Mimi made some strange noises that sounded like grunts.

After a moment the men moved away to confer with their supervisor.

"What are they?" Oliver whispered.

"Trolls. They work here... for the demons."

"Ugly things." Oliver shuddered. "Those collars."

"The only thing keeping them from attacking us," Mimi said in a matter-of-fact tone.

The collars were wound tightly around the trolls' necks, and drew blood every time they moved. Oliver could not help but feel repulsion and pity for the creatures.

He looked around. "So this Helda you're meeting - she's a demon?"

"No." Mimi shook her head. "She's more like their...

grandmother."

Oliver blanched, and Mimi continued to explain. "She's one of the goddesses. The old ones, before we came along, like the witch we visited in North Hampton."

"There's so much I don't know about the world," Oliver murmured.

The trolls returned and motioned to a gas station beyond the checkpoint. Mimi parked the car. "Wait here," she said.

"With them?" Oliver balked. He wished he'd thought to put the roof up, but now it was too late. The trolls sniffed him, one leaning forward so closely, Oliver could feel its hot breath on his cheek. "Human," it said to the other, in perfect English.

"Living." His friend nodded with a sly smile.

"He's mine, beastia! Touch him and you'll know the taste of Azrael's steel," Mimi snapped. The trolls backed away, but Oliver wasn't sure if he felt safer. They were still looking at him as if he were dinner.

"They're only teasing you. They don't eat meat," she assured him. Mimi neglected to add "only souls," but Oliver didn't have to know that, and he looked terrified enough already. "Stop being such a wuss. Trolls, leave him alone."

Mimi walked toward the small office located in the back of the gas station. She didn't want to tell Oliver, but the endless driving had bothered her. She'd worried that it was a sign that Helda would not allow her past the lower levels, and she would have to reach the seventh if she was going to find Kingsley. Another troll, a fierce female with a bronze mane, guarded the door to Helda's office. The she-troll was wearing a heavy iron sash loaded with bullets, and carrying what looked like an AK-47. She gave Mimi a pat-down to check for weapons. "What's this?" she asked, her hand on Mimi's back.

Amazing that the troll had found the needle Mimi kept pinned to her bra. "It's my sword."

"You'll have to leave it here. You can have it back when you finish with Helda."

Mimi complied and handed over her needle, pulling it out from underneath her shirt. "Can I go in now?"

The troll nodded and kicked the door open.

Helda did not look pleased to see her. The Queen of the Dead was an older woman dressed in severe black, her hair in a tight gray bun. Her face was wrinkled and drawn, and she had the thin, puckered lips of a lifelong smoker, as well as the hard beady eyes of a gambler who had spent her last dollar on a losing horse. She looked nothing like her niece in North Hampton. There was something cruel and ancient about her, as if she had seen the world at its worst and had merely shrugged. She sat behind a desk that was messy with ledgers, receipts, crumpled notes, and torn envelopes. It looked like the desk of a harried accountant, which, when Mimi thought about it, was what Helda was, since the Kingdom of the Dead was a little like a bureaucracy that collected souls instead of taxes. "You're back," she said flatly.

"Thanks to your niece," Mimi said.

"Which one?"

"Erda."

"How disappointing. Erda was always the smarter one.

Freya, she would do it just to spite me." Helda regarded Mimi coolly. Mimi thought Helda was not unlike one of those rich women who ran the charity committees and took pleasure in excluding social climbers from the group. "So. What do you seek from my domain, Azrael?"

"You know what I want. The same thing I wanted last time. I've come to retrieve a soul from beyond the subvertio."

"Back for Araquiel, are you? Shame. He's been an asset down here; a great help keeping the demons in line. There's no way I can dissuade you from your quest?"

Mimi shook her head. Did Helda expect her to believe that crap? Kingsley was suffering down here. Who knew what kind of tortures and agonies he'd endured. She didn't know what kind of game Helda was playing, but she decided to keep her mouth shut so the old bird would let her pass.

"You are prepared this time. You have your barter?"

Helda asked.

"I do," Mimi said, motioning to the window.

Helda observed Oliver trying to lean as far away from the trolls as possible without looking like he was avoiding them. "I see," she sighed. "A human's a poor substitute for the soul you're taking from me. But very well. If you are able to convince Araquiel to return with you, you may have him."

Chapter Nine

Studio Session

The address that the gallery assistant had left on her answering machine brought Allegra to a warehouse near market Street. She took a creaky factory elevator to a loft on the top floor.

Last night she had spent the remainder of the party re-miniscing about high school with her old friends, many of whom were starting their lives in the world: newly minted investment bankers and law students, a scattering of television PA's and cub reporters, along with fashion assistants and the self-described ladies and gentlemen of leisure who had come into their inheritances and were whiling away their days on the social circuit - their lives a succession of parties and benefits and festivals; a jet-setting crowd who frequented Wimble-don, Art Basel, and the Venice Film Festival. Her friends had cooed over her new haircut and wanted to know why she had disappeared from their lives without an explanation. People like Allegra were not supposed to do such disagreeable things.

Their kind kept in touch out of habit, forever recounting the glory days when one had been a scrapper at St. Paul's or Endicott. She had apologized profusely and promised to have them all over, in New York, once they were finished with the renovations on the town house on Fifth Avenue, where she and Charles were supposed to live after they were bonded.

The elevator opened right into Ben's studio. "Hello?"

"In here!" Ben called. She walked out to find him standing in front of a large painting, wiping his hands on a wet rag.

"You're here," he said, as if he didn't quite believe it. He put the rag away and wiped his hands on his jeans. He was nervous, she was surprised to discover. He had none of the breezy nonchalance he'd displayed the night before.

"You invited me."

"I wasn't sure you would come," he admitted.

"Well, I'm here now." She gave him a tentative smile. She didn't know why he was acting so strange. Had she misread him? He had invited her to see the studio, and she had thought it was a sincere invitation - not one of those casual, polite things that people say to each other at dinner parties.

Was this yet another mistake? She had woken up this morning excited at the prospect of seeing him again, and hoping that he would be alone. They stood facing each other for so long that Allegra finally felt he was being rude. "Well, are you going to show me your work?"

Ben blushed. "Sorry, seem to have forgotten my manners.

Please, by all means."

Allegra walked around the room. The studio was a large white loft with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bay.

There were paint cans and paintbrushes everywhere, and plastic on the floor. The oily smell of gesso filled the air.

"Sorry it's a bit messy," he said.

She nodded, not quite sure what to say. The loft was filled with an assortment of canvases in all sizes, a few stretched eight feet high and ten feet across. There were smaller paintings propped on easels or tacked on the walls. Some were framed and encased in plastic. As Allegra looked around, she noticed a theme in all of his work. Every painting - from the mural that showed a girl lying dreamily in bed, like a modern odalisque, to the small ones, which were like the one she had purchased - each and every painting in the studio was a portrait of her.

She walked through the space, studying the paintings and drawings in complete silence and utter shock. Ben followed her wordlessly, waiting to hear her reaction. For now, she didn't have one. She was merely processing the information he was giving her. The paintings held the breadth of their short love story: Allegra on the bed, in her white camisole; Allegra in the woods, the night of her initiation into the Peithologians,

"a secret society of poets and adventurers," which meant they got drunk in the forest after curfew; Allegra holding up a Latin textbook, laughing at how terrible she was at the language; Allegra nude, her back turned to the viewer. There was a small dark painting, all black except for the bright blond hair and ivory fangs. Allegra the vampire princess.

She understood now. The carefree artist and jocular heir-about-town from the night before was all an act. The familiar's kiss had marked him, had changed him, and in order to deal with her abandonment, he had created a shrine to her. This obsessive recollection of every moment of their relationship was his way of keeping her close to him. He painted her over and over so that he would never forget her. It was all there - his love and need for her. This was his true heart, open and exposed and bleeding.

Now she understood what his mother had tried to tell her when she had said, "You're the girl in the paintings." Decca Chase was worried about her boy, and had thought that maybe if she brought Allegra to him, he would find a way to be with her or get over her. Smart woman.

Ben shuffled his feet, his face slowly turning a brilliant shade of crimson. He gulped. "Well, what do you think?"

"I'm so sorry for leaving you," Allegra said slowly, not quite able to meet his eyes. "I'm so sorry I disappeared that night. You don't understand - I'm not free.... I don't have a choice about whom I can love. You have to forget about me....

It's better for everyone. For you."

Ben frowned. "No... no... you don't understand."

But Allegra was back in the elevator, and this time she would not return. She had made a mistake in seeking him out, in putting her entire future at risk, and she would not make it again.

Sometimes it was better to keep Pandora's box closed.

Chapter Ten

City of the Dead

It was only after the Venators had relaxed their hostile stance that Schuyler noticed their surroundings. They were inside a small stone room, and she wasn't sure, but it looked as if the shelves were made from grave markers, and that two ornately carved tombstones formed a table. "Are we where I think we are?" she asked.

Sam nodded, apologized for the smell, and explained why they were living in a mausoleum, called the City of the Dead by the locals. They were in the eastern part of the city, in a necropolis that served as a home for people whose ancestors were buried in the basement catacombs, or for those who had been forced out of the crowded areas of Cairo, unable to afford apartments. There were anywhere from thirty thousand to a million people living among the dead, Sam explained. The cemeteries were equipped with a minimal sewage and water system, while electric wires connected to nearby mosques provided light and heat. Since the tombs had been built to ac-commodate the traditional mourning period, when people stayed at the cemetery with their dead for the requisite forty days and nights, living in them was a natural progression when there were no other options.

"We got a lead on a Nephilim hive in Tehran. We shut that down, did the same to one in Tripoli, then came here when we heard rumors that girls have been disappearing from the City of the Dead." He explained that the disappearances and kidnappings did not conform to typical Red Blood crimes.

There was a systemic, even ritualized aspect to them that piqued the Venators' interest. "It's got Hell-born written all over it, so we've been bunking here to be close to the target."

"Last week we raided their nest and got them all - except for one that got away," Deming told them.

"You thought that was me," Schuyler said.

Deming nodded. "Yes." She did not apologize for the mistake. She recounted the events in New York, how she had caught the Nephilim who had been after the vampires.

"So it is as we suspected," Schuyler said, catching her breath at the news. "This has been going on for some time now." She told them what they had discovered in Florence, and confirmed what the Venators already knew about bloody work of the Petruvian priests, who hunted and killed the human women who had been taken by Croatan, along with their offspring. "The girl who'd been taken had a mark on her: three intertwining circles that contained Lucifer's sigil, a sheep, and the Blue Blood symbol for union."