surprised at how automatic the impulse to respond in kind with her name was. Alban smiled, a flicker of understanding and dismay.
“Please. You have no reason to trust me, I know, but I need your help.”
“My help.” She stared up at him. They stood only a few inches apart, unmoving among the sea of bodies, like a couple so lost in one another they’d forgotten to keep dancing. Only the tension between them gave lie to that illusion. “Why would I help you?” she asked. “And why me?”
“Because I’m innocent,” Alban whispered, “and because you’re not easily frightened.”
Margrit’s heart skipped a beat, hanging painfully in her chest a moment too long. A jolt of stress angled through the empty place where the heartbeat should have been, and she gasped, stumbling a step. Alban caught her, a hand around her elbow to steady her, then let go again almost before she knew he’d touched her. “Please,” he repeated. “I don’t have much time. Will you help me?”
“I—”
The attitude of the dancers changed, a sudden switch from casual to disturbed. Heads turned, bodies straightening, as if in response to a silent warning that not all was right with the world. Margrit and Alban looked toward the DJ’s table, the direction the alteration had come from.
Tony pushed his way through the crowd. His clothes didn’t set him apart from a dancer who wanted onto the floor, but the brusque way he moved, full of purpose, did. There was no acknowledgment of the music in his movements.
“Dammit!” Alban cast one desperate look down at Margrit, then disappeared from her side. In almost the same moment Tony grabbed her shoulders, examining her with a critical glare, then released her to continue after his prey. A cobalt spotlight lit Alban’s hair to a fiery blue. Then the strobes popped back on, and Margrit lost them both in the crowd.
He hadn’t kissed anyone in nearly two hundred years.
She was almost as surprised as he was, looking him up and down. “Goin’ slumming or something, buddy?” She was tall and plump, with kohl-rimmed eyes, her hair dyed an unnatural black. In his slacks and button-down shirt, hair pulled back in a long ponytail, he no more fit into the Anne Rice Victoriana Room than anywhere else in the club.
Still, there’d been no choice. Margrit had swept the street with her gaze that evening, watching for someone who wasn’t there. Searching in shadows between alleys and cracks in buildings, not looking up, where he hid among rooftops. He’d followed her from her building after night had fallen, boldness driving him to linger across the street, high in the sky, to wait for her evening run. Instead, she’d left with friends, dressed as he’d never seen her: in a short trench coat thrown on over a skirt no longer than a promise, showing off slender strong legs. Tall heels shaped her calves, her stride as certain in them as it was in running shoes. He’d caught only a glimpse of the camisole she wore, clinging to her ribs and hugging her waist, when she’d slipped her coat off just inside a restaurant door.
He’d quashed the desire to follow her in, an impulse stronger than anything he could remember in decades. He’d protected her in the beginning because her daring nighttime runs woke fondness in him. But a few moments’ stolen conversation had lit embers so long banked he’d never have imagined they might still bear heat. Even that he might have ignored, had the news not borne whispers of impossible things to his ears. Need had arisen in him: a need to prove himself innocent to Margrit; a need to avoid becoming even more of a fugitive from the human world than his people were by their very nature.
With that need came awareness of his own limitations. Margrit’s indignation at being accosted had reflected back the shallowness of his own existence. In all his centuries, he had never found himself or his enduring path to be wanting, but now he was reminded of a vitality so long forgotten he almost wondered if it had ever been. He had not—not!—let himself brush his hands over her arms to feel the softness of her skin, or his mouth over her shoulder before he’d spoken, for all that she’d seemed to invite it. The closeness they’d shared had been heady enough, so extraordinary as to make him risk uncharacteristic things.
Such as kissing this woman now standing before him. “Flirting with a beautiful woman is never slumming.”
A sly smile of disbelief stained her mouth as surely as her lipstick stained his own. A pang of guilt laced through him, already too late. Authorities knew he was in the building, and he could not afford to be caught in their presence come sunrise. The chance to get Margrit away and speak with her had come and gone. The only thing left was his own survival. Nothing else would have driven him to the measure he’d already taken, much less the one he was about to.
He lifted his gaze, examining the room briefly. It was littered with carved vampires and gargoyles, their stone forms making drink holders and seats for the dancers. The walls held mock gaslights and candles, giving off flickering yellow light usually overwhelmed by the dance floor light show. The bar was dark polished wood, the seats covered in red velvet with worn spots, and the dancers were pale and beautiful in their dramatic dark clothing. “I have an idea,” he murmured to the girl. “There are three security cameras…”
“An’ she comes over an’ he goes over an’—” “We can see it, Ira.” Tony waved his hand, silencing him.
On the security screens, the kohl-eyed girl grinned at the camera in the corner and reached up. The picture cut out. In the opposite corner, Alban was recorded doing the same thing, except he kept his eyes and head lowered so the camera recorded only the top of his blond head.
The detective swore and hit the security-room desk with the heel of his hand. The Goth girl had been detained in the hall; Margrit could hear her talking to another cop.
“Man, I thought he wanted to, y’know, like, make out. Get a little down and dirty in the club, y’know? I thought it was cool.” She was pale-faced and sullen, her lipstick so dark red it bordered on black. “That’s all. I’ll pay for the wire, Jesus. But then he was fuckin’ gone, man. Bailed and left me to take the blame. Bastard.”
An air vent at the top of the wall opposite the camera was found with its grate dangling from just one screw. The third camera in the Goth Room had caught Alban frantically untwisting screws after the other two cameras had been disabled.
Tony pounded the desk again. “A full-grown man couldn’t have fit into that vent, goddammit. Especially not in forty-five seconds. He didn’t have time. And nobody saw it happen!” The third camera—hidden behind a bubble in the Goth Room ceiling—hadn’t filmed Alban’s scramble into the vent, but had focused instead on its sweep around the room. “Goddammit. Westing! Anybody find anything in the furnace room yet?”
“No, sir. They’re searching the perimeter of the building, too.” The cop talking to the Goth girl leaned into the security-room door, frowning at Margrit. She lifted an eyebrow brazenly, challenging him to question her presence there. He spread the fingers of one hand in appeasement and focused on Tony instead.
“Keep looking,” Detective Pulcella muttered.
“Yes, sir. What do you want me to do with her?” The cop gestured at the Goth girl. Tony scowled at her, scowled at Margrit and scowled at his coworker.
“Arrest her for vandalism and get all her information. She might end up as an accessory to murder.”
“Murder! Jesus fucking Christ! What the fuck are you talkin’ about? I clipped a couple wires and I said I’d pay for the fuckin’ things! C’mon, they’re not really fuckin’
