"Can I kiss you?" he said, kind of offhand, as if we hadn't kissed a hundred times before and the thought had just occurred to him.

In reply, I took a slow step toward him, and another. Before I knew it, he touched my face and brought our lips together. The kiss was hot, hungry. I held him and pulled myself close to him. His hands slipped down my back, one of them moving farther, cupping my bottom. Just a thin layer of silk lay between us. And still, we kissed.

We finally pulled apart to catch our breath.

"I suppose we should do this sort of thing more often," he said.

"Yeah," I said, whispering, a little shaky. All of a sudden, I didn't want to go to the concert. I was still holding on to him.

He ducked his gaze. "I was going to say—we'd probably better get going. We'll be late."

"Yeah." We still didn't move.

Then, at almost the same moment, we started giggling. I pressed my face to his shoulder to stop myself, and he hugged me, and the intensity of whatever had just happened went away. Mostly, it went away.

I said, grinning, "Hey, wanna go on a date with me?"

"Absolutely."

We looked like a million bucks. Stalking arm in arm, we crossed the courtyard of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, a collection of theaters in the heart of downtown, to the doors of the concert hall. We turned heads, the two of as. Like we were in a commercial for diamond jewelry or a music video. Sure, we were way overdressed compared to a lot of the crowd—why did some Coloradoans think it was okay to wear jeans to a symphony concert?—and it made us stand out, but in the kind of way that the stares told me that they all wished they could be us. My grin felt silly, but I felt better when I glanced at Ben and saw the same grin on him. The alpha pair indeed.

I even almost forgot that I was supposed to be in hiding. I kept telling myself that none of the Denver wolves would be here, lycanthropes avoided crowds like this and the vampires didn't hang out here. I'd be fine, just fine. I didn't wilt in the middle of the crowd. I felt on top of the world.

We collected our tickets from Will Call, were ushered to our seats, and settled in as the orchestra was tuning up. The lights went down, the conductor appeared, and the orchestra launched into an overture.

Then she appeared, entering stage right.

Mercedes Cook had ivory skin and brick red hair, the rich color and sheen of silk, rippling past her shoulders. A midnight blue, shimmering gown clung to her slim figure. Her limbs were slender, her face aristocratic, like that of a Greek statue. I couldn't tell her height from where we sat, about halfway back in the orchestra section. She seemed to fill the stage. She seemed bigger than life.

I was close enough that the hall's air-conditioning system carried her scent to me—the cold, clean scent of a vampire. If I hadn't been warned, I'd have been shocked. She moved with such energy, such vibrancy. A consummate performer, she had a spark in her gaze.

I could guess her story: she'd always aspired to the stage. A talented performer, vampirism wasn't going to halt her ambitions. Maybe she even sought out the vampirism, or encountered the opportunity and grabbed it as a chance to hold on to that elusive advantage of youth and beauty. She'd been on stage since the sixties, when her official biography set the start of her career. Maybe she'd even been around longer, a vaudeville performer or singer in the twenties and thirties who disappeared and changed her identity to start a career on Broadway. That would take a bit of research and digging. I was hoping I could get the scoop from Mercedes herself.

Vampires didn't need to breathe. Their blood was borrowed, and their hearts didn't beat. They existed in a kind of stasis, never decaying, and never experiencing the cellular processes of life. But they used their lungs, inhaling air in order to speak. And to sing.

Mercedes's vocal cords didn't suffer at all from her being a vampire. She was a belter, yet her mezzo voice rang like a bell. She sang show tunes and torch songs. Fast, jazzy pieces and slow, bluesy pieces. Some I recognized, some I didn't. Every one of them had me at the edge of my seat. She owned that stage, and she needed the full orchestra to keep up with her. Nothing else possibly could.

She spotted me. From the stage, she looked right at me, caught my gaze, and she knew who I was, could tell what I was from forty feet away. Her smile thinned, her eyes narrowed into a sultry gaze, almost but not quite winking at me. Then she turned, and it was all part of the song, all part of the act. Every person in the audience probably imagined she was looking right at them.

Part of me didn't trust her talent. Vampires had…something. Energy, power, presence. They were seductive, they spent decades practicing being seductive. More than that, some of them could entrance you with a look. Hypnotize you. You'd follow them anywhere without knowing what was happening. They lured their prey to them.

She might have been casting that spell over the whole audience. Ben's jaw was open.

She gave two encores, then the lights came up, and it was over. I shook my head, like I was trying to clear a fog from my mind. The spell was fading. I reached over to close Ben's mouth for him. He blinked, also spellbound.

"She's impressive," he said.

"Want to meet her? I've got a backstage pass."

"Are you kidding?"

"Perks of the job, baby."

"Did—was I imagining it? Is she really—"

"Yeah. That's why I'm here. Come on."

I grabbed his hand and pulled him into the aisle. Back in the lobby, I followed my nose to a side corridor that led to a plain-looking door. We slipped through it to the chaos of backstage. Cables and lighting fixtures decorated shadowy concrete walls. Velvet drapes hung from a ceiling that was lost in darkness. The whole thing was, strangely, both cozy and industrial. Musicians carried instrument cases from the brightly lit stage.

I didn't spot anyone who looked official. At most rock and pop music concerts, a whole barrage of staff and bouncer types would have stopped us from getting this far. I'd marshaled my speeches that would get me past them to see Mercedes. But no one paid attention to me here. I was almost relieved when I spotted someone dressed all in black and wearing a headset. Even then, I had to intercept her.

"Can you help me? I was invited to visit with Ms. Cook after the show, do you know where I can find her?"

Just like that, the techie showed Ben and me to a back hallway where the dressing rooms were.