Cyprien listened as Jaus told him about the attack on Jema Shaw at the museum, and how Thierry Durand had killed the three men involved.

"Thierry saved Miss Shaw?" It could not be a coincidence. "How did he come to be there?"

"I cannot explain his presence at the museum," Jaus admitted. "Perhaps he came upon them purely out of chance."

Cyprien wasn't so sure of that. "He might have gone to the museum to find out something about Ms. Lopez."

"Yes, I remember now. She once worked there."

"At least we know Thierry is not responsible for killing Montague. He was on the other side of town at the museum." Something occurred to Michael. "There should be a connection between Montague and the three men whom Thierry killed. It will identify the Kyn behind these attacks."

"If there is, my men will find it." Jaus sighed. "Michael, I have enough men in the police department to protect Jema and remove the evidence that might expose the Kyn's involvement in these murders, but we cannot permit Thierry to go on killing humans. I believe he may be too dangerous now for us to try to capture alive."

"This is how you would reward him for saving Jema?"

"This is how I protect my city from a madman who is chopping up humans and leaving the pieces in his wake," Jaus replied evenly. "Even one to whom I owe a debt I can never repay."

Cyprien rubbed his eyes. "Very well. Give the order to your men. What will I tell Alexandra? Jamys?"

"It is better to say nothing of this," Jaus suggested. "Let the boy believe that his father was lost in a fair battle, not…" A commotion downstairs distracted him. "An assassination."

Michael followed him to the door in time to hear Alexandra shouting his name.

Jaus ran, but Cyprien didn't bother with the stairs. He jumped over the balcony and dropped thirty feet to the floor below. Alexandra and Falco were carrying Jamys Durand between them. Their garments were scorched and Alex's and Jamys's faces were covered with soot. The smell of gasoline was thick and sickening.

Jaus intercepted them as Cyprien took the boy in his arms. "Mein Gott, what happened?"

"They firebombed the limo," she told them as Michael carried the boy into the lab Jaus had set up for her. "Jamys pulled us out in time, but while he was saving us, they hauled John right out of the car. They took him."

Jaus shouted for his guards as Cyprien placed Jamys on the exam table. It was then that Michael saw the boy's hands were burned black. "How serious is it?"

"Hang on." Alex thrust a steel instrument into the boy's mouth and checked inside. "Okay. I need saline solution and two basins. Fast." She used a scalpel to cut open Jamys's shirt and checked his chest and abdomen while Cyprien and Jaus brought her the supplies she needed. "Empty the saline in the basins and put one under each hand."

Once they had the basins prepared, Alex carefully immersed Jamys's burned hands in them. Soot and dead tissue immediately floated to the top of the solution, blackening it.

Alex broke an ammonia ampoule and held it under the boy's nose. "Come on, Sleeping Beauty. Open those pretty dark eyes for me so I can yell at you."

Jamys jerked and opened his eyes, staring at them in shock before he coughed violently. Soot came out of his mouth, a small cloud of black dust.

"It's okay, let it out." When the boy had stopped coughing, Alex brought over an oxygen tank and fixed a mask over his face.

"Why are you doing that?" Jaus asked.

"Oxygen helps the internal healing." She checked his eyes with a penlight. "Looks like your brains are still working okay." She straightened and looked down at him. "I should whip your ass, Jamie. What were you thinking, diving into a car on fire?"

Jamys blinked and coughed again, then shrugged.

"Well, thank you for saving my life, you little shit." She turned her head. "We'll need two units of whole blood for our hero." When Cyprien brought them to her, Alex started an IV line and hooked both bags of blood to it so that both fed directly into his veins. Jamys's body began rapidly absorbing the fluid.

"How did this happen?" Jaus asked Falco.

"The doctor asked me to park the car so she could take the blood from her brother. While we were parked, someone threw a firebomb through the back window. The boy dragged me and your sygkenis out of the flames, but other men were there. They took the brother from the car, threw him in the back of a truck, and drove off with him." Falco looked at the floor. "I would have followed, but your lady insisted we return to Derabend Hall."

Cyprien glanced at Jamys. "Who were the men? Brethren?" He thought of the medical office in New Orleans. "Did they look like professionals?"

Falco looked uncertain. "I do not think so, seigneur. They were young men, with smooth-shaven skulls. I have seen them before, in the city. They are like dogs; they hunt in packs and attack the weak and the different."

"Skinheads." Jaus turned and issued terse orders to his guards. To Cyprien he said, "I know these jackals. I will bring them here for questioning."

"I want to talk to them." Alexandra was sponging dead tissue from the back of one of Jamys's hands. New, healthy flesh was already forming.

Michael saw the urgency in the boy's eyes. "He can identify the men who did this?"

"Not now. He won't be writing any messages for a few hours, will you, kiddo?" Alex turned to the boy. "By tonight you should be healed, though, and then I'm going to make you write, 'I will never run away to Chicago and scare the wits out of Alex and Michael and my family again.' Five hundred times should do it."

Jamys gave her a frustrated glance before he gave Cyprien a heartrending look of entreaty.

"I understand how you feel," he said to Thierry's son. "Have you seen your father?"

Jamys's mouth turned down, and he shook his head.

"Jaus told you how Thierry saved Jema, didn't he?" Alex asked Cyprien. "I think that's a good sign of his state of mind."

"Yes." Cyprien looked away from the woman he loved, and the boy whose father he was going to have killed. "I think so, too."

Once Jamys's hands were cleaned of the burned tissue, Alex gave him a small dose of the sedative she had created for the Kyn.

"He'll heal faster if he sleeps," she explained as she took a blood sample from Jamys.

"Why are you taking his blood? More tests?"

"I think it might help to take a look at it. Jamys was seventeen when he made the change, right?" At Cyprien's nod, she said, "Forever a teenager, poor kid. Anyway, he's the youngest Kyn I've met so far, in a manner of speaking, so I'd like to see if there are any differences in the mutation of an adolescent versus an adult human."

"I was not so old when I changed," Cyprien told her. "Only twenty-two."

"You mean I'm robbing the cradle?" She chuckled, and then noticed a report that her printer had produced. "That was fast." She took out the paper and read it. "This thing must have a glitch in it."

Cyprien glanced at the computer analysis equipment. "What is it?"

"This thing is a prototype blood analyzer. Val was nice enough to bully it out of a medical researcher he has on the Kyn payroll. It performs hematological, biochemical, and microbiological tests on any blood sample, and the computer software program linked to it generates a comprehensive report and profile. I've been using it to compare the pathogens and anomalies in Kyn blood. I found a little blood in that syringe Jema used, so I figured I'd run hers, to serve as a human baseline." She stared at the paper again. "But this can't be right. Her results are way off."

"Is it caused by the combination of drugs she has been taking?"

"No, this is different." She shook her head. "It's got to be a software glitch."

"What do her readings indicate?" Cyprien asked.

"That she's something she's not, Michael." Alex reached in her pocket and took out a vial of blood. "Let me show you how this is supposed to work."

She put a drop of blood in another vial, which she then placed into a complicated-looking machine.

"This is John's blood. Certified human." As the machine began to process the sample, she went to the computer and pulled up a stored profile. "These are my readings." She turned so Cyprien could see the line graph. "John's will not be the same."

A few minutes later, John Keller's blood profile appeared on the screen and, as Alexandra had predicted, displayed dissimilar readings.

"Now I'll do Jema's over." Alex replaced the vial in the machine with another and processed it. The third screen that came up was closer to her own readings than John's. She made a frustrated sound. "I'll run Jamys's blood; I've tested him before. If that shows up wrong, we're going to make Jaus take this piece of junk back where he got it and ask for a refund."

She ran the fourth sample. Jamys's profile made her mutter, "You have got to be kidding me."

"Does this mean the machine is working, or not?"

"I must have contaminated Jema's needle." She rested her head against her hands. "I stuck myself, and my blood got on it and mixed with hers."

"Do you remember doing so?" He watched her shake her head. "The blood must be Jema's."

"It can't be." She looked up at him. "If that is her blood, then Jema is carrying the same pathogens in her blood that you and I and every other vamp in this place have. Michael, if this test is correct, Jema Shaw is in the process of becoming Kyn."

Thierry went back to the Nelsons' to check the house and assure himself that in his haste he had not left behind any traces of his presence. He walked through the rooms, inspecting them, welcoming the sense of emptiness.

He had no place in the home of a human. He could be only an intruder, unwelcome, unwanted. Never a part of their lives. He could not even find the men who had tortured Luisa Lopez. He was beyond worthless.