oldest war in man’s history—

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“Then let the battle begin.” She stepped over the threshold. “It’s dark in here,” she said. “I can barely see you. But I can see your eyes. I can always see your eyes.”

He reached a hand out toward her, then let it fall.

“I would touch you,” he said. “But where? Your lips . . . your throat . . . your hands . . . ? They are all so tempting. I can’t decide.”

“Here . . .” Her voice was barely audible. She took hold of his hand, placed his finger on her lips. “Start here.”

He kissed her. Her eyes closed and shock flashed through them both like lightning, paralyzing them for an instant. The feeling that held them in its grip was overpowering. It was as if all the energy in the uni-verse flowed through that single kiss. They abandoned themselves to it.

At last they parted. His heartbeat sounded loud in Justin’s ears.

Sandra, too, seemed overwhelmed. She swallowed, whispered, “My, my.” Her pack thumped to the floor. He took her in his arms again and kissed her thoroughly.

“I think, Justin . . .,” she whispered into his ear,

“ . . . we just won that war . . .”

Omar paused for a moment after he hopped the fence surrounding the safe house where the Drokpa agent DARK HEART

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masquerading as a psychologist in the Chicago police force had taken Tina Danforth. He was as careful as it was possible for one of his impulsive nature to be. No one heard the rattling of the chain links. Omar scratched at the stump of his arm and seethed. It would heal, but the newly forming nerves itched like crazy. It would be at least another couple of weeks before it was completely regenerated, Kalzar said. The infernal itching as it grew back was driving him mad.

Omar turned his attention away from his lost arm. A large black man in a white uniform walked around the corner of the brick building, wheeling a trash barrel out to the Dumpster. Omar stared at the man, then walked toward him.

The orderly turned when Omar was a scant few feet away. He jumped in surprise, then frowned. “Hey, man. You shouldn’t be here. Get out of here!”

Omar continued walking forward. The orderly retreated, got back against the Dumpster, and balled his fists, ready for a fight. He was a large man, very strong, and clearly sure he’d win any sort of confrontation.

“What the hell you doing here, anyway?” the orderly said.

Omar paused a couple of feet from the man. He narrowed his eyes and looked at the orderly. After a moment’s silence, he spoke.

“Trying to decide how to kill you without getting blood on your uniform.”

•

•

•

318

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Tina awoke in the darkness of the strange room and sat up. Everything seemed odd to her—she’d been dis-jointed and confused ever since that terrible night. She had been dreaming about the dragons, some dreams terrible nightmares that dragged her screaming from sleep, others reassuring her that she would heal and times would change. She couldn’t remember exactly how the last dream—one of the lovely ones—had ended. She hadn’t wanted to wake up, but the dragons said she couldn’t stay right now, that she had to go back.

It was important, they said.

Now she just had to figure out where they wanted her to go.

As the reality of the dark room took hold, Tina heard something outside of her door. Fear tore through her. Now she remembered what the dragons had said and why she had to leave, leave now. The dragons said that danger would come for her tonight.

Do not be afraid, they had said, but be swift and prepare.

The door handle turned and a shaft of light fell across the floor. Tina slid her feet off the bed and stood up to face the intruder.

The man came in and closed the door behind him. He wore a white orderly’s uniform, but Dr.

Shiang said the orderlies would not come into her room at night unless Tina called them.

The man paused. Tina could barely make out his features, but she saw enough to recognize him. He was the man who had attacked the Chinese kid just after DARK HEART

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Zack’s murder, who would’ve killed her if she hadn’t run for her life. Tina had talked about it with Dr.

Shiang. The doctor told Tina the man’s name was Omar.

“I know who you are,” Tina said, feeling a strange calm. Her dreams, while a warning, had somehow settled her nerves.

“Do you?” Omar narrowed his eyes. He lunged across the room, slamming Tina up against the wall.

She gasped, completely unprepared for his speed and brutal power.

“Good,” Omar said. “Then you know I’m the one who’s going to rip that pretty face off your skull.”

Tina struggled against the iron hand holding her captive. She kicked at him, scratched at his eyes.

Nothing worked. He was toying with her like a cat toys with a mouse, enjoying her futile struggles while he contemplated the best location for his killing blow.

Tina felt herself unraveling. Her calm dissolved as if it had never been, and she felt herself returning to that dark place deep within herself, the place where Dr.

Shiang had found her.

Then she remembered the dragons’ voices from the dream and she ceased her struggles. The dragons seemed to speak to her again and soothe her fright. If Omar really wanted to kill her, she would now be dead. Perhaps he would hesitate long enough for her to escape.

Tina swallowed against Omar’s relaxed grip and spoke hoarsely. “I’ve heard the voices of the dragons from Beyond,” she said. “I have heard their singing. I will never be the same again.”

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“Then you’ve joined the wrong side,” Omar said, a snarl curling his lip. He threw her across the room. She crashed into the bed, overturning it. The lamp, the digital clock, and a box of tissues clattered down around her. She cried out, sprawling onto the floor. She pushed herself up and turned to look at him, crying, sobbing through the pain.

Omar’s eyes were glowing red. He stood over her, waiting for something. Tina noticed that he had an empty sleeve where his left arm should be. At that moment he looked even more threatening than if he’d been whole, his body and his expression twisted and malevolent.

Tina swallowed, steeling herself, and said the first words that came to her. “You are just a minor disciple.

You can’t take the dragonling form.”

That seemed to affect him. His triumphant smile turned into a snarl. “Soon enough, pretty one, I’ll cross that threshold. I don’t know who’s been telling you so much, but they obviously haven’t told you enough.” He moved toward her and Tina scuttled backward.

A shaft of light tore across the room again, and a cool voice came from the doorway. “It will be difficult to rip apart your victims with only one arm.”

Tina melted with relief. Omar turned to face Dr.

Shiang. The small Chinese woman stood quietly in the doorway, outlined by the glow of light from the hallway. Her long, black hair was unbound. She looked as if she had hurried here. Tina had never seen Dr. Shiang look hurried before.

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“That will be a problem for you,” Dr. Shiang continued, stepping into the room between Tina and Omar.

“Who the hell are you?”

Dr. Shiang answered his question with a question. Her voice was a warm breeze in the cold room.

“If they have already taken your arm, the rest will not be far behind, don’t you think?”

Omar responded by backhanding her sharply across the face. Dr. Shiang stumbled across the room, but did not fall. She righted herself and stood calmly once more, waiting for the next attack. She did not once look at Tina, but Tina could almost hear Dr.

Shiang’s voice inside her head.

Run fast! Now!

Scrambling to her feet, Tina went for the door.

She reached the hallway at a dead run and heard Omar yell. Over the pounding of her own heart, she heard his footsteps crashing after her.

At the end of the hallway was the physical ther-apy room. Tina fumbled with the handle and threw the door wide open, rushed inside even as she slammed it in Omar’s face. Weight-lifting equipment in all shapes and sizes filled the room. Six-foot-tall mirrors covered every wall.

The mirror! Dr. Shiang’s voice whispered in her head. Into the mirror!

Tina’s rational mind couldn’t quite see the point of that, but her rational mind seemed distant and small in these circumstances. She had seen things in the past few days that defied explanation. Tina had 322

Margaret Weis and David Baldwin only one certainty right now. She trusted Dr. Shiang with her life.

That was the only certainty she needed.

She leapt at the mirror. It rippled as she passed through it.

Omar’s fingernails scraped Tina’s nightgown as she plunged into the mirror. Her actions caught him off guard, and he missed her. He leapt after her, reaching for her disappearing leg. He caught hold of it just as his senses were overwhelmed by the mirror world.

Keeping his grip firm, he thought of Kalzar’s mansion as his mind was forced into sleep.

When Omar’s consciousness returned to him, he knew something was wrong. The surface of the mirror at Kalzar’s house parted for him like water, and he stumbled onto the marble floor. The bright sun blinded him for a moment.

Omar looked at his hand. In it was a girl’s slipper.

Tina Danforth was nowhere to be found.

With his mouth agape, Omar stared up at Kalzar, who had noticed his arrival. Kalzar rose from where he had been lounging on some cushions. His eyes narrowed.

“Where is she, Omar?” Kalzar asked in a quiet voice.

Omar shook his head. “I don’t know. I had her . . . I know I had her . . . I will return at once and—”

“So you have failed me again,” Kalzar said. “I don’t think returning to fetch her will be necessary.”

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“But, Kalzar, it wasn’t my fault. The dragons from Beyond—”

“Yes, yes . . .” Kalzar nodded. “I know.”

Omar watched in terror as Kalzar’s face elongated.

Teeth cracked and grew large in his jaws. Wings burst from his back, ripping through his shirt and spraying blood.

Omar screamed and leapt for the mirror.

His hand broke the surface just as Kalzar’s claw closed on his ankle . . .

But Kalzar captured more than a shoe.

Kalzar threw the bloody rug at the base of the steps. It fell open, revealing what was left of Omar. Already, the lesser disciple’s parts were trying to fit back together.

Eventually he would reform, but there was a trick Kalzar had learned long ago when one of his protégés had disappointed him, and he had used it many times since.

I’d better hurry, he thought, before he assembles himself enough to start moaning again.

Kalzar crouched before one of the stone walls of the cellar and hit a hidden lever. A section of the wall moved and he reached within and pulled out a large, iron-bound trunk. Setting it aside, he pulled out a second, identical container.

A thump broke his quiet contemplation, and Kalzar turned. No shadow marred the light spilling from the stairway. The thump sounded again, and Kalzar looked down at the trunks. A slow smile curved his lips and he laughed.

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Margaret Weis and David Baldwin Softly at first, then with growing strength, a voice came from inside the other trunk. Kalzar produced an ornate key and opened it.

Half of a man struggled within. His body ended roughly at the base of the rib cage. His wild eyes rolled and squinted at the light. “Please!” he cried, “I’ll do anything! Please!”

“Hassan,” Kalzar said pleasantly. “Do you know that I had completely forgotten where you were?

You’re looking much better than when I put you there. Would you like some company? I’m sure you and Omar will become the best of friends.”

Kalzar scooped up roughly half of Omar from the rug and tossed it on top of Hassan’s upper body. It didn’t really matter what went in, as long as the spine was roughly in two pieces, and those two pieces weren’t allowed to touch. A lesser disciple would grow back any extremity in time, but if the spine was halved, the disciple would remain in two pieces. Kalzar wasn’t sure if that was the case with the Elders—he’d never had a chance to experiment—but he’d always been curious about it. Perhaps he’d have a chance to find out soon.

“Oh, dear God, no !” Hassan screamed.

Kalzar opened the second trunk and threw the rest of Omar on top of Hassan’s legs, which were kicking. He closed and locked the container, then turned back to the original trunk. Hassan had managed to push himself on top of Omar’s remains, and he was clawing at the sides, trying to drag himself out.

He grappled with the edges of the trunk, but Kalzar DARK HEART

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patiently removed his hands and pushed him back.

“Hassan,” Kalzar began, “Do you think, after all this time, you have learned your lesson?”

“Yes, master. Oh, yes, master.”

“I don’t.”

Kalzar slammed the lid shut and locked it. The horrified scream from within afforded him a great deal of pleasure. He couldn’t even remember what Hassan had done to invoke his displeasure.

Perhaps Justin was right about one thing, Kalzar thought as he shoved the trunks—one moaning, one reverberating from desperate kicks—back into the alcove and closed the wall. Omar had turned out to be a bitter failure. Kalzar decided that he must be much more careful about the allies he chose in the future.

Or perhaps he should do away with allies altogether, start tying up the loose ends himself ?

Yes, that would suit him. The general would take the field again. Why should the lackeys have all the fun?

4

n i n e t e e n

The clacking of keyboards and the buzz of voices in the precinct made a comfortable, familiar sound as Sandra breezed into the Eighteenth District the next morning.

The station felt like home, and it was good to be home, even as difficult as it had been to leave Justin.

The memory of the night she’d spent with him brought a smile to her face. But then, just about everything was bringing a smile to her face today. The rain had let up and the sky was robin’s egg blue with a few white puffy clouds—a very nice change from the unending storms of recent days. She’d even heard a bird singing just outside the garage as she turned off West Chicago.

She had wanted to linger beside Justin all morning, or do something stupid like make pancakes and fresh-squeezed orange juice and have breakfast with him in bed. After hours of lovemaking, each time sweeter and slower than the last, they had finally col-DARK HEART

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lapsed in exhaustion. The miracle wasn’t that she was late. It was that she’d come in at all.

If she’d been juggling her usual caseload, if it had been any other day, she would have been tempted to stay in Justin’s arms. But things were coming to a boil. And the monster was still out there.

She walked into the detective squad room to the familiar sight of Mac talking to his wife on the phone.

Linda always called at the beginning of the day, about an hour after he got to work. Mac was nodding without really listening and saying, “Mmm hmm,” at random intervals, and nodding some more, until he saw Sandra.

“Honey? Yeah. She just walked in. I gotta go.” He paused. “Who? Sandra! Who do you think?” He shook his head. “Right. Okay. I’ve got to go. Bye.” He put the receiver down and regarded Sandra silently for a moment.

She gave Mac a sweet smile.

“Glad to see you could finally make it in,” he said.

“It’s good to be back.”

He looked at his watch, “Really? You wouldn’t know it by the time.”

“Relax, Mac. Nothing ever happens before ten o’clock.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What’s up with you?” he asked.

“I’m not sure what you mean, Mac.” She shrugged and looked around. “Did they wash the windows or something in here? Seems brighter.”

“Little Miss Sweetness and Light . . .” Mac sat back in his chair and smiled a little. “I don’t believe it.”

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“What?”

“You’ve got that barnyard egg look.”

She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Just laid,” he said, chuckling. Mac was his own biggest fan. “Ever heard that one before?”

She felt her face heat with embarrassment.

“And well laid, from the looks of it,” Mac continued.

“Not funny, Mac.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “Don’t get your hackles up, Bruce. But questions like ‘Gee, did they wash the windows?’ and that goofy smile you’re wearing are a dead giveaway.”

“Focus, Mac. Think focus, okay?”

Across the room Lewis was cussing at his computer again. O’Mara was trailing the captain to his office door, trying to convince him that she deserved this weekend off.