Who's that? he wondered, dragging himself off the couch where he'd been sitting for the past three hours. He was watching the MTV countdown, trying to avoid thinking about what it meant that Nina had gone home to her parents--whom she hated--rather than hang out with him for a few days.

He shuffled to the apartment door and opened it without bothering to check the peephole. On the front stoop he found two teenagers, around his age or a little younger. The boy looked remarkably familiar, and Ash felt the image of Mark Carter rise vengefully in his mind. Same dark hair and hooded gaze, slender body and slightly detached manner. The girl also seemed familiar, although she was the exact opposite of her companion. Dark blond hair cascaded down her back in multiple fluffy layers, eyes that were neither blue nor green met his without hesitation, and she had an air about her that spoke of power.

"Dad?" she said.

Ash couldn't recall later exactly what he did then. He remembered blinking a couple of times and noticing that the person she reminded him of was himself, but he was never sure how the three of them ended up in the living room.

"Who are you?" he asked, trying to figure out exactly how they were related.

"Heather Redfern," the girl snapped. "This is Shae. We're your kids."

Ash shook his head. "Uh un. I don't have kids. There's been some kind of mistake."

Heather shook her head. She was bleeding, Ash noticed, from a long gash across her elbow where a bone was protruding from the skin, and she seemed to be breathing fast. "No mistake. You're my father."

Shae sat down on the couch, frowning deeply. He was handsome, Ash noted, and Heather was a knockout with her sailing hair and searing gaze, but they both looked frail, beaten.

Ash rubbed his forehead. "How can I be your father? You're almost as old as I am."

"Look." Heather sighed deeply and grimaced as she slowly straightened her arm. "This is going to take some explaining. Do you have a bandage?"

Ash went into the bathroom and rummaged around in the closet until he found a clean--?--washcloth. He was startled by his own lack of shock; this was very weird but for some reason he felt close to these people. As if they really were family.

"Here."

Heather nodded her thanks and rolled up her sleeve. Even though there was no way she was Ash's daughter, she was definitely family. No one but a Redfern would walk around with a bone sticking out of her arm and act like nothing was wrong.

"I'm sorry this is so unexpected," Shae said, and Ash jumped at his voice. He sounded like Mary-Lynette. Not the pitch, but the cadence. The way he softened his p's and drew out the o's.

"Do you think I'm your father, too?" Ash asked him.

Shae hesitated before nodding. "But it's complicated. I should let Heather explain."

Heather frowned and tapped the exposed bone experimentally. It reminded Ash of a cat playing with its kill. "I'm going to need a doctor," she said.

"I guessed," Ash replied. "If your my kids, why are you human?"

Shae leaned forward and Heather's frown deepened. "You're a vampire, aren't you?" Shae said.

Suddenly relieved--they weren't his kids if they didn't even know he was a vampire--Ash nodded.

"Because the girl didn't die," Shae said thoughtfully. "So the vampires didn't change."

Ash's stomach turned suddenly. "What girl?" he demanded, although he was pretty sure he knew.

"The Gift girl, Crystal or whatever."

"What the hell are you talking about here?" Ash cried. "If Cristona were dead, I would be...." He trailed off.

"Human," Shae finished.

The living room was silent for a minute. Ash took a few steps back, ran into an arm chair, and sat down.

"We need a place to stay," Heather said suddenly. "Not just tonight, but permanently."

"I don't even know who you are," Ash said hollowly.

"We're your kids," Heather snapped. She glared at him and then tugged her sweater back down her arm. She picked up a photograph of Nina with Quinn and Rashel from on top of the tv and blew out a long breath. Her jaw tightened, and she made to tear the photo in half.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Ash demanded, jerking the picture out of her hands. "I don't know you, get out of here."

"Heather," Shae said, rising. "Please, Dad, don't get mad at her. She's just pissed off because of all this stuff that's happened to us in the last couple of hours."

He touched Heather's good arm and tugged her gently toward the couch. "Come on, Heather, don't pick a fight with him."

"I still want to know what the hell is going on here," Ash said. "And don't call me Dad."

Shae glanced at him darkly as he pulled Heather down onto the sofa. "Wait," he said, suppressing a cough. "Ash, please calm down so that I can explain this."

Ash tossed himself backward into the recliner. "Explain away."

Shae nodded. "This is how Heather and I were made to understand the situation. Apparently, some time in the far future, someone goes back in time and disrupts this era. They go back and kill Cristona, and consequently, all the made vampires die and the lamia become human. Because of this change, you marry Mom instead of Nina."

The facts were mind-boggling but clear. "I marry who?" Ash asked.

"Mary-Lynette Carter. So the past was changed, and as a result, you married your soulmate, and you guys had two kids, me and Heather."

"You're telling me that in some alternate time-line, I dump Nina and go back to Mary-Lynette?"

"Right. Then, even further in the future, another person goes back in time to correct what the first person did. But she realized that changing the past back would mean that Heather and I were never born, so she offered to transport us here as an alternative to oblivion."

Ash couldn't even believe he was hearing this.

"Even still, why come back to now? In twenty years or whatever, you'll be born in the alternate time line and vanish."

"But we won't be born," Shae said. "You and Mom don't make up in this time line. She dies in 2016, and you marry somebody else. Besides, time travel doesn't work like that. It's completely possible for two people to be in the same space at the same time and still be separate."

Ash leaned back in his chair. "I do not get this."

Heather leaned forward. Her face was angular and presenceful, possessing all the attention in the room. "Even though we don't get born in this time-line, we still happened while the time was messed up. So since we came over here, we still exist."

"It's complicated," Shae said softly. "We've spent all afternoon trying to figure it out."

Keeping his eyes on the two humans on the couch, Ash picked up the phone and dialed Quinn's number. "Hello?" Rashel's voice was a little quicker than usual, probably she was drinking champagne and getting ready to toast the new year.

"Hey, it's me. Is Quinn around?"

"Hold on."

Heather chuckled. "John Quinn? Goddess, this time-line is weird."

What kind of kids do I have who say "Goddess"? Ash wondered. Then he thought of something. Of all the Night World races, the witches were really the best at living with humans. Their DNA strands were just a couple molecules different, so if suddenly everybody became human, who would be best suited to get the Night World resituated?

A moment later, Quinn said, "What is it?"

Ash felt himself grimace when he heard that voice. The two of them still weren't on the best of terms. "I didn't know who else to call. There are two people in my apartment claiming to be my kids from an alternate time-line where I marry Mary-Lynette. They said somebody went back to make the time-line right again, and they offered to dump the kids here. The creepy part is that I might be starting to believe them; the boy looks dead-up like Mark Carter, and the girl is as arrogant as I am."

There was silence for several long seconds. "Quinn?"

"I'm still here. I don't know what to tell you."

"Terrific. What am I supposed to do here? What's this?" Shae put several papers in his hand, and Ash unfolded them quickly. "Oh god, here's a marriage certificate. Here's a wedding photo, and two birth certificates. How did they fake this picture?"

"They can do a lot with airbrushing, Ash, it doesn't mean anything. And Thierry fakes certificates all the time. Why don't you call Mona and ask her what to do?"

"Why would Mona know any better than you would? You're two hundred years older than she is."

Quinn let out a harsh sigh. "This is the strangest thing I've heard in a long time, Ash."

"No shit. The more I look at Heather, the more I think she looks like me. Or my mom. Maybe I should call Mary."

"Do you know where to reach her?"

"No, but Thierry might."

"I'm not sure Thierry's working again yet. Besides, what could Mary do?"

"I don't know, adopt them. Never mind, Quinn, I don't know what the hell I was thinking calling you."

He hung up and stared at the duo on the couch. "Well," he said.

They stared back. "I guess I should get you to an emergency room," Ash said, gesturing to Heather's arm.

"Who would you tell them I am?"

"What do you mean?"

"I don't exist in this time-line. I don't have a valid social security number, birth certificate, health insurance, whatever. How are you going to get them to treat me without that stuff?"

He leaned back in his chair. This was unreal. No, this was beyond unreal, it was fucking nuts.

And it would be the weekend Nina left town, he thought. He wished she hadn't--for multiple reasons--but mostly because he knew she could think more logically in situations like these. He needed somebody with a clear head. Nina and Tern were both out of town, Quinn was no help, and the other logical person to call--Mary-Lynette--hadn't spoken to Ash in three months, after he told her that he never wanted to see her again.

She had a right to know, of course.

She really did have a right to know.

Ash picked up the phone again and dialed. There were four numbers he bothered to remember, and one of them was for emergencies like this.

"Hello, this is Gen speaking, can I help you?"

"Yes, this is Ash Redfern. I'm in the middle of a very strange situation and I'm wondering what I should do."

"Could I have your confirmation code, please?"

"JC7."

"And your pass phrase?"

"Luke Skywalker is a pansy-ass."

"Okay, you're cleared. What's wrong?"

Ash explained the situation. He remembered Gen, she was Thierry's secretary and had stayed on during his amnesia to work with Grahme. When he was finished, she took several seconds to think and then said, "All right, let's see what we can do. According to my records you're in Cross Bien, right?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Take the girl to the Cross Bien Emergency Medical Center and have her arm treated. Register her under the name Heather Redfern and use your insurance card. I'm transferring files to their computer now. While you're doing that, I'll contact Mary-Lynette Carter and tell her she needs to call you. Any questions?"

Ash had about a dozen, but none he thought Gen could help with. He thanked her and hung up, then relayed the plan to Heather and Shae.

"Would you mind if I just stayed here?" Shae asked. "This has been such a day, I feel like I'm going to collapse at any moment. I'd really just like to stretch out on your couch and take some sleep."

Take? Ash wondered. This kids must really be from some other world, all their slang is weird.

He was debating whether or not it was safe to leave Shae alone in the apartment, where he could easily steal everything and run, when the phone rang.

"Hello?" he asked, annoyed.

"This is Quinn."

"Look, I already took care of it-"

"That's not what I'm calling about."

"Then what are you calling about?"

"I'm sick of fighting with you. I know what I did was absolutely wrong, that it was sick and gross and selfish, and if I could take it back, I would. But since I can't, the least I can do is let you know how much I regret it."

Ash blinked. If he hadn't been in such a weird place he would have been enjoying this moment. "Are you trying to apologize?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing."

I'm going to explode, Ash thought. Something's got to give.

"Fine, you're forgiven. I'll even let you make it up to me."

Quinn sounded slightly suspicious. "How?"

"I have to take Heather to the hospital and I need somebody to watch Shae while I'm there."

There was a pause, and then Quinn emitted a low laugh. "You want me to babysit your son for a couple hours?"

"Yeah."

"How old is this kid?"

Ash had to ask. "He's fifteen."

Another chuckle. "I know it's hard to let go, but there comes an age when children have to be given some independence or else they'll be forced to rebel."

"Don't fuck with me, Quinn, I'm not in the mood. I'll drop him off in ten minutes."

"Okay, I'll tell Rae to stick a teething ring in the freezer."

"Shut up."

Ash dropped the phone back in its cradle. "You can stay with Quinn and Rashel while Heather and I go to the hospital."

"John Quinn, your friend," Shae clarified.

"I wouldn't exactly call him a friend," Ash muttered, grabbing a coat for Shae out of the closet.

Shae went on as they left the apartment and walked toward Ash's car. "He's a hero in our time-line. Because he died trying to save Crystal. You always spoke very highly of him."

"Yeah," Ash grumbled as he unlocked the driver door. "I guess in your time-line he didn't try to have me tortured to death to save his own ass."

Shae blinked a couple of times and got in the back. Heather sat shotgun, carefully adjusting her seat belt so that it wouldn't touch her arm. The house Quinn and Rashel were renting was only a few minutes away, in a suburb of domestication that struck Ash as a very strange place for their lair. The kitchen was yellow and he'd caught Quinn mowing the lawn one day.

"Where's the diaper bag?" Rashel asked, letting them inside. She looked different lately, she was wearing tan instead of black and her cheeks were faintly flushed.

Ash grimaced and said, "I'll be back in a couple of hours. I guess he's pretty tired, just give him the guest room and he'll be fine."

"It is pretty late for baby to be up," Rashel agreed. Ash caught a glimpse of Quinn standing in the living room and their eyes met for a moment. Ash nodded almost imperceptibly and pulled the front door shut.

The Care Center people only made them wait five minutes; apparently the sight of Heather's arm was making other patients even sicker. Ash said she was his sister--as if he needed another one--and was pleased to find that Gen had successfully created health records.

"That's a nasty break," the doctor said, blanching as he touched Heather's arm. "What happened?"

"I fell," Heather told him. He glanced at her, then at Ash, as if he was suspecting abuse, and Heather added, "Out of a tree. I landed on the steps that lead to our deck."

The doctor nodded, satisfied, and continued more casually, "What were you doing in a tree this time of night?"

"It's a family game to hang a bag of fortunes for the new year at the top of a tree and then race to get it. Whoever reaches the top first is the first to get their fortune."

Ash glanced at her sharply. That wasn't just any family tradition, it was specific to the Redfern's. They were obsessed with trees, taking risks as they climbed between wooden spears. He'd played a varied version a few days ago with Jez and Morgead. But he couldn't image that Mary-Lynette had let him continue that sort of thing with their kids, especially given that human kids tended to take falls from the tops of trees a lot harder than lamia children did.

The doctor took several X-rays and asked them to wait. Heather lay down on the examining table and covered her eyes with her good arm, sighing deeply. "You tired?" Ash asked.

"Yeah, time travel will do that to you."

He sat down on the doctor's swiveling stool. He had always been fascinated by stools that turned, had spent hours on them when he was younger. Now he just braced his feet on either side of himself and rocked back and forth a little.

"You look different than I expected," Heather said.

"How?"

"Younger. You were almost forty last time I saw you. But also, you're kind of bright."

"Bright?" Ash echoed.

"I guess it's the vampire thing. Your eyes keep changing color."

"What color were they in your time-line?"

"Black. All the lamia's eyes turned black. It's weird to see them blue now. And you look a lot less tired."

He leaned forward, chin in his hands. "Tell me about that life."

Heather made a nondescript sound and lifted her arm, staring at the ceiling. "You and Mom got married in 2001. You decided to have me kind of impulsively, and then Mom accidently got pregnant three months after I was born. Shae and I have the same birthday. You got a job at the lumber mill and Mom worked as a telemarketer."

"She didn't become an astrologer?"

"No." Heather glanced at him. "She went blind when she was in college. Some kind of chemistry accident."

"Oh god," Ash whispered, before he knew what he was saying. Mary-Lynette without her stars? What did she reach for then?

Heather went on, oblivious to the horror sweeping over him. "She married you right after the accident. We lived with your sisters in Vermont for a while, but Mom and Aunt Jade didn't get along because of her brother."

"What happened to Mark?"

Heather looked at him again. He still couldn't decide what color her eyes were. "He killed himself. Drank paint thinner. Anyway, nobody was very happy then. Aunt Kestrel's boys were really mean to Shae because he was younger and Aunt Rowan was drinking all the time. Then the lumber mill went out of business because there weren't any more trees to cut, and the President declared a national state of emergency because of the ozone layer. After that we had to go to the shelter, which wasn't so bad. There were a lot of other kids there that we went to school with. And I think you were happier living underground because it reminded you of when you had been a vampire. We stayed in the shelter for four years, and then we went out and Mom got her telemarketing job and you painted houses. I was nine then, and Shae was eight. He got leukemia and he was in the hospital off and on for three years. The medical bills were really awful and you and Mom fought all the time. We moved around for a while then, we lived with Grandma Claudine for a couple of years. You and Mom ended up getting divorced and there was this really big custody fight. You won, after that she really hated you. Frankly, I kind of hated you, too, but I was just mad at everybody in those days. The courts didn't want to give a blind woman who made fifteen thousand dollars a year two kids to take care of. That was about a year ago."

"And now this," Ash finished. "You know I'm not with Mary-Lynette in this time-line."

"I know. There's this Nina person. It's okay, I'm used to seeing you with other women. You really painted the town after the divorce."

There was a note of anger in her voice. "Only after?"

"Before, too. You and Mom both cheated, and for some reason it never occurred to either one of you to lie about it."

Or maybe we couldn't lie about it, Ash thought. A sadness had crept into him while Heather was speaking, but now he felt a small measure of comfort. He and Mary-Lynette had done the right thing, going their separate ways.

The doctor returned with two male nurses and announced that it was time to set the bone. Ash cringed but Heather didn't make a sound, only gritted her teeth and closed her eyes hard for the duration. Afterward came the cast and a prescription for painkillers, and another doctor's appointment in two weeks to talk about surgery.

"Happy New Year!" the secretary called as they left.

Ash found a 24-hour drugstore and got Heather's pills, which she swallowed two of dry on the car ride to Quinn's. The city streets were brightly lit but no one was about, only a few cars drifted past on their way home. The windows were frosted and Ash had to keep the heater on even after Heather asked him to turn it off just so that he could see.

Four am, Ash had long ago decided, was the darkest time of night, when even the glimmer of the stars turned cold and indifferent. He was relieved to walk through the front door of Quinn and Rashel's house and find bright lamps on in all the rooms, and warmth coming from the big fireplace.

Quinn, Rashel, and Raksha Keller were in the kitchen talking. "Hey," Ash said, easing out of his coat.

Rashel told Heather that Shae was asleep in the guest room, but there were two beds and if she wanted to take a nap herself she was welcome. Heather nodded and vanished down the hall, leaving Ash to suffer the idiot jokes about diapers and bottles. When they were finished, Keller said on a more serious note, "This is pretty strange way to start the new year."

Keller and Rashel had become good friends; not surprising given their occupations. Ash wasn't sure what Keller was doing these days, but she was often in Cross Bien.

He let out a long, deep, satisfying sigh and let his head drop onto the table top. "What am I supposed to do?" he moaned. "I always knew my life was straight out of a horror novel, but this is pure science fiction!"

"Shae's a nice kid," Rashel told him. "We ate hot dogs together before he went to bed. But technically, you don't know that he's really your kid. He could be anybody."

"He does look like Mark Carter, though," Quinn added.

Keller picked up a pad of paper from the counter and started writing. "Have you called Mary-Lynette?"

"No, Thierry's secretary is trying to find her number."

"You don't have her phone number?"

"We aren't on great terms," Ash growled.

Keller rolled her eyes. "Pettiness," she muttered. "I'm writing a to-do list for you."

"'Cause God knows I can't do anything for myself."

She smiled at him and kept writing.

"You even work when you aren't working, don't you? You're just like Nina. Instead of wanting to cuddle after sex, she wants to study. It's like playing some kinky game, with all that paper in the bed."

Rashel took a hefty swig from her coffee mug. "That was a little more than I wanted to know, Ash."

"Too late now. I need to go back to the apartment in case Mary-Lynette calls. Should I wake Shae and Heather up?"

"Leave them here," Quinn said. "We can drive them over later on."

"All right."

Ash stood up, and for the first time in a long while, felt honestly tired. He rarely needed to sleep, but did it often because he found lazing about enjoyable and relaxing. It was conducive to a happy life-style. His body, however, could go days at a time without resting if he fed frequently and didn't move any mountains.

But tonight, as he approached the first morning of the new year, he felt a weight in his limbs that rendered them tender and sore, and a heaviness in his eyelids that made sight more a burden than an asset.

His apartment door was locked, which startled him for a moment. Not only because he never locked it himself, but because it meant Nina had. Which meant she was inside.

He fumbled with his keys so long that she finally just opened the door from inside, smiling indulgently at him as he stumbled into her arms. "What are you doing here?" he asked. She smelled terrific, like she'd been bathing in raspberries.

"I don't know. I was having dinner tonight and suddenly I just realized that I wanted to be here with you. I got here as fast as I could, but I guess I was pretty late." She pulled back to kiss him. "You went out partying, huh?"

"No, actually...." He tried to find a way to tell her what was going on but nothing came to mind that didn't sound incredibly Twilight Zone. "It's just been a crappy night. Want to get some sleep with me?"

She lifted an eyebrow. "Real sleep?"

"Un huh."

"I've been driving for eleven hours, sleep sounds good."

Ash kicked his shoes off and tumbled into the bed, glad once again that he hadn't made it. Turning the blankets down would have been such a pain in the ass. Nina curled up beside him and reached for the neon-numbered alarm clock. "What time should I set it for?"

"Jesus christ, can't we sleep just once without worrying about when we'll have to wake up?"

"Okay, okay," she said delicately. "Forget it. I don't have anything to do tomorrow, anyway."

Ash felt like a jerk but was too tired to apologize. Vampires, when they do sleep, sleep drowning and heavy, dead to the world. Reaching out to clumsily clutch her hand was all he could do before he sank out of consciousness.

Heather closed the door as quietly as she could but Shae still woke. The mantle of sleep had never been anything more than a thin veil for him.

"Hi," he said as she felt the doorknob for a lock, and, finding one, depressed it. She could see his vague, ghostly form in the corner's shadows. "You can turn on the light if you want."

"That's okay."

"There's a bed to your right," Shae added. "How's your arm?"

"They put it in a cast, and they might want to do surgery in a few weeks."

"What did you say happened to it?"

"I lied to the doctor and Ash didn't ask."

"Oh."

She found a mattress and sat down on it carefully. Her arm was throbbing with each heartbeat, all the way up into her shoulder, but she wasn't sure if that was pain from the break or just her own tiredness. Still moving slowly, she lay back until her head was cradled in a pillow. The room was cool but she felt feverish and found it refreshing.

"Heather?" her brother asked.

"Yeah?"

"I'm scared. This isn't like what I thought it would be."

She closed her eyes. "What did you think it would be?"

"I thought....I guess I thought he would want us around."

Heather sighed. She didn't like hurting Shae's feelings, but he could be impossibly naive at times. "That was a pointless thought," she said. "Not only does he not remember us, but he's a teenager. He doesn't want to father us."

"And you don't want him to," Shae said softly.

"It's not what we came here for."

"We could have waited and come back later on, when Carabel and Juliet are about our age. I'd like to meet them. Do you think they'd like us?"

"I can't imagine why they would be."

"Maybe we should leave."

"And do what instead?"

"I don't know, I feel bad about using Ash like this."

"He's not your father, Shae," she said sharply. Heather rolled onto her side, facing away from him. "You're always running away," she said. "For once I'd like to see you face something."

Shae was quiet for a long time and she started to feel guilty. They had been through rocky times together, but Shae was always there for her, no matter what, no matter how much he was suffering. He was scared now, he needed her, and she more than owed him her support.

"Don't worry," she told him finally. "We'll take care of things, we'll be all right. Don't worry about it."

She closed her eyes and let the exhaustion take her over. As she drifted off, she heard Shae say, "Thanks, Heather."

Ash usually woke up instantly, in the fashion of most vampires. He was asleep, and then he was awake, all faculties intact.

But that morning he was never sure exactly when he woke up. He knew that his mind had been working for a while, but it might have only been dreaming, or it might have been just that he dreamt his mind was working, when in reality he was fast asleep.

Either way, he didn't become fully conscious until he opened his eyes and saw Nina holding out the phone, and even then he felt a distinctly human grogginess come over him. "Ash," Nina said firmly, still shaking him. "Come on, wake up."

He moaned and swatted at her hard enough to leave bruises.

"How much did you drink last night?" she asked, getting annoyed. "Come on, Ash, pull yourself together. Mary-Lynnette's on the phone."

His mind rolled over, confused. He sat up and felt the sleep pinch his eyes. "Mary-Lynnette? Why is she calling? Tell her to hold on while I wash my face."

"I already made her wait five minutes while I debated waking you up."

He couldn't help chuckling. "That's my girl," he said, taking the phone and flopping back into the pillows. "Hello?"

Nina curled up in the same funny cat position she always slept in, head pillowed on his stomach, and closed her eyes. Ash didn't believe for a moment that she was as relaxed as she looked, but he gave her Brownie points for pretending.

"Ash?"

Her voice was stunning and strong. The last time Ash had seen her, she'd looked sick and depressed, and he'd seen from her memories that she hadn't been sleeping well. Now she sounded back to her old self, independent and wary.

"Hi," he said. "Why are you calling me?"

"I have a message saying to call you, that it's an emergency. What's going on?"

"Wait." He felt all fuzzy and confused. "I called you? When?"

"Yesterday."

"Why would I call you?"

Mary-Lynnette sighed. "That's what I'm calling you to find out."

Ash rubbed his eyes, and a sudden vision flashed before them. A girl and a boy, standing on his doorstep the previous night. "Oh, shit," he said. "I remember now. Look, Mary, you're going to have to come here for a while."

"Come where? To Cross Bien?"

"Yeah."

"Don't be ridiculous. What's going on?"

"It's....well, see, last night....I don't think I should be telling you this over the phone. It's kind of shocking, and you probably won't believe me anyway unless you see it for yourself."

"That's not even an answer, Ash."

"I told you, I don't think I should say it over the phone."

"Is somebody dead? Did you do something to Mark?"

"I haven't even spoken to Mark since he dumped me for you."

"Don't start on that again, Ash, it's early."

"Nobody's dead. I just don't want to talk about it over the phone." She was silent. "Do you seriously think I'd go dragging all this up again if it wasn't important?" he demanded.

"That's the frustrating part, I don't think you would." She signed again. "If I get there, and this turns out to be something stupid-"

"It's not, I promise. Give me your number and I'll have Mona call you. She'll take care of your flight and everything."

Mary-Lynnette paused. "I don't want to give you my phone number."

Ash gritted his teeth and clenched his hands into tight fists. "O-kay," he said, deliberately keeping from shouting at her. "Then I'll give you Mona's number and you can call her."

He rattled it off and hung up a moment later. Nina opened her eyes and slowly peeled one of his fingers open. "What's this all about?" she asked.

Ash groaned. How was it that his vacations always turned out to be hell on earth?

"Last night," he began slowly, trailed off, and began again. "Last night, I was sitting home alone, when the doorbell rang."

"Was it the Publisher's Clearing House Prize Patrol?" Nina asked, and smiled at him as she sat up. "You don't want to tell me, do you?"

"Not really," he admitted guiltily. "It's nothing I did, I just....don't know how to say it without freaking you out." He examined her face closely, remembering how upset she'd been Christmas morning when they had finally escaped certain death at the hands of a werewolf pack. That was when she'd told him she was going home for a couple of days, and the expression in her eyes hadn't been entirely trusting when he kissed her goodbye. He didn't think she'd been thrilled when he slipped and called her "vermin," either.

"What are you doing here, anyway?" he asked. "Not that I'm not happy, I just thought you were pissed off after what happened the other night."

Nina shrugged. "Yeah, I was kind of freaked out. It's not every day I get kidnapped, it's a very disturbing experience. But I got to my parents house and they started in on me, and it was like, What the hell am I doing here? That was when I realized that I didn't really care about everything with the werewolves, that it didn't even bug me that much. I was just upset because I thought I was supposed to be upset. Maybe it's a girl thing and you can't understand, I don't know. But in the end what I wanted was to come back here and spend my last couple days of vacation with you."

Ash considered her for a moment. He wasn't sure he understood--upset because she was supposed to be upset? What did that mean?--but if he'd learned one thing about Nina, it was that she meant what she said, and if she said she wasn't upset and wanted to spend the next week with him, she meant it.

He kissed her forehead. "Last night two of my children from an alternate time line appeared on my doorstep," he said.

Nina stared at him for a full minute. Then she closed her eyes as her shoulder began shaking with silent laughter. A smile broke out on her face and she rolled onto her back, curled up in a ball.

"You think this is funny?" he asked dubiously.

"You don't?" Her face was flushed, hair in her eyes. "Come on, Ash, have a sense of humor. I mean, of all the thousands of people whose alternate time line children could show up, that it would be you strikes me as just slightly amusing."

"Mary-Lynnette is their mother," he added, hoping to sober her.

That really got her going. She buried her face in a pillow, entire body shaking. Ash frowned, unable to decide on a reaction, and the phone rang.

"Hello?" he answered, eyes still on Nina.

"This is Quinn."

"Hi. What's going on?"

"I was just wondering what time you wanted me to bring the kids by."

"Uh, I don't know. And don't call them 'the kids.' Mary-Lynnette just called, she's going to fly in sometime today."

"Have you told Nina?"

"Yeah, she's sitting next to me laughing. Nina, stop it before you pull something."

"She's laughing?"

"Uh huh. I don't get it."

"It is kind of funny, Ash."

"No it isn't. Tell Heather and Shae I'll be by to pick them up in an hour."

"All right. Good luck."

He hung up. Nina was sitting beside him, still chuckling occasionally. "So," she said. "Let's go pick up the kids."

Ash frowned. "Are you sure you're cool with this?"

She smiled again and put her arms around his neck. "Asks he of the perpetually cold skin."

Ash had never heard of Schule Sav Set before, but Quinn seemed uneasily familiar with the place. It was a large Victorian house, as out of place in New Mexico as an Amish at the mall, painted pale purple and cream. Small cement animals dotted the well-groomed lawn and patrolled the smooth stone paths between class buildings and dorms. The atmosphere would have been idyllic, if not for the spiked iron fence surrounding the place.

"Where are all the people?" Shae asked, having to take over-sized steps to keep up with the vampires and his sister.

"They're on winter vacation," Quinn told him. Ash watched the silk shirt flutter over his back, resting just long enough against the flesh for the molted scars to show if one looked carefully.

Heather was wearing a leather jacket she'd found in the back of Ash's closet. He wasn't sure exactly where it had come from, but it looked good on her, even with her encased arm leaving one sleeve limp. Her eyes were a little glazed over; he wondered how closely she was following the recommended dosage on those painkillers.

Quinn opened the front door with a key from his pocket and led them down a stairwell that was absolutely medieval. The basement smelled thick and gross, and the air hurt Ash's nostrils with a sharp acidic flavor. Beneath it, he caught the strong scent of fresh paint and plastic.

"Violet's just started fixing the place up," Quinn said as they reached the bottom of the stairs and turned a sharp corner.

Ash felt himself tensing, sensing another vampire near by. He twisted his neck to loosen up and glanced around, finding himself in a newly remade laboratory. One wall was lined with clean black file cabinets, two others had been decorated with beakers, stoppers, tubes and flaming things. The last was shelved with bottles of unrecognizable substances, split halfway down by a steel refrigerator door.

The vampire herself was slender and easy to look at. Her eyes didn't radiate power and animosity the way Quinn's had been known to do, and her gaze was painless and friendly. She wore a clinging V-neck blouse that showed off her long arms and neck, and jeans that were frayed in all the right places. Her body didn't appear older then twenty-seven, but from the deceptively casual way she held herself, Ash guessed her true age to be closer to Quinn's.

"This is Violet Yarrow," Quinn introduced, his voice unusually soft and respectful. "She has owned Schule Sav Set for the last hundred years. Violet, may I present Ash, Shae, and Heather Redfern."

Ash bowed his head and averted his eyes a moment, showing traditional respect to a vampire more than fifteen times his age. He saw Heather note his gesture before extending her hand, which Violet, always polite, shook daintily.

"Quinn has spoken well of you, Ash," Violet said, running the back of her fingers down his cheek in an unexpected show of affection.

Ash glanced at Quinn, somehow pleased and suspicious at the same time, but the smaller vampire's face revealed nothing.

"He's made me aware of your situation," Violet went on, her voice faintly accented with the rich flavor of old Europe. She smiled warmly. "I've got to admit, I've never heard of anything like it." Her eyes brushed over Shae and Heather. "But they do look like Redferns, don't they? I can see Hunter's smile at the edge of your mouth, Heather."

Heather didn't respond, and Ash wondered if she was unsure who Hunter Redfern was. If I have kids for real some day, he wondered, what will I tell them? That Hunter was the best leader to ever take the Night World by storm, and I betrayed him to live with vermin?

He didn't regret the decision, but was suddenly aware that he wasn't entirely comfortable with it. He'd gotten into more than his fair share of trouble growing up, but it was always the kind secretly encouraged, always in the manner of being too much the perfect vampire. His parents had bitched and moaned, but they'd been proud inside.

He somehow doubted that they were proud of him for joining Circle Daybreak.

Violet was going on. "All I need is a blood sample from each of you, and I should have the results in ten minutes or so."

Ash rolled up his sleeve and watched in fascination as Violet inserted a wooden-tipped needle in his arm. He kept his face blank, but it stung like hell, and he secretly wondered how Nina was able to do this to herself three times a day.

The blood went into a vial, which Violet shook violently with a machine until it was rich with blood and air bubbles. After repeating the procedure with Heather and Shae, she suggested they go upstairs and make themselves comfortable while she worked.

"I'll be along in a moment," Heather told Ash. "There are a couple of questions I'd like to ask Violet."

Quinn led him and Shae to a thickly carpeted lounge upstairs, complete with gas fireplace and a box of cigars. Ash sat down on a leather couch, the feeling of unease that had been with him since that morning still strong. Nina was at home, waiting for Mary-Lynnette to call with her flight information. Gen was contacting some prominent scientists who had made headway in the field of time travel and might be able to lend a hand. Rashel was with Mona forging documentation to make Shae and Heather legal American citizens.

Quinn went to stand beside a floor-to-ceiling window, brushing the curtain aside to stare out. Shae sank into a chair, his cheeks faintly flushed. He seemed winded from walk up the stairs, and Ash reminded himself again that this boy was only human.

"Shae," he said slowly, "when you were growing up what did....your father tell you about the history of the Night World?"

Shae blinked a few times, as if he was suddenly showered with bright light. "You talked about it a lot when I was younger, but it made Mom angry so when I was older you rarely brought it up."

"And you never asked?"

He looked uncomfortable suddenly. "Heather asked," he replied. "If I wanted to know something I asked her."

"But Heather and I talked about it frequently?"

"I don't know, you two were always talking about something."

"We were close?" Ash asked.

Shae nodded. "Yeah. She always sided with you when you fought with Mom."

"And you sided with...Mary-Lynnette?"

"I tried not to side with either one of you, but that didn't work very well. You and Heather would be too angry to help out, and Mom couldn't manage on her own."

"So you had to take care of her."

"Yeah." Shae looked away, his expression taut.

"I was at a Circle Daybreak meeting this summer," Ash told him, "and I met a witch named Aradia. She's only my age, but she's been blind since she was a year old. A pretty extraordinary girl, she lives alone, takes care of herself, goes to college. I don't think she's had anyone to take care of her since Grandma Harman died last ye-"

"Not everyone is strong like that," Shae snapped with unexpected venom. "Some people need to be taken care of." He stopped, turning his face away, then added, "And god knows you never did it."

Ash exchanged a glance with Quinn, who was listening silently. "Look, Shae," Ash said, "I don't want to downplay your pain or anything, but I'm not your father. Obviously you have some issues with him-"

Shae stood up suddenly and walked to the corner. He pretended to run his fingers down the spine of a number off books, but was clearly sending a message for Ash to back off.

Ash sighed. He really didn't think he was cut out to be a parent.

"I was hoping you could explain to me how a person becomes a vampire," Heather said, sitting on the edge of a padded stool as she watched Violet smearing blood on a microscope slid. "Not just the general part, about the blood, exchange, I understand that. I'd like to know about the scientific part, exactly what the blood does once it enters a person's system."

Violet nodded slowly, and went carefully over the process. She thoughtfully avoided the scientific terms that could confuse young humans, sticking with the simple schematics of the change. When she had finished, Heather thought a moment and then said, "But what about the rest of it?"

"The rest?"

"Is there a spiritual aspect involved?"

Violet glanced at her before answering slowly, "I suppose. There was an experiment I ran a few years ago, well, almost forty now. Instead of transforming a human into a vampire by drinking his blood and allowing him to drink mine, I slit his wrist and he bled out into a bucket. Afterward, I used an IV line to introduce my blood into his body. He burned out immediately, although he was only twelve years old."

She expected Heather to be disturbed by the age of the victim, but Heather said instead, "You think it had to do with a lack of personal touch, so to speak?"

"I think it's likely that on some spiritual level, life energy is required to complete the change. Being given the blood without the prana it carries could cancel its effectiveness." She eased a slide under the microscope. "Feeding, and particularly being fed off of, can be a very emotional and intimate thing for a vampire."

Heather nodded and slid off her stool. "Thanks. I'll head upstairs now and let you work."

Violet watched from the corner of her eye as the girl tread slowly up the stairs. So much like Ash, and yet....something wasn't right.

She shook herself lightly. Probably just because a human Redfern was an unnatural thing.

Ash felt no easier when Heather returned. Her gaze was too steady, it made him nervous, and she had been quieter this morning than she had the night before. "How's your arm?" Shae asked as she sat down beside him on a hassock.

"Better."

They were pressed close together, almost defensively, and Ash's mind returned to Heather's description of his other life. Regardless of whether or not he was doing well for them here, it was apparent he hadn't done well for them there.

There was a gentle knock on the door, and Ash was surprised to see a young man in a wheelchair entering the room. "I didn't know we had company," he said, his voice sweet but very weak. His hair was a shineless black, thick but flat, and it hung almost to his shoulders in tangled strands. One frail hand had crept out from under the frumpy plaid blanket he was covered in to move a joystick on the arm of the chair, which he maneuvered expertly into an empty spot between the couch and the windows.

Looking at him made Ash uncomfortable, although he couldn't pinpoint why.

There was a pause, before a light came into Quinn's expression and he said, "You must be Zion."

The boy smiled, and it was a warm smile that spoke of kind acceptance. His eyes, hidden behind watery glasses, were a very washed-out hazel. "And you're Quinn. Mom's been telling me stories about you since I was a baby."

He held out his hand, which trembled slightly, and Quinn shook it. "I didn't know you were staying at the school."

"I've been here since Anhinga died. Mom's nervous about leaving me alone."

Suddenly it clicked in Ash's head. Violet had been Anhinga's mother, this must be her son. But if he was the child of a vampire, how he could....

And Ash realized what was wrong with the picture. Zion's legs weren't tucked up under the blanket. They weren't there.

He felt himself recoil without wanting to. A vampire without legs. With birth defects. He'd never even heard of it before. Yet here he was, traces of blood barely visible around his lips and chest heaving as he fought for air. He was sick--worse than sick. Ash doubted he'd live out the month, judging by human standards of illness.

Quinn was introducing them, and Ash managed to force a polite smile. Zion's hand was freezing cold and the skin felt waxy, but he smelled like the same oatmeal soap Nina used, and Ash found that comforting. The boy floated between each one of them in his chair before settling back in his original position and letting his head rest against a pillow attached to the high back of the wheel chair.

"Does Mom know you're here?" Zion asked.

"She's in the basement running a blood test for me," Quinn told him. "She'll be up in a few minutes."

Zion nodded barely. "I haven't been down their since she started renovating; how does it all look?"

"Lovely. It's going to be a functioning laboratory again soon."

"I don't know if that's a good thing or not."

Quinn merely lifted an eyebrow. "How are your sisters?"

Zion shrugged, a tiny motion. "I'm sure you know Annie's dead. Betony is in London for the opera season, and Zinnia is in Switzerland working with Angelica Sundew."

"I was under the impression that Sundew is still with the Night World," Quinn said.

"She is. Mom hasn't mentioned to the girls that she's joined Circle Daybreak."

"What about you?" Ash asked.

Zion smiled again, ironic but sweet. "Oh, yes, I'm one to mock the lowly humans," he said. "I've never heard of either of you, Heather and Shae. Where are you from?"

"Chicago," Heather said. "But we're hoping to move here."

"Soon?"

"Immediately." Her eyes darted to Ash and he felt himself cringe. "To be with family."

Why did she have to look at him like that? So damn hopeful and trusting. He was the most irresponsible person on the planet, couldn't they see that?

The crusher was that he wanted to help them, to sooth that worried crease in her brow, make Shae's ever series expression break into a smile, promise that he would take care of them both for as long as he needed them. He felt possessive, and he didn't even know if they were really his kids yet.

His train of thought was broken as Violet swept into the room. "Zion!" she cried, rushing forward to put her hand on his forehead. "What are you doing up?"

He just smiled and shook her away. "I'm fine, the fever's gone. Look, I was finally able to meet Quinn."

Ash watched her worry over him, pulling another blanket from a trunk in the corner to wrap around his shoulders. Zion accepted her care as one long accustomed to being fussed over, and with an understanding that it made her feel useful. Ash had to admit, even thought Zion was obviously debilitated, he seemed to be perfectly capable of wheeling around and getting his own blanket. When Violet was finished, she perched on the arm of a chair where she could reach him quickly, should his head pop off or anything dastardly like that.

"I'm sorry to say the results of the blood test were inconclusive," Violet told them at Quinn's prodding. She kept glancing nervously at Zion, as if she expecting him to whip out a gun at any moment. "There's just no way to compare DNA of two species as different as vampires and humans for hereditarity. When Mary-Lynnette arrives, I can compare her to the kids, assuming she's still human."

"She is," Ash assured her.

"I can definitively tell you that Shae and Heather are related to each other, but unless you have another human Redfern to compare them with, we're at a stop."

A butler appeared at the door. "Zion, there's a Miss Georgia Dresa here to see you."

Zion grimaced. "Excuse me," he grumbled, and Ash heard him say, "Bloody hell," under his breath as he wheeled past.

The minute he was out of earshot, Violet burst into tears. "Oh, god," she said, "I didn't mean for you to see him!"

Quinn sat up a little straighter. "No, Violet, it's fine."

Her face crumpled and she buried it in her hands. Ash looked away, meeting Heather's eyes, and Violet went on, "He was sick this morning, I thought he'd stay in bed or I never would have told you to come over."

Quinn patted her awkwardly on the back, and Heather cringed. "Thank you very much for your time, Mrs. Yarrow," she said. "We'll wait outside, Quinn."

Ash followed them into the hall, embarrassed as hell. He was about to go through the front door when from a nearby parlor, someone called, "Ash? Could you spare a moment?"

He peered into a brightly lit alcove room and saw Zion rolling swiftly toward him. A forty-ish year old woman sat primly in the window seat.

"Is that my mother making a spectacle of herself?" he asked.

"Well..."

Zion rolled his eyes. "Ignore her," he said dismissivly. "She could wet her pants during a speech to the Council and elegantly pass it off, but I come into a room and she goes to pieces. Anyway, I'm glad I caught you alone. Are your children about?"

Uncomfortably, Ash said, "Heather and Shae are outside."

"Good. Listen, my father was a witch, and while I don't have any really magical talent, I do possess one gift. I can always tell when someone is lying, and when Heather said she was from Chicago, she wasn't telling the truth."

Ash's mind started to spin. "She's not from the normal Chicago, it's a different one-"

"Doesn't matter. What I sensed was an intent to deceive. She has no plans to move here permanently, either."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely."

He leaned back against the doorjamb. "Why would she lie about where she's from?"

"I don't know. I've only just met her. But keep it in mind, will you?"

"Yeah, thanks."

Zion reached out and put his cold fingers against Ash's hand. "I have a daughter, Ash. She's barely a year old, but I know what it's like to blindly over-look things because you love them so much."

Ash started at him and then burst out in a low voice, "Who are you?"

Zion merely laughed. "Brilliant computer nerd, debonair laddies man, legless vampire freak. Christ, I don't know, Ash." He reached into a pouch hanging from the back of the chair and removed a pen and paper. "Give me a call some time, we'll talk about daughters and the general weirdness of parenthood."

He walked slowly outside, taking long steps over the trim lawn, and found Heather and Shae sitting on the trunk of the car. Heather's eyes, such a clear and intent color, caught his attention again. Her free hand was holding tightly to Shae's, and Ash saw tears in the boy's eyes.

"Everything okay?"

"Fine," Heather said tightly. "Are we ready to go?"

Behind him, Ash heard the front door open and close, and the distinct sound of Quinn's slightly impaired walk. "Yeah," he said, and slid into the car knowing little more than he had when he climbed out.

He paused before getting out of Quinn's car. "Who's Zion?" he asked.

Quinn's expression was withdrawn, as if that morning's scene had disturbed him. "It's not pretty," he said.

"I don't care."

He glanced out the window as he spoke. "For the last two hundred years, Violet has been running experiments on humans. Sometimes she extended her work to Night People. Schule Sav Set is mostly a front to lure children to her. Years and years ago, she met her soulmate, a Chimera witch named Maze Dovleac. She married him, but they were unable to have children. By that time she already knew about DNA, genetic sequencing. Zion was the result of her and Maze's first attempt at a son."

Ash's throat was closing off, but he managed to say, "It didn't work."

Quinn smiled bitterly. "No, not the way she had hoped it would. Apparently the mistake was a small one, but significant. He has all the weakness of both humans and vampires, and none of either group's strength. Something to do with the extra Y chromozone. None of her daughters were born disfigured."

"How old is he?"

"Almost twenty-one. I know he looks fragile, but he's strong inside. Much stronger than Violet has been claiming all this time. I hadn't realized until today how ashamed of him she is."

"He said he had a daughter."

"With a human. He borrowed one of his mother's concoctions to suppress the girl's immune system so that it wouldn't reject vampire seed."

"Is she...."

"Yanna-Beth is perfect." His eyes wandered over Ash's face. "It would be a mistake to be afraid of Zion, Ash. If he's reached out to you, you should be honored. Violet has refused to let me meet him until today, but everyone knows that he's one of the most promising members of Circle Daybreak. They say he would be the next Thierry, if he weren't so sick."

But he is sick, Ash thought, remembering the icy touch of Zion's fingers. He's sick and he's still managing to be a better father than I am.

The scene at his apartment wasn't at all what he had imagined. In fact, he was so stunned to see Nina and Mary-Lynnette sitting on the couch sharing a bag of corn chips and laughing like old friends that he stopped dead in his tracks and dropped his keys.

"-and by the time we got out of there," Mary-Lynnette was saying, her face warmly flushed, "all Mark could say was, Please, please, I have to find a bathroom. Please!"

Ash leaned down to retrieve his keys and Nina smiled at him. "Hey, Ash," she said mildly. "I didn't think you'd be home for another hour or two."

Mary-Lynnette turned her head to look at him, and he felt that wave of absolute shock roll over his body. This was the Mary-Lynnette he always remembered, not the waif who had showed up months earlier. Her hair fell thick and glossy, further down her back than it used to, and her eyes sparkled even in the weak evening light. She was strong and swift, and she wasn't going to take any crap from him, that much was obvious.

They both waited for the other to move, to see how things would be played out, to decide whether this would be a peaceable truce or not. He was torn between the need to wrap her in his arms and slap her, and, unable to make himself do either, he just stayed very still and stared across the room into her eyes.

Nina was silent, her head bowed almost respectfully, and the tension in the unexpectedly tidy room grew. Ash felt the jagged edge of his car key dig deep into the flesh of his palm, tightening dramatically when the hush was broken by Shae's ecstatic cry.

"Mom!"

Before even Ash had time to grab him, Shae had rushed across the room and thrown himself onto Mary-Lynnette. She made a high sound of surprise and scrambled back, and Ash cringed when he again met her eyes.

"You didn't tell her," Heather said softly, coming to stand beside him. "How could you not tell her?"

"I thought I'd have time before she saw you. It never occurred to me-"

"Of course not," she cut in. "Don't you ever think ahead?"

Mary-Lynnette, apparently understanding that Shae intended her no harm, gave him an awkward pat on the back, similar to the one Quinn had given Violet an hour before. Quinn himself was now locking the front door and hanging up Shae's hastily tossed jacket.

"Oh, god," Shae was saying. "I'm so glad you're here." He pulled back, smiling beautifully. "Look at your eyes."

Shae touched her face, and the smile began to melt slowly. "Don't you ever think of anyone else?" Heather whispered bitterly. "He's finally found her again and she doesn't even recognize him. This is going to haunt him for the rest of his life."

Ash wanted to fight her, there were a million reasons why this wasn't his fault, but he just kept thinking that he should have taken those extra precautions, made sure Mary-Lynnette didn't see Shae and Heather before he could speak with her, or else prepared her for their reaction. At least he could have been sensitive enough to realize how important seeing Mary-Lynnette obviously was to Shae. His kids or not, they were trusting him to take care of them.

He watched the boy's face crumple as Mary-Lynnette continued inching away from him. Shae stood up, tears glistening in his eyes, and turned away. "I....sorry, I forgot..."

He fell into Ash's easy chair, sitting almost backwards in it to hide his damp face. Mary-Lynnette's breath was coming fast as she looked up. "Ash," she said, "what's going on?"

Heather touched Shae's arm. "Come on, let's let them talk."

"There's a spare room down the hall, on the left," Nina told them. When Ash glanced at her, she added, "I cleaned it this morning."

Ash watched them vanish into what had been his junk room twenty-four hours before, and let out a heavy sigh. "Damn," he muttered, and slumped into the easy chair Shae had just deserted.

"Ash," Mary-Lynnette said again. He cracked his eyes open just enough to see her put the bag of corn chips on the coffee table. "Who is that boy, and why does he think I'm his mother?"

Ash didn't know what to say. "I'll go make some coffee," Nina said tactfully, and she and Quinn eased into the kitchen.

He sat up a little, enough that he could see her clearly. She moved smoothly, confidently, her eyes taking in everything with a witty scope. He couldn't even begin to imagine her blind.

Unsure of himself, he started, "I think he might be our kid."

She shut her eyes briefly. "Yours and mine?"

"Yeah."

A quick laugh. "I would have noticed, Ash."

"Maybe not...I don't know how to explain this. Maybe you should ask Heather."

"That's the girl? I suppose you think she's ours, too."

"That's what she says."

Mary-Lynnette kicked her shoes off and pulled her legs up on the couch. "Start at the beginning."

He nodded, thinking a moment before he began. "There's a figure in the Night World called the Gift of Life. Without her, the Night World would cease to exist. If she were killed, all the werewolves and vampires and witches would become human. Unless they're over eighty, in which case they would probably just die. Back in March--actually, two days after you dumped me--I was assigned to heal the girl currently carrying the Gift. She was dying at the time, but we managed to find a healer who could help her."

He stopped. "There was a price?" Mary-Lynnette asked.

He nodded almost imperceptibly. "Eleven people died. It was...one of the worst days of my life."

She gave him a moment and then said, "How does that fit in with Heather and the boy?"

He was relieved that she didn't ask for details. He couldn't even think about Ravenal and Shale and Marty without feeling panicky.

"Have you ever heard that theory that every single decision we makes spawns another time line where we make the other decision? Like in this world we might flip a coin and it lands on heads, but another dimension where the coin lands on tails is instantly created?"

"I've heard of it," she said. "Never given it much credence."

"Neither have I. But...suppose for a moment that we hadn't been able to save Cristona, and she had died. I would have become a human in a split second. The Night World would be gone."

"In this other dimension."

"Right. So in that dimension, I become a human, and you and I are able to work things out."

Mary-Lynnette smiled faintly. "That would be interesting."

"I'm not sure interesting is the word I'd use, but it would be different, that's for sure. So in that dimension, you and I get married and have two kids named Heather and Shae-"

"Wait!" She held out a hand. "Are you saying this is what's actually going on here?"

"I think it's possible," he admitted. "This is what Heather said happened."

"But then how did they end up here?"

"That's what I'm getting to. Some time traveling group from the far distant future decided to go back in time and get rid of that time line so that Cristona didn't die after all. In this scenario, you and I don't work things out, and Heather and Shae are never born. The time travel people feel bad because they're essentially wiping out two people who would have been alive otherwise, so they offer to transport them to this time line, where they can live happily ever after. The kids agree, and where do they ask to be taken? Their father's house."

Mary-Lynnette picked up a marble egg from the table--where the hell had all these nick-knacks come from?--and rolled it around in her hands. "Do they have any proof?"

"Photographs, certificates, and Heather mentioned something about DVD home videos. What's really unsettling about it though, is the smaller stuff. Things they know about us that I don't think they could find out without the help of a serious undercover agency. Unless this is a really elaborate hoax involving a lot of spies and a lot of money, it seems to be real."

"Why would someone with power want us to believe we had two kids?"

He glanced purposefully out the window at the sun setting over the parking lot. "Maybe they thought it would bring us back together or something. But what the purpose of that is, I don't know."

Why was this so uncomfortable? Wasn't the whole point of having a soulmate that they could see inside you, look at your every secret and weak spot, and accept it? Here they were, both of them edgy and looking away, pretending to be cool with something determined to make they more intimate than they had been in a long time.

"I'm sorry," he blurted out. "About what happened the last time you were here. I was kind of worried after I threw you into the table."

"It's fine," she told him shortly, then groaned. "I'm sorry, too. I wasn't really there to make peace to begin with. We were both itching for a fight."

"Yeah. Well, we got one."

She chuckled. "Was Nina really pissed?"

"She's still around, isn't she? Nah, she was nervous, but she got over it."

"She's nice."

He smiled at his hands. "Are you surprised?"

"No," she said quickly. "Don't start with me, Ash."

He looked up and found she was smiling at him, and he couldn't help smiling in return. "I'm glad you're here," he said, another of those admissions he never meant to express but was always making around her.

She just nodded.

One of the things Ash was unaware of was that Nina could cook. Not just Ballpark Frank singles or macaroni and cheese, but actual cooked food with spices and sauces and things. Aside from the other changes she'd made in his apartment, she'd stocked the kitchen with human foods, and prepared a bizarre smelling mix of vegetables and chicken that made Ash wrinkle his nose but everyone else swore was delicious. Since Quinn was still around, Rashel came over and ate dinner with them, and the meal was shocking to Ash in every sense.

The kitchen table had come with the apartment, it had never occurred to him that it might have fold out wings, which made it long enough for seven people to settle around comfortably. Nina claimed to have found the china and table cloth in his cupboards, and while Ash had his doubts, he had to admit that the table looked classy. They pulled odd chairs, stools and a crate up around it, opened the cover on the main dish, and then Shae said, "Are we going to say grace?"

Heather blinked, as if this was another thing she wished she could have avoided. Her interest seemed to be in making this transition as painless as possible, and Shae's continued references to a way of living that no longer existed was making everyone uncomfortable.

Ash couldn't have said a human grace if his life had depended on it, and he imaged Rashel and Quinn were similarly off. Heather looked as if she'd rather avoid the whole ordeal, and Nina was dramatically liberal with her spirituality and thought saying grace meant she didn't deserve food to begin with.

Mary-Lynnette said with a great deal of tact, "Sure. I'll do it." She bowed her head, and Ash followed, wondering what he was supposed to be doing with his hands. In lamia church, he always had to cross his arms over his chest, so he decided to do that. "We thank you, Lord, for this bounty which we are about to receive, and for your divine vision, which has seen fit to bring us all together tonight. Thank you for your guidance and wisdom in bringing Heather and Shae here, and help us all to provide for and comfort them during this trying time. Amen."

Ash felt frozen. Mary-Lynnette's words had shocked him. He couldn't remember her ever being religious, even in the vaguest sense, but her words as she prayed had been...honest? Heartfelt? Maybe a little passionate?

Where have you been? he wondered. What have you been doing that's changed you?

It wasn't just that she looked so much better or spoke with a return of self confidence. There was an inner light to her now, something that seemed almost like apathy but closer to faith.

One of his hands clenched under the table around a wooden leg, and he felt a splinter dig into his hand.

Ash, Quinn voice said coolly in his mind. Snap out of it.

He lifted his face and saw Quinn's calm black eyes meet his. As if by example, he took a slow, deep breath, and Ash did the same. He felt a little better, and Quinn's lip curled in a private smile.

"I heard you went home for a few days, Nina," Quinn said smoothly, slipping into the roll of the polite debutante vampire he must have played for so many years at Hunter's side. "What's your family like?"

She shrugged, and Ash wished Quinn had asked anything else. None of the rest of them were going to be able to keep this serenity up for long, especially if they stayed on the topic of home life. "I have two brothers, both older. My mother is a housewife and my father's an accountant for KFC."

"Where did you say they lived?"

"Connecticut."

"That's a long way from New Mexico," Rashel said.

"That's the point," Nina told her. She swallowed a mouthful of chicken and green peppers and said more peaceably, "What about you, Rashel?"

"My family's dead," Rashel said without pause. Nina promptly choked on a piece of chicken and excused herself to go gag it into the disposal. "I heard you were out to see the Redfern sisters recently, Mary-Lynnette."

Ash's eyes flashed toward her. Damn Rowan, she hadn't said a thing. He'd known Mary-Lynette had gone home for Christmas, but he didn't think she was still speaking to his sisters. He'd assumed she had sworn off the Night World as a whole.

No, he mentally corrected himself. Not the Night World. Just you.

Mary-Lynnette nodded. "They've done amazing things with their aunt's house. Really fixed the place up. And they're breeding the goats, so there were a couple of adorable lambs around."

"Your brother still with Jade?" Quinn asked.

"On again, off again. Mark's overly sensitive and Jade's fickle. But they're amusing, I'll give them that."

Shae was listening carefully to every word, while Heather kept her attention focused solely on her meal as if she didn't want to hear it. "Are you a sophomore this year?" Shae asked.

Mary-Lynnette looked blank. "Excuse me?"

"You're in college in Colorado, aren't you?"

She shook her head slowly. "No. I've taken a year long internship program with the Janosch Corporation."

"Doing what?" Nina asked as she slid back into her chair.

"Running lab tests, mostly. A lot of work with computers. It's decent work."

She had refused to tell Ash where she was going or why. Not even what damn state. He closed his eyes slowly, trying to draw his temper under control, but inwardly shaking. She hadn't disclosed a single detail to him alone, and here she was telling a whole table of practical strangers.

What do you want from her, Ash? he asked himself. You've said yourself that it wouldn't work. She's too determined and you're too laid back, you could never live up to her standards. She's too honest and decent to allow your fucked up learning curve and occasional morality slips. You're too interested in experimentation to follow her rigid guidelines. You'd be miserable together, Heather said so herself, and she's seen it.

He swallowed thickly. There was a plate of something soft, sticky and bright orange that he could only vaguely identify as being a fruit or vegetable that gave off a sweet scent he found comforting. He occasionally ate human food, coffee, mostly, but tonight he didn't have the stomach for it. This was all too human, that was the problem. Him and the little wife and the two kids sitting around the table, saying grace and passing the salt like a Norman Rockwell painting. The talk changed to simpler things, less personal, safe. The President and Monica. El Nino. How stupid people who don't recycle are. The awkward pauses vanished.

Aside from feeling completely out of place, Ash was disturbed by how natural Nina appeared. As if she had been here a hundred times before and knew how to make easy conversation with her guests. When she ate with Ash, she usually did it on the couch with her legs propped on his lap, watching the television. Seeing her now, he was struck by the disturbing realization that there was a hell of a lot he didn't know about her.

The whole scene was just too damn domestic. Lamia families never sat down to dinner together, at most, they would share a kill out in the forest, and that required no elegance or dialogue. Ash felt thirsty but couldn't imagine drinking; any movement was a betrayal of his inner turmoil.

The meal took forever, and afterward lingered into coffee and some kind of bumpy cake powdered with sugar. Bunt cake, Ash thought Nina called it. No wonder the apartment smelled so weird; she had been baking. He wanted to leave but had no idea what would be polite, or if it was polite to leave at all. He thought about pretending to choke on something so he could leave the way Nina had, but expected she would see through him. She could always tell when he was bullshitting her.

Finally, Quinn said, "Ash, Rashel blew a tire on her way over here. Would you mind giving me a hand changing it?"

Ash jumped at the offer, fully aware that a vampire of Quinn's strength could have lifted a car over his head and thrown a touchdown with it from the thirty-yard line, let alone change a tire on his own. Their entrance into the night wind was an escape Ash relished as he followed Quinn up into the branches of a tree out front.

"Okay, come on. Tell Uncle Quinn what's wrong."

Ash felt a little of the tension ease out of his shoulders. He hadn't heard anyone refer to "Uncle Quinn" in ten or twelve years.

"Not a thing," he said easily, breathing in the burning scent of freshly painted asphalt. He wondered if Nina had arranged that, too, and dismissed the thought.

"Ash..." Quinn said warningly.

"I'm just tense. It's a weird situation. I expected Nina and Mary to hate each other."

He nodded. "But you got lucky. They seem to be getting along. I heard Nina ask Mary-Lynnette if she could borrow some shampoo. Rashel won't even let me use her shampoo."

Ash glanced at Quinn drolly. Quinn shrugged. "I'm trying, Ash."

He tilted his head back, getting a glimpse of weak-breathed stars between bare branches. "You know, when I said I would forgive you, that didn't mean we were going to become bosom buddies or anything. It just meant I wasn't pissed at you any more."

"No," Quinn agreed. "I just thought I'd throw in the bosom buddies thing for kicks."

"You've gone kind of weird in the last month, know that?"

"So everyone keeps telling me."

"Like the other night. What were you thinking letting me and Jez and Delos and Iliana go out like that? It was totally against your whole ancient adult seriousness thing."

Quinn shrugged again, and Ash thought he wasn't going to answer, but then he said, "I wanted to please you."

"I still don't understand why you care. Nine months ago you were happy to trade me in for a ticket out of Ravenal's clutches, now you're actually...well, I hesitate to say this, but being nice."

"Hmm."

There was a long pause between them, the only sounds those of sand blowing about and a rusty swing creaking back and forth.

"Getting skinned," Quinn said, "was really awful. It's one of the most physically painful things that has ever happened to me. But worse than that, it felt like a punishment come directly from Fate. When I told Shale why I thought she should use you, she just looked at me and shook her head and asked what the real reason was. When I admitted it, she said, 'He's your friend. You don't do that to your friends.' It surprised me that she thought I was your friend, but what surprised me more was that I actually felt sort of sad at the idea of you getting killed. Protecting myself was still my number one interest, but there was a sadness there I didn't like admitting.

"I've done a lot of thinking since then. Not just about what happened that day, but about my whole life, how I got here, why. Sufficient to say I'm pretty disgusted with myself."

"So you're doing this out of guilt."

"No. I'm doing it because once I stopped lying to myself I realized that I actually like you, Ash."

Ash turned, stunned again, to look at him, and saw a bemused smile playing on Quinn's mouth. "You're bright, you're amusing, and you look at everything with such freshness. Your soulmate's a human, no problem, you'll deal with it. She dumps you, not a big deal, you'll meet someone else."

Trying to pretend the tense moment had never occurred, he said, "My kids show up on the doorstep, I completely freak out."

"I don't think so. You're just taking it all in. You'll figure this out and land on your feet."

"How would you know?"

"I've seen you do it before." Quinn smiled again, and Ash realized that the shadows he had grown up seeing in those dark eyes had been swept away. They hadn't spoken to each other before the past week for at least five or six months, and Ash had simply blocked the older vampire's presence out as much as possible. In doing so, he had apparently missed some transformation.

"Come on, the conversation inside is stalling," Quinn said, and jumped lithely to the ground.

Heather and Shae went to bed shortly after Quinn and Rashel left. Ash could tell Shae was fighting the urge not to hug his "parents" good night, but Heather took a firm grasp on his hand and tugged him down the hall.

Curled in the living room, Ash, Nina, and Mary-Lynnette sat silently a while together, each lost in their own thoughts. Ash was still awhirl, caught up in his strange relationship with Quinn, his continued amazement at seeing Nina and Mary-Lynnette getting along, and the strange protective feelings he kept experiencing toward Heather and Shae. It had actually occurred to him that he should go check on them.

"I'm going to put in one of these discs," Mary-Lynnette announced, climbing off the couch. Nina had rented a DVD player while she was making her other "adjustments" to Ash's apartment earlier that day, and after they fussed with it for half an hour, an image actually appeared on the television screen.

The clarity was surprisingly sharp, but the picture was frighteningly foreign. In a windowless room full of harsh artificial light, Ash saw three little girls sitting on the cement floor. They were all dressed shabbily, legs spread out to form a rough triangle as they rolled a ball between themselves.

"Hey, girls," a voice said, and Ash heard himself gasp.

"Is that me?" he cried.

"What are you doing?"

"It is," Nina said. "You sound about eighty years old."

But Ash heard the real difference. His voice had that rough, earthy quality human voices had, the jarring pauses between syllables. He felt himself shiver like a child watching a scary movie.

"We're playing pass it," one of the girls said. Thick blond hair tumbled down her back, and she smiled widely.

"Let's get your mom on tape," the tape-Ash said, and swung the camera around to settle on a shrouded woman in the corner. Black, unbrushed hair, streaked with gray, fell to her hips, covering her face almost completely.

"That's me," Mary-Lynnette said with horrified certainty.

The tv version of her said, "No, no, Ash, don't tape me."

She lifted her spindly, frail legs and tucked them against her chest, the same way her contemporary was doing now in Ash's living room. On tape, she lifted her hands up as if to hide her face from the camera, but she wasn't able to see where Ash was standing and ending up waving her arms in the wrong direction.

The camera zoomed cruelly in on her face, barely visible between the dirty clumps of hair. Just visible enough to show the pock-marked skin with the scarred, melted blue eyes.

They watched for the next hour in silence. The video Ash walked all around the underground bunker where he and his family lived, interviewing a few people, including a frighteningly aged version of Tern Zizias, and then handed the camera over to Shae, who immediately turned the lens toward him and captured an Ash that even Ash didn't recognize for a moment.

The movie was arranged in random pieces, not even chronological order. After a dim clip of a hospital room where Shae lay curled weakly between thin sheets while Mary-Lynnette screamed for Ash to "turn that fucking camera off!" the scene switched to their wedding.

Or, he thought it was a wedding at first. He and Mary-Lynnette were both dressed in white, and they approached a priest in front of a large congregation. Mary-Lynnette wore a thick lace veil and leaned heavily on Ash's arm.

The priest lifted his hands and asked the congregation to join him in prayer. "Dear friends: let us pray to Almighty God for our brother and sister, Ash and Mary-Lynnette, who are asking for baptism. He has called them and brought them to this moment; may he grant them light and strength to follow Christ with resolute hearts and to profess the faith of the Church. May he give them the new life of the Holy Spirit, whom we are about to call down on this water."

Ash felt something inside him drop. What the hell were they doing? Mary-Lynnette may have come to some spiritual crossroads, but he couldn't imagine that--even if he had become a human--he would be able to join a church. He had grown up attending the vampire church his family had been a part of, which was as much brutal hunting as it was religion, and somehow the two images failed to reconcile.

"Do you reject sin so as to live in the freedom of God's children?" the priest asked.

"I do," Ash heard himself reply.

"Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness?"

"I do."

"Do you reject the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?"

"I do."

And then, "Do you reject the life of loveless, wanton sin in which you lived for so many years as a child of Satan? Do you reject the sins of blood and hunt? Do you reject the damnation that your Night World birth has laid upon your breast?"

And Ash watched himself glance ever so briefly at Mary-Lynnette, as if perhaps hoping that she might back out and not make him do this, and he heard himself on film, lying.

"I do."

Ash stood up. "I don't think I can watch this any more," he said, and leaned over to turn the player off.

The room fell into abrupt darkness. Glossy blue light flittered in through the windows, and Ash could easily see Nina and Mary-Lynnette sitting on opposite ends of the couch. "I guess I should be heading home," Nina said softly. She rose and turned on a small lamp, and Mary-Lynnette blinked rapidly.

"It was nice seeing you," Nina told her, and Mary-Lynnette echoed her.

Ash walked with Nina into the hallway outside him apartment. "You sure you want to go back to the dorm?" he asked.

"Yeah. I don't think I'd feel right staying here tonight." She paused, pulling on her coat and straightening the shoulders. "If you want to sleep with her-" she said suddenly.

"Nina," Ash exclaimed.

"I'm not talking about having sex with her." She kept her eyes rooted on the carpet. "I'm going to be furious if you have sex with her. But if you decide to do that thing you do, with your minds and the sleeping and all, like last time, I can't really blame you."

He didn't know whether to laugh or slap himself. "Nine," he said, "don't go there, okay?"

She glanced at him. "You said it yourself, I have every right to feel threatened by her."

"I know. It's just not gonna happen."

"That's what you said last time."

"This is different. Nothing will happen."

"Just tell me if it does, all right? I want to know."

There was nothing he could say, obviously, so he just put his arms around her and kissed her forehead. She hugged him tightly and then pulled away, heading out into the night to her car.

Ash went back inside, remembering for once to lock the front door, and found that Mary-Lynnette had already gathered sheets and blankets from the hall closet and was making up the couch. "I thought I'd sleep out here," she said, boldly meeting his eyes.

Ash nodded. "If you get cold, you can turn up the thermostat. Nina's always telling me how I keep the place too cold."

"Thanks."

They stared at each other. Mary-Lynnette face was strung with apprehension. "Well," Ash said, "good night, then."

"Yeah," she echoed. "Night."

He forced himself to turn and walk down the hallway to his room, but he doubted he would get a wink of sleep.

Shae batted his eyes sleepily and glanced at his sister. She was sitting up sideways on the bed, her back to the wall, one hand in her chin, and she contemplated the nightstand lamp blankly.

Shae drew the comforter closer around his shoulders, feeling warm and weak. "Heather?" he asked, and her eyes flicked toward him.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing, I just wondered why you were still up."

She hadn't even changed out of her jeans and sweatshirt. "I'm not tired."

He nestled his head deeper into the pillow and contemplated her, seeing her eyes harden in intense thought and her focused concern for him in the corner of her mouth. The hand of her broken arm fisted and flexed unconsciously.

Heather might not be tired, but Shae was. His body felt leaden and sore, and the blood pumped painfully under his skin. He could barely keep his eyes open; consciousness hurt.

Soft fingers traveled over his cheek, and he peered blearily at Heather. "Don't worry," she said, "we're going to be fine."

He tried to nod and sighed instead. Her lips brushed soft and moist on his forehead. "I love you," he whispered.

"I love you, too. Rest a while, I'm going out to talk to Mary-Lynnette."

"What for?"

"Sympathy. Don't worry, Shae. Go to sleep."

She turned off the lamp and slid out the door, closing him into a cozy darkness he could not resist.

Ash opened his eyes the moment the bedroom door knob turned. It was hesitant, trying to be quiet, but his senses weren't easily bypassed. "Nina?" he asked. His voice was a sliver in the silence.

"Um," Shae whispered, "it's me."

Ash rolled over, immediately missing the comfortable unthoughts of sleep, and peered through the darkness at the boy. He could see dark tousled hair falling over a thin face, and an unsure mouth that bent as if in question.

"Everything okay?" he asked, trying to not to make it come out like, "What the hell do you want?"

"I was just...um." Shae closed the door carefully behind himself. "Can I talk to you?"

Ash groaned silently. He wasn't into father-son moments, and that appeared to be what Shae had come here for. But what could he say?

"Sure, sit down."

Shae took quick steps to the bed and sat down, and Ash eased up on his elbows. Something was wrong with this mattress; either there was a huge bump in the middle or else he and Nina had shared it so often that there were two dips instead of one.

"I was thinking about you and Mom. I mean," he corrected himself quickly, "you and Mary-Lynnette."

"Uh huh."

"See, it's hard, because I know you guys are having to deal with all this stuff, but I still just sort of want you to be my parents. And...it's sort of like seeing you naked, like I'm not supposed to be seeing this because it's not the sort of thing you tell your kids."

Ash didn't know what to say, so he remained silent.

"But...I'm sorry for how I acted earlier. I didn't mean to scare Mom like that."

He rubbed at the sleep in his eyes. "Don't worry about it, she was just startled."

"Okay."

Ash thought the subject was closed, but Shae wasn't moving, so he added, "Look, whatever happens between me and Mary-Lynnette, you don't need to worry about it. We're still going to do everything we can for you and Heather."

Shae brightened and hugged Ash impulsively. "Thanks."

Ash patted him on the head and let his eyes fall closed. That hadn't been so hard. "No problem."

Ash woke up to the ominous sensation of heat and hurt that signaled sunrise. "Ow," he growled, heaving himself off the mattress and onto the floor. Nina, in her house-cleaning glory, had opened his bedroom curtains, and he had forgotten to shut them the night before.

He found himself craving meat; that was strange. It wasn't the hunt he wanted, or the kill, or even the blood. He just longed for the morose aroma of a grilled steak, with maybe a side order of those disgusting sauteed mushrooms.

Ash shook himself and got off the floor. He was always the most sensitive to sunlight when he first woke up, and the longer he stayed out, the less it hurt. "Work through the pain," he could remember his father telling him, when he had been very young and terrified of the day. Quinn--a mistakenly trusted babysitter for the family--had shown him some cheap horror movies in which truly horrible things happened to vampires, and some of the memories never left. Ash still dreamed of sinking his fangs into the beautiful, dying damsel and finding her veins chock-full of maple syrup. Sap of any sort is poisonous to vampires, and the one in the movie had died in an agony that made even Quinn lose his smile.

He found Mary-Lynnette in the kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee. The mug was a thick, ceramic one, no doubt made by some experimenting art student at Rachel University and purchased by Nina out of sympathy. The sides showed a gaudy, fortyish-style Garden of Eden glazed one too many times, and the handle was shaped like a writhing Eve, who held an apple to her chest like a third, misshapen breast. Her face was twisted in an ugly grimace as she gave birth to deformed twins. Ash had the other mug of the matched set somewhere around, but he had hidden it because he didn't enjoy drinking his blood from a sculpture of Adam getting his shlong eaten by the serpent.

"Hi," he said, going to the refrigerator.

She nodded, and he changed direction, moving instead to a chair across from her. He was thirsty, but he didn't want to drink in front of her. Even if she didn't say anything, it would take all the fun out of it.

"You find everything?" he asked, gesturing to the coffee.

"Yeah."

"Good, cause I don't know where any of it is."

Mary-Lynnette glanced up at him and they both smiled. She looked sallow in this light, her dark hair seemed overly dramatic against the hesitant morning sun.

"Did you sleep okay on the couch?"

"Fine, although I was thinking I should maybe find a hotel to stay in tonight."

Dammit, he couldn't say anything in front of her without feeling off. He wanted to demand to know why, but he also wanted it to sound like he really couldn't care either way. Which might or might not have been true at the time.

Finally, he just kept his mouth shut, and she went on. "It's just that I feel like I'm getting in the way here. I know you're uncomfortable-"

"I'm not uncomfortable," he snapped, although that's exactly what he was.

Mary-Lynnette was silent a moment before going on in a more subdued tone. "I'm messing Shae and Heather up, Ash. Last night I heard Heather get up and go outside, and I found her sitting in the parking lot, bawling. And you saw how Shae reacted to seeing me."

"Shae was close to his mom, that's all."

"I'm not his mom."

"He'll have to accept that sooner or later. Might as well be sooner."

"What about Heather? They have emotional problems, Ash. Like, serious ones. The kind that they should be in therapy for."

"Shae was better yesterday. Seeing you just really spooked him. He needs some time to adjust." Ash leaned forward over the table. "If you got an offer to go to an alternate time line, one where your mother was still alive, wouldn't if fuck you up a little?"

Mary-Lynnette glared hard at him. "It's not the same."

"How? If you could see her alive and well, and healthy, and happy? Wouldn't you feel like you'd just missed the floor?"

She stood up without warning, and her chair went skidding across the tiles until it cracked into the sink. "It's not the same because my mother wouldn't be nineteen and scared shitless," she told him furiously. She threw her hands up. "We suck as parents, do you realize that? I've been taking care of myself so long I can't even remember exactly what a mother is supposed to do. You come from a family of traditional sadism. And you want to take care of them? What the hell kind of values are you thinking we'll impart?"

He knew she was going to bring up the vampire thing, goddamn her, so he interrupted. "Have you looked around? Have you seen this place? Do you know anything about my life? Here you are, making judgments about my moral sanity, and I'm living with Martha Stewart and fighting to save the world from evil."

"They're what, three years younger than we are?"

"And how long have I been living on my own? And how old is Jade? You're doing that thing adults do, where they block out their actual memories of being fifteen and assume they were stupid."

"I'm not saying anything about them, Ash, I'm talking about us."

She turned away, hands gripping the sink, head lowered. "Look at us. They deserve better."

She's still ashamed of me, Ash thought. He went numb and still all over, and felt himself darken intangibly. No matter what he had done, he had never been able to silence that little voice in the back of his head that whispered a single question over and over: What would Mary think of this?

All he had wanted since the day they met was her approval. Acceptance would have been nice, pride divine. He'd turned himself upside down and inside out, and nothing was enough. Nothing was ever going to be enough.

The seed inside him, the spark that held everything he ever was, turned a sludgy maroon, and heat shot down his arms. An image flashed in his mind of Mary-Lynnette crumpled on the floor in a lagoon of inky blood, her head resting a few feet away. Her blue eyes stared up at him, and her tongue lolled.

He hadn't felt this way in a long time. He knew he had to get out of here, fast.

"Ash?" Mary-Lynnette called, but he was already shutting the front door behind himself.

He found himself down town half an hour later, pounding so blindly over the concrete that it didn't even occur to him to skirt the Prairie Yard Dance School, where he had been held by werewolves a few days before. The car exhaust smelled good, stinging and bitter, but it was too warm on his already hot face.

There was a rage inside him that he was trying to walk off. Not just at Mary-Lynnette--although he couldn't stop thinking of how good she'd look dead--but at the whole situation. At Fate, for concocting such a painful web, at his other-world self, for being such a pansy-ass that he let a woman force him to give up everything he believed in, at his parents, who had never prepared him for this.

Every vampire got this way, some more easily than other. It was an almost blind fury that struck without warning, and often, without reason. Ash had been in good moods before and then suddenly felt an intense need to hurt something, although today he had his reasons. With him the urge was violent and deceptive, with others it came differently. He had seen Rowan sit with perfect composure on a park bench in the mall, looking like the poster girl for "Beautiful, Friendly America," and then lean over and calmly snap the neck of the man sitting next to her.

Today it was a girl at the bus stop. She wore a gross pink waitress uniform and carried a tool-box purse, and her eye shadow was the blue of the deep Caribbean. Her round face was accented by the way she pulled her hair flat against her scalp and doused it in gel, and her hands were heavy with silver fashion rings.

"Hey, cutie," she called as Ash approached. "You want to strut that little ass over here for me?"

He stopped a few feet away, although his legs ached to keep moving. "How much?"

She glanced him up and down and smiled coyly. "For you, thirty bucks."

"Fine."

He grabbed her arm and she squealed as she was jerked to her feet. "Chill out, man, I don't charge by the hour or nothing."

"Shut up."

His eyes scanned the area. There was a team of garbage men down the street, but they were completely absorbed in their trash. In the opposite direction a cattle rush of traffic had just been released from the stop light and wouldn't get here for another minute. Three middle schoolers played Hacky Sack on the side walk.

There were people around, but he could stop witnesses when he saw them, and these humans posed no threat. He hauled the waitress into a cramped alley by the back of her polyester uniform and tossed her between two industrial garbage cans. It was a tight fit, he had to wedge himself in there and the stink of garbage was powerful.

The waitress groaned, suddenly aware of the mortal danger she was in. She opened her mouth to scream and Ash clamped his hand over it. The bright pink lipstick smeared pink over his skin, but her jaw felt weak and malleable beneath his strength. With his free hand he jerked her legs out straight. The exposed and tender skin on the backs of her thighs rubbed off on the crumbling asphalt, and the clip her hair was tied with made clicking noises against the wall.

"Stay still," Ash told her, but they never listened anyway. He tilted her chin back until her head was bent toward the wall and she could no longer meet his eyes, then he tore the front of her blouse open with a long, razerish rake of his hand. Her flesh was sparse, stretched over under-developed breasts and ribs that rippled like waves under her artificially tanned skin. There was a pink, nubby scar on her abdomen, a parting gift from the belly button ring that she had so thoughtlessly allowed one of her customers to tear out.

Her bra was a glittery green that showed clearly through the top of her uniform. Ash ripped it away--he had never been much for clasps to begin with--and fell on her. He pressed his ear against her breastbone until her heartbeat throbbed in his head and he smelled the sweet scent of terrified sweat rise off her body. He held her tightly, the way he and his mother had held each other all those years ago when he was too small to hunt and had to feed off of her. His fangs pulsated painfully, dug into his lower lip until he was forced to open his mouth wide.

She tried to roll under him, she struggled, but his mind was fixated solely on her blood. "Mother," he breathed, and his teeth sank hard and merciless into her skin.

The waitress tried to scream. He smacked her head hard enough against the garbage bin that she was stunned, but not hard enough to knock her out. The bin reverberated hauntingly around them.

Ash wiggled his fangs in the skin. They were wedged beneath the folds of skin so tightly that no blood was escaping. He pulled out until the pierce came, until the nectar flowed between his begging lips.

The waitress was sobbing, but he wasn't listening. He was back home, back on the enclave in the years before Rowan and Kestrel, when he was the sole focus of his parents' adoration. He lay curled in a ball and lapped at the blood that was pumping out of the waitress's chest, so fresh from the heart that the color was still blue and the oxygen made bubbles froth around his lips.

Safety. God, safety and warmth. His hands were necessarily harsh but his tongue was tender as it probed the wound. He could hear singing and smell the sea, he could sense his mother trying not to throw him off, laying sprawled out on the daybed in the nursery, her hands clenched so hard around the metal posts that one finally bent gracefully over.

He drifted there, allowed himself to grow lost and comfortable. Here, with Mother, he was still small and not responsible. Here he would sleep in peace until nightfall, sheltered from the sunlight in his tiny, windowless nursery with the fur sheets. The cage of live mice that never grew empty no matter how many he killed. The beautiful copy of Dracula that his aunt had made with the huge colorful pictures and words big enough that he could read the letters.

The girl went still beneath him, and Ash felt everything fall away. He was on the concrete between two dumpsters, panting and draining blood from a heart that beat far too quickly. His body jolted, he was high on the blood and his mind was confused. He knew where he was, but somehow the remembered chronology of events didn't seem to lead up to this moment.

He sat up, dizzy and sweating, and put his hands over the waitress's chest until the blood stopped flowing. Her eyes were closed, lips parted and fluttering.

Ash got to his feet, knowing he had taken too much. Not just for her, but for himself as well. He had grown used to small meals, just enough to staunch his thirst. This sudden rush came like a slap to his system, and he couldn't stop the wave of shivers that ran down his spine.

He stumbled onto the street and saw the garbage truck only a building away. His mind was beating with too much power. He couldn't even stop the arrow of telepathy that flew from him to the garbage men, saying clearly, Go dump the trash in the alley. Do it right now.

As he started walking home, he finally became aware of the sour taste in the back of his throat. Jesus, how much acid had that bitch dropped just before he came by? That was why he had stopped feeding off hookers, he remembered now. The combination of drugs and blood was just too much for him.

He walked quickly, and his trembling slowly grew easier. The power would store, he could use it later if he wanted, and the pure rage that had threatened Mary-Lynnette earlier had been worked off. Now he felt full, and a little guilty, but mostly just...apprehensive. How long he would be able to keep this calm feeling, he wasn't sure.

Tern came out of the apartment building to greet him. His eyes moved immediately to the blood that saturated Ash's tee-shirt and caused the cloth to cling to his chest, but his expression--somewhere between serenity and disinterest--never changed. "What happened?"

Ash shook his head. "I don't know. I lost it with Mary, I thought I was going to kill her."

Tern waved vaguely at the shirt as Ash peeled it off. "Did you kill her?"

"No." He used the clean back of it to wipe at his sticky skin and added faintly, "Almost."

"Mary-Lynnette is in your apartment with two other humans I don't recognize."

"That's okay, I know them."

"The boy is pretty upset."

The burn of the sun against his bare flesh felt fitting, and he was far too buoyant for it to be truly dangerous, but he walked slowly to the door anyway, shirt bunched in one hand. The stairs felt like clouds that lifted him effortlessly to the third floor where he found the door to his apartment open. He was on fire, he was ready to lash out.

Mary-Lynnette was standing in the living room, hands clenched at her sides. She took one look at him, at the stained shirt in his hand and the red blotches around his mouth, and stumbled back, shaking her head miserably. Heather was sitting on the couch with her arms around Shae, eyes averted.

"What?" Ash demanded. "You want to know if it's blood? It is. You want to know whose? I didn't ask her name. She's probably on life-support in the back of an ambulance right now, and no, I don't give a damn."

"Chill out, Ash," Tern said.

"You bastard," Mary-Lynnette hissed. "You got mad at me and took it out on some poor helpless stranger?"

"Pretty much," Ash agreed readily.

"Oh, hell," Tern muttered. He recognized his friend's mood, and knew how unstoppable it was. He went into the kitchen, and Ash heard him speak into the phone. "Can you come over to Ash's apartment? He's having a melt-down and I need back up."

Terrific, now Quinn would be showing up. "Why don't you call Mona, too, Tern? You know how pissed she is at me right now, I'm sure she'd like to get in on this."

"Do you think that's funny?" Mary-Lynnette demanded.

Ash shrugged. "I really don't care."

There were tears in her eyes, but she picked up one of the marble eggs from the coffee table and hurled it at him, enraged. Ash caught the egg without blinking, its weight didn't even hurt his hand at a hundred miles an hour. He threw it back, not at Mary-Lynnette but at the plate-glass window behind her. Heather shrieked and tried to cover Shae with her body as the window exploded out onto the street.

"You're disgusting," Mary-Lynnette sneered.

"I believe you're the one who started this."

She should have let it go, and they both knew that. He was too powerful at the moment for rational reckoning, he was dangerous and she knew all the buttons to push. But months apart had given Mary-Lynnette plenty of time to come up with ammunition, and her trigger had been pulled.

"You want to take care of them?" she shouted, pointing to Heather and Shae. "You're covered in blood! You attack people for no reason. You're sick, and you're not fit to take care of anybody."

"You don't know that," he told her. "You don't know a damn thing about me anymore."

"Oh, what, you've changed?" she spat, her voice acrimonious. "Sure, you've changed a lot. That's why you lost your temper like that-"

"I didn't loose my temper." He had, of course. "I made a firm decision to go hurt someone. It was my decision, and you are in no position to question it."

"Who do you think you are, Ash? Some god that reins above humans? Let me tell you, God has a little compassion. When God hurts things, he does it for a greater good. You hurt people for your own good, you don't love anything. You don't feel anything."

"Where do you get off talking about compassion?" he demanded. "I gave up everything for you, and you broke me into pieces."

"And this is your way of getting back at me?"

"Do you want me to starve? Is that what you always wanted?"

"I want...." Her eyes fluttered around the room, lost and damp. "I want you to hurt as much as I do. And....I want you to be someone I'm not disgusted with myself for loving."

"You never loved me. I don't think you can hate people you love as much as you hate me."

Heather lifted her face miserably. Shae was shuddering silently in her arms. "Please," she begged. "Stop it. Just stop. We'll leave."

"This doesn't have anything to do with you," Ash told her shortly. "Mary's hated me since the day we met." He glanced at his soulmate with tilted eyebrows. "She's very good at hating people."

She leapt on him, her fury over-coming common sense, and with one swift kick he had her on the ground beneath him. The PCP wasn't finished with him yet; he tightened his fingers around her wrists until the bones in her arms almost touched. Her quick breathing reminded him eerily of the waitress an hour before, only now there were sparks where their skin touched, sparks that burned him more than the sun ever had. He felt her fear as if it were his own, and also her disgust. It hurt him, it all hurt him like slivers in his chest pounded deep with Fate's gavel.

"Do you want me to kill you?" he whispered. "It would make things a lot easier for both of us."

Mary-Lynnette turned her face away, refusing to acknowledge him. Ash filled with desperation, he had tried everything from surrender to attack, she would never want him. "Don't do this. You don't know how you're hurting me."

A tear crept out from under her eye lid, and she replied in a voice as faint as gauze, "Yes, I do."

She knew and she found it gratifying. He lay frozen, clamped around her. Tern called his name desperately and Ash didn't respond. He waited, waited, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, holding onto what had once been a lifeline and was slowly become a noose, still afraid to let go of the frayed rope binding them together and jumping into dark waters.

He became aware of a hand on his shoulder, small and weak, and Shae sobbing as he knelt beside them. "Please don't hurt her, Daddy. Please, please. Please don't hurt her again."

Ash let go of Mary-Lynnette and turned to look at the boy sitting beside him. Mary-Lynnette opened her eyes and stared at them both, Shae buried his face in his hands, crying harder now with relief.

"Do you really want me to ignore him?" Ash asked her. "He's hurt, and you want me not to hold him?"

Mary-Lynnette opened her mouth and couldn't speak, could only shake her head mutely.

"That's what I thought," Ash said, and turned to wrap Shae in his arms. "It's all right," he promised. "Mary-Lynnette is fine."

He saw Tern and Quinn standing sentry-like in the hallway, and shrugged blankly at them as he lifted Shae's light body. He smelled like tears and sadness, and the small sounds coming from his throat were raw. "Silence," Ash whispered to him, not as a command but a suggestion, the sort of vision his mother would have given him years and years ago. "Warmth. Darkness. Sweet."

He set Shae on the bathroom counter and ran a washcloth under water, remembering that humans were sensitive to extreme temperatures. Then he washed Shae's face with careful strokes and toweled it dry.

"I'm sorry," Shae croked.

"There's nothing to be sorry for."

"I know you hate people who cry."

It was true, Ash had always hated crying. But now he was growing to understand it a little more, it seemed like less of a mysterious and frightening phenomenon and more like a natural expression of grief. He might even try it some day.

"Is that what your father told you?"

Shae closed his eyes, his composition returning. "He always said I was weak, and that's why I got cancer."

"You're dad was a jerk," Ash told him frankly. "I'm glad I didn't live to become him."

He watched the boy climb off the counter and carefully hang the washcloth back on its rack. "You almost hurt Mom."

"Yeah. I'm not better than your dad, I'm just a jerk in different ways."

"But you're not Mom's plaything, either."

Ash glanced up at him, startled. "No. I can't be, I'm sorry."

"I'm not. I guess you guys have a chance at being happy if you're apart. I always thought it was because of you not being a

vampire any more, and Mom not being able to see, but maybe you were never suited for each other."

Ash didn't respond, and Shae wiped again at the tears that refused to stop coming to his eyes. "I'm sorry," he whispered again.

Quinn knocked lightly on the open door. "Are you two all right?" he asked coolly.

"We're fine."

"In that case, Mary-Lynnette is demanding I drive her to a hotel. Would you like to say good bye, Shae?"

Ash waited until they were gone and then turned the cold water on. He let it run over his wrists, still feeling hot, still feeling jittery. His hands were trembling again, and he held them under the water until the shaking eased. He was no good with drugs and blood, the combination confused the hell out of his system. He felt closer to being human now than he ever had before.

In the hallway, he noticed that the spare bedroom door was slightly ajar. "Heather?" he called, tapping a knuckle against the wood.

Sunlight came in through the uncurtained window, but it was stunted by a herd of clouds that had rolled by. The room looked blue and frosty, and in the enclosed space Ash was acutely aware of the scent of blood coming from his skin. He licked his lips self-consciously.

"Heather?"

She was crammed into the corner of her bed, wrapped tightly in blankets. Hair the colors of honey and butter hid her face. "Don't come any closer," she said harshly.

He stopped beside the closet. "I apologize for what happened just now."

"It's like the old days," she told him. Her voice was breathy, somewhere between whispering and yelling. "You hitting Mom. Mom hitting you. Both of you trying to kill each other while Shae sat on the couch and died. He died and died and died, and I kept waiting for it to happen for real. I promised I wouldn't die before he did, and he just kept hanging on. Sometimes I wanted to hit him for not dying when he should have so I could get the hell out of there."

There was a hysterical edge to her words. "Heather?"

He took another step forward and she shouted, "Don't!"

"Okay."

The blankets had rustled when she started, and Ash caught a heavy whiff of blood. It definitely wasn't coming from him this time.

"You made me want to hurt my own brother, and he was so small and weak. He never recovered from getting sick, now he'll probably get cancer again. And I won't be there to hold his hand..."

She began to cry, and Ash stepped to the edge of the bed before she could stop him and tore the blankets away. The scent of blood hit his nostrils even before Heather could scream at the intrusion. She tried to scramble back further into the corner but there was no where to go, and Ash grabbed her arms. His hands closed around skin slick with blood and torn in all the right places. Heather's breath was coming in short gasps; now that he listened he could hear her heart skipping beats.

"Quinn," he screamed, strangled. "Oh fuck, Quinn get in here!"

Heather was soaked in her own blood, and her fingers were clenched so tightly around the razor blade she had used to cut herself that the tiny bones in her hand were exposed. A ripple of pure pain ran down Ash's spine and he doubled over, trying to hold onto her as he fell to the floor. Psychic, she was psychic, and she was trying to stop him from helping her. Even with the human drug in his veins, he was too weak to fight off the incredible onslaught she sent hurtling toward him.

Quinn, ever the incredible telepath, came into Ash's blurry view and landed one quick, precise blow on the side of Heather's head. Ash felt her mental tentacles uncoil from around him and collapsed against the side of the bed, panting.

"She's dying," Quinn said, matter-of-factly. "She's going to bleed out in less than a minute."

Terror was running through Ash with such command that he could barely think. "Can't you...."

Quinn looked down at him, black eyes flat and cold. "It's not my place," he said simply, and turned away.

Ash climbed to his feet, his heart fluttering, and touched Heather's cheek. It was already beginning to grow cold. "Heather!" Shae screamed from behind him, and Ash allowed himself to be brushed aside as the boy rushed forward.

He turned his face and saw Mary-Lynnette standing in the doorway, frozen. He shook his head, lifted his hands helplessly.

"Oh god, she did it. She really did it," Shae sobbed. "I didn't think she'd really do it." His face and arms were bloody now, as he lifted his head. "Please, you have to save her. You can make her a vampire, she won't die." His face contorted and a bolt of pain ran through Ash. "Please."

He looked at Mary-Lynnette again. She was crying. Shae was crying. Heather's unconscious tears traced pink lines down her cheeks.

If he hadn't been so damn proud and vindictive with Mary-Lynnette, Heather wouldn't have done this. She wouldn't have felt that she needed to take it so far.

"Go into the living room," Ash said in a voice soft and breathless. He touched Shae's shoulder. "Go on, I'll take care of her."

"Thank you," Shae sobbed as he got up.

Ash met Mary-Lynnette's eyes one more time. She was as torn and guilty as he was, and they stood close together for a moment before Ash closed the door.

He walked back to the bed and lifted Heather's damp, crumpled form into his arms.

Shortly after dusk, Ash entered the living room. His face was absolutely white, and the irises in his eyes were drained almost to the point of translucence. His shirt was covered in blood, some dried and brown, some fresh and still dripping. He collapsed into his arm chair and didn't speak.

He couldn't see a thing, his eyes wouldn't focus. He was lucky he had found the living room, let alone his chair. His lips were puffy and worn raw, his temperature alternated between feverish and chilled.

He was aware of presences, Mary-Lynnette, Shae, Tern. Quinn and a woman who was probably Rashel. He wished Rowan was here, he needed a pillar to lean against.

They all waited in silence for him to speak, as if he were an emergency room doctor about to give the diagnosis. But when he opened his mouth, he was stunned to hear himself say, "I feel like I'm in love with her."

Quinn's voice was simply reassuring. "It will pass."

He nodded, wanting to sleep, craving oblivion. Instead he forced himself onward. "Mary-Lynnette, I don't know what this means. I'm afraid that I didn't just turn her into a vampire, I turned you against her. She needs you more than she needs me, I think. You're right, you're the sane one. I'm unstable, and lucky for me I've got friends who are willing to put up with that, but I don't need to expose Shae and Heather to it."

He stopped and corrected himself. "Or, I didn't. Now Heather will need someone to hold on to, and you're right that I'm not a good guide."

"Dad-" Shae started.

"No, it's not up for discussion. Mary-Lynnette will take you and Heather back to Oregon, as soon as she's strong enough. You can live with my sisters, and they'll teach you everything you need to know. Mary-Lynnette can go back to where ever it is she goes."

"And you'll just pretend we were never here?"

For the first time, Ash heard true anger in Shae's voice. He opened his eyes.

"How could I do that? I already told you, I feel like I left some part of myself in there with her."

Shae shook his head. "I won't go."

"You can't stay here."

"Why not? You'll take care of me."

Ash's breath shook. "I can't even take care of myself, Shae." He put his head down, felt blood throbbing in his temples. He literally didn't have enough. If he were human, he would be a hair's breadth from dead right now. "Quinn or Tern, I know I've been more trouble than I'm worth the last couple days, but would one of you please grab a credit card from my wallet and take Shae and Mary-Lynnette to a hotel? Oh, and someone please call Nina and tell her not to come by for a few days. I'd do it myself, but...."

"Don't worry it about," Rashel told him. "We'll take care of everything."

He sighed deeply, and it hurt his lungs. "Thank you."

A muted bustle began around him. Mary-Lynnette and Shae gathered their things--although most of Shae's were still in the bedroom, and Ash said firmly not to go inside it--and Tern made a few phone calls. Ash wasn't sure who he spoke to, he got the strange impression it was his cousin James, but that made no sense. Rashel warmed a glass of O negative and tried to talk Ash into drinking it. She didn't realize his stomach was tautly full.

Before they left, in a hesitant group, Quinn crouched beside Ash's easy chair. "Will you be all right?"

Ash let his eyes flutter open. "Em hmm."

"You won't do anything crazy?"

"Like barricade myself in a bomb shelter?" He smiled distantly. "No."

Quinn paused and then went on, "I've been through this, Ash, I know how it is."

"Really? Why don't you tell me how it is?"

A cold but steady hand was laid over his own. "It feels like nothing. Like there's nothing behind you, someone stole it. Like you've just been born and the world is all overcast, and the day's turned into night."

Ash swallowed hard.

"Call if you need anything," Quinn whispered, before vanishing out the door.

Alone, Ash rested a few minutes and then went into the bathroom connected to his bedroom. He dug through the small, plastic trash can until he found one of the syringes Nina had used to inject herself with insulin. He carefully jerked the needle out, and then walked to the kitchen and inserted it in the bottom of a bag of blood that hung in the refrigerator. With gentle hands, he slid the other end into a large, trembling vein in his arm, and felt the blood trickle slowly, cool and thick, under his skin.

He paused outside the spare bedroom door. He could sense Heather inside, hear her breathing quickly. Forcing each step, he turned away and walked into his own bedroom, trying to move as if his life didn't hinge on hers.

It didn't, of course. She could die and he would still wake up the next evening. But at the moment their blood was too similar in make-up for ethereal webs not to be spun between them, and Ash knew that being close to her wouldn't make the separation come any quicker.

He lay in bed under a cold sheet that refused to settle into the caverns of his body, and thought about moving out of his apartment. He'd been living here since he met Mary-Lynnette, all his hopes for their relationship had been contemplated here. Now he knew it was over, that it had to be. This was the last separation; he couldn't take another one. He would apologize, swallow his pride and made peace with her, and then he'd avoid her until she died. His heart would always hurt a little, but scars are better than fresh bruises.

The blood leaked into his body and gave him strength. He shuddered as it infiltrated him and collapsed into sleep.

When he awoke this time, there was a hand on his cheek. It took him long seconds to recognize the face leaning close to him, and the body beside his that was so much taller than it had been the last time they lay side by side.

"Rowan?"

She smiled, continuing to push the hair behind his ears.

"What are you doing here?"

"You called, I came."

"No I didn't...."

"When you were drinking the blood, you called out for me with your mind. I heard it."

Maybe he had. He remembered wishing passionately for her, maybe his need had become an out and out bulletin. It hardly mattered, he was flooded with relief.

"Oh, god, sis, I've fucked up good this time."

"Yeah, I smelled the blood and went in to see. I take it that's Nina?"

"Nina?" He spun internally. "Who told you about Nina?"

"You think Tern and I don't ever talk any more? He's as much my friend as yours."

"Tern told you?"

"He didn't say you were thinking of changing her. You're getting in over your head, big brother."

He rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. "That's not Nina in there, it's your niece."

He poured out the whole story, for once not just relaying the facts but admitting how the whole thing had effected him. How stunned he'd been, how much Mary-Lynnette never failed to hurt him. He went so far back as to recount the horror's of Ravenal's kidnaping.

Rowan was the world's best listener. She just lay in the bluish dusk with one arm around his waist and let him babble, and every time he thought he was finished, he'd wait for her to respond and then realize there was something else he needed to say. She always stayed quiet, as if she knew he wasn't done.

Finally, when the silence stretched and Ash knew he had nothing left to tell her, she said, "She's a very pretty girl. She'll be a beautiful vampire."

"Probably. What should I do?"

"Why ask me? You seem to already know what needs to be done."

"But...."

"You're only uneasy with it because it's not what you want to do."

"Really? What do I want to do?"

"The same thing you've always wanted to do, make Mary want you. You're sending Shae and Heather away because you know it's what she wants."

"It isn't the right thing, then?"

"It might be. But you also have to look at what you want, and what Heather and Shae want. Mary-Lynnette won't ever want you, Ash, that's the hard, cold truth. It appears that Shae wants to stay with you, and Heather probably doesn't want to be shipped away. You made her, she's a little part of you."

"It's insane to let them stay here."

Rowan sighed. "How do you know when you're in love, Ash?"

"Beats me."

"Then how do you know you love Nina?"

"I'm guessing. Blindly. Why?"

"Because I think if you asked yourself, you'd find out that you do love them."

"I barely know them."

"Jade barely knew Mark, and she told the whole goddamn town practically that she was in love with him."

"Jade's....Jade. It's different."

Rowan put her head on his shoulder. "Can I tell you a secret?"

"Acourse."

"You know cousin Grew?"

"Yeah."

"I don't love her at all. She's nice and everything, I just don't love her. Even though we spent every summer together for sixteen years, I wouldn't go rushing to save her from Humans Against Vampires or anything. Time doesn't have anything to do with love, that's what I'm trying to tell you. So you've only known them a couple of days, what difference does it make? You love them, that's that."

Ash rested quietly against her, thinking. She was probably right, she usually was. Just as he was about to open his mouth to suggest they get up and check on Heather, Rowan, always reading his mind, said, "Now let's talk about my problems."

If his sister hadn't shown up, Ash probably would have spent the time it took Heather to wake up moping. As it was, Rowan hauled him out of bed that night and took him hunting.

Despite his large, drug-laced meal the day before, he was exhausted. Rowan drove to a night club in the heart of Cross Bien, a dark, sour-smelling place called, Lounge Around, where the bouncer was huge and the bartenders had no interest in ID.

"You've been in the city for two days," Ash said as they passed by a filthy bathroom with a crumbling cement floor, cleverly labeled, Coat Check. "How the hell did you find this place? I've been here eighteen months."

Rowan shrugged. "I'm not as innocent as I appear," she told him.

"You aren't innocent at all. I assume I'm doing this?"

"No, I will. Go find a booth in a dark corner and order me a drink."

"Great, boy for dinner." Ash rolled his eyes and crept into a high-backed seat. "Coffee and a Shirley Temple," he said to the waitress, who looked like a burned-out Faye Dunaway without breasts, and then leaned back between the shadows.

He watched Rowan moving across a grossly over-crowded dance floor. He was surprised to see her pass by several tall, dark human boys, the kind he knew she preferred, and paused to stand behind a black-haired girl with--gasp--blue eyes.

She met his gaze and lifted her eyebrows slightly.

Bitch, Ash mouthed. She chuckled and moved along, dancing a step here and there so that she wouldn't stick out. The waitress arrived and Ash gagged on the worst coffee he had ever tasted. His eyes continued to follow Rowan as he automatically emptied four creams into the chipped mug.

He thought of Heather back at the apartment. How was he ever going to teach her to do this? Was it even possible? He and Rowan had a silent communication, they pointed out possible victims, vetoed each other's suggestions, made silent jokes about Mary-Lynnette. He could have done the same thing with Tern or Kestrel or Jade, but he didn't have the slightest idea how it had started. He couldn't have made a step by step list of how to hunt a nightclub.

He wondered if maybe he should take a look at that book Jez wrote.

Rowan was returning to the table with--surprise of all surprises--a slight, blond girl. Her hair fell in lovely thick curls around her face, and despite the very feminine velvet dress she wore, Ash somehow knew she went both ways.

Okay, he agreed, speaking only to Rowan. Maybe you aren't as innocent as I thought.

She slid into the opposite side of the booth, holding the blond's hand and drawing her down. You think you're the only one who walks on the wild side, Ash?

Rowan didn't reply, merely smiled and said, "Maegan, this is Ash. Ash, Maegan."

Maegan held out her hand and Ash, struck suddenly by a debonair urge, kissed it. "Lovely to meet you, Mae."

Maegan, despite being blond, turned out to be very smart, and Ash leaned back in his seat listening to her talk to Rowan. They flirted subtly, the way girls flirt when they don't have to deal with thick-sculled men. He couldn't help finding it a turn-on, Maegan was funny without being jaded or negative, and she was independent without being defensive. He would have been attracted to her even if he hadn't been half-starved, and the girl-girl undercurrent was an added bonus.

But what would Heather have thought? And if Heather stayed with him, learned to hunt at his side, what would she report back to Mary-Lynnette?

"Do you want to get out of here?" Rowan asked.

Maegan hesitated, then nodded. Blond ringlets brushed in front of her lovely gray eyes.

Fuck Mary-Lynnette, Ash thought brutally, and stood up.

Ash drove, because his sister was in the back seat making out with their new companion. He had to keep adjusting the rear-view, finally just bent the thing straight down because it was such a distraction.

He made sure to roll the deadbolt in the door behind himself; he didn't want anyone stopping by for a surprise visit. The living room was dark, and Rowan expertly turned the tv on to Fish TV. Ash wasn't even sure why he got a station that showed fish swimming around twenty-four hours a day, but it did make for an unexpectedly romantic source of light.

Drinks, Ash, Rowan thought to him. Give us a couple minutes alone.

"I'll go get something to drink," Ash said. "Make yourselves comfortable."

He walked into the kitchen, found a bottle of fruit juice--thank you, Nina--in the fridge and poured three glasses. He added a splash of tequila to the one in the green cup, leaving Rowan's and his own untouched. Alcohol that wasn't absorbed in human blood rarely had any effect on them.

Moving through the living room with inhuman speed so as not to disturb Rowan and Maegan, he walked down the hall and carefully opened the spare bedroom door. Heather had rolled off the bed and onto the floor while he was out; her body was crumpled disturbingly on the floor.

"Heather?" he whispered, although he doubted she was awake yet.

He rolled her over onto her back, noting that her clothes had been changed and her hair washed. Good old Rowan, making sure the girl didn't wake up covered in mess.

He lifted Heather up and settled her back in bed. He could see the change in her already, the loss of skin pigment, the strange highlights in her yellow hair. She had broken off her arm cast, and the pieces were scattered around the floor. He thought she looked more like a member of the family than ever, it was striking, really.

After checking the tape that held a square of cardboard over the window, he hesitantly kissed Heather's forehead and left the bedroom. He felt unsettled, but there was nothing he could do until she woke up.

He speed-walked back into the kitchen, gathered up his drinks and returned nonassumingly to the living room. Soft classical music played on the fish channel, and he found his sister lost kissing their guest.

He sat down on the couch, not even sure Rowan knew he was there until she told him, She's perfect, Ash.

The tone of wonder in her voice was surprising. Well, he thought, you have three sisters, Ash. One of them was bound to be gay.

Somehow he'd just expected it to be Kestrel.

Blurry minutes passed as he watched his sister seduce the human. Maegan's velvet dress landed on the floor, revealing a small, darling body made of distinct lines. Not really his type, he liked Nina's round curves better, but lovely just the same. Rowan certainly didn't seem to mind.

Finally he saw his sister's fingers touch the base of Maegan's scull, and felt a subtle flow of power emanate from them. Maegan sighed and her head rolled onto Rowan's shoulder, and Rowan reached a hand out to pull Ash up from the couch.

"You got her?" he whispered, seeing Maegan begin to go slack.

Rowan mumbled something vaguely affirmative. Her lips were caught up in tenderizing the skin of Maegan's neck. Ash wrapped his arms around them both, drawing them closer so that he could press a stumbling kiss to Rowan's cheek and then bite quick and mercifully into Maegan's shoulder.

The girl let out a squeak, somewhere between a moan and a gasp, and Ash withdrew his teeth. The holes undamed, blood came flooding into his mouth. It was like it always was, like home. He was transported to that place he yearned for, the place he went to during deep, dreamless sleep, the place he and Mary-Lynnette always reached for and never achieved. Maegan's blood was the instantaneous perfection of his soul, the sweetness and warmth of absolute faith in the future.

He felt her heart begin to slow and drew back, pressing his tongue over the wound until it closed. Rowan lifted her head away, revealing a cut just large enough for her to taste. She had kindly left the bulk of the blood for Ash; the girl's neck was barely scratched.

They clung together in the blue-lit room. Ash felt inexplicable tears at the corners of his eyes, and Rowan leaned even closer to kiss them away. Their mouths met, still painted with blood and hot with sucking. One or both of them let go of Maegan; she dropped with a painful thud to the ground and Rowan stepped lightly over her.

Ash wrapped his arms around his sister and kissed her long and hard, caught up. Rowan responded in like, knowing just what he wanted, and he indulged a few minutes before remembering that this was why the Redfern family tree was so inbred. Too many lamia kids feeding together.

He pulled back and let his forehead fall against Rowan's neck. Her fingers clung to his hair, dug into the tender skin behind his ears as they stood together and caught their breaths.

"Rowan?" Maegan asked weakly, looking up at them from the floor. Ash opened his eyes and saw her holding her arms out like a child waiting to be carried.

Rowan lifted her easily and licked the blood quickly from her own lips. She raised her eyebrows at Ash and he shook his head.

"I can't."

"Do you mind if I....?"

She gestured toward the bedroom, and he smiled, dizzy. "Help yourself."

He sat down on the couch as Rowan carried Maegan down the hallway. She left the door open; good old Rowan, letting him get his kicks without breaking any rules. She'd grown up a lot in the last year, finally found a set of morals she could live with that wasn't too far in either direction.

Ash rubbed his head. It felt massively swollen, which was normal when he was in dire need of blood and then gorged himself. And there were other things that were swollen--he was horny as hell and it was taking at least ninety percent of his willpower to keep from joining the party in his bedroom. But he'd promised Nina he would give monogamy a shot--actually, she'd just told him she would leave him if he cheated on her, no second chances allowed--and he didn't want to screw that up. He'd never been monogamous before.

Well, except for Mary-Lynnette, but he wasn't sure that counted because he'd never slept with her to begin with. He'd always regretted it, that they'd never joined together in every way possible. Maybe it would have changed things between them, allowed them to love each other more easily.

Morgead said it wouldn't have helped. "If anything, it would have made things worse."

"How do you figure that?" Ash had asked.

"Because the first time is awful. In fact, the first five times pretty well suck. It's the whole soulmate thing, you think you're ready for it but you're not. The first time Jez and I did the Vulcan mind-meld, I thought that was deep, but it's not even the beginning."

"What exactly went wrong?"

"We both freaked out, that's what. There are just some things I wasn't ready to show her. Like intensely personal stuff, things you don't even admit to yourself that you think about. Jez went totally hysterical, we were both-" He glanced around to make sure no one else was in hearing distance. "We were both crying and freaking out, it was awful."

"Has it occurred to you that it might have just been because you both have serious intimacy issues?"

"That's what I thought at first, but Delos told me the same thing happened to him and Maggie. I'm telling you, there are things inside you that you don't even know are there until your soulmate tears them out."

After that, Ash had decided that keeping things with Mary-Lynnette non-sexual had probably been the right path to take. Of course, now he was sitting alone on his living room couch, listening to his sister get it on with a girl they had picked up in a sleazy nightclub and watching the fish channel, so maybe he should have taken his chances with intimacy.

He reached for the phone and dialed Nina's dorm room number.

"Hello?" Chelsea moaned after seven rings.

"Is Nina there?"

"Goddamn you, get a clock."

She hung up, and Ash lay down the receiver. A moment later it rang.

"Hello?"

"Hi," Nina said groggily. "Sorry, she got there first."

"I woke you up, huh?"

"Yeah, it's okay. I was having lousy dreams anyway."

He could see her in his mind, sitting in the hallway outside her dorm room with her sleep-shirt stretched over her knees, tugging the phone cord under the door. Her heavy black hair was quickly rearranging itself, and her eyes settled half-closed on some non-descript patch of carpet while she concentrated solely on his voice.

"Did Tern call you?"

"Yeah, he said there was some stuff going on at your place with the kids, and I should give you a few days alone."

Ash sighed. "Do you want to hear about it?"

"Do you want to tell me? You sound like you're sick of thinking about it."

"I am." He lay down on his side, legs drawn up to his chest, and muted the tv. "How are you doing?"

"I'm okay. I went over the next chapter of my psychology book, I feel pretty ready for classes. Have you fed? You sound groggy."

"Yeah, I ate a live dinner about twenty minutes ago. Rowan's in my bedroom having sex with her right now."

Nina laughed quietly. "I didn't know your sister was like that."

"Neither did I."

"What's she doing there, anyway?"

"Moral support. 'Cause of the kids and all."

She thought a moment. "Is there anything I can do? I know you don't want me over there, but...I don't know, you sound sad."

"I miss you," he said honestly, and it wasn't just from the sexual episode he'd almost had with Rowan. He realized he liked the domestic feel life with Nina gave him, that smooth, reliable subplot in his often unpredictable world.

"I miss you, too. Want to meet at a hotel?"

He liked the jokes, too.

"I can't leave. Otherwise I'd say yes in a heartbeat."

"Okay. I understand." She yawned. "I think I'm going to get back in bed."

"Arright. Sleep good, I'll call you tomorrow if I get a chance."

"Uh huh. Take care, Ash. Don't let them push you around too much."

"I won't."

"Good. I love you." She didn't say it often, maybe she knew how much he needed to hear it.

"I love you, too. Good night."

"Night."

He felt a little better afterward, for no real reason. She hadn't asked about Mary-Lynnette; he didn't know if that made her trusting or just stupid.

He watched a number of info-mercials before dawn, and had to talk himself out of purchasing a nifty food dehydrator. After he turned off the television, he went outside and collected the newspaper, then stretched it out over the kitchen table.

Hmm, the Russian economy was still trembling. The Presidential impeachment hearing was still going on, as stupid as it was. People were predicting who would be nominated for the Oscars this year.

A small lead-in caught his eye. "Waitress hospitalized." He flipped to page seven and read the article. The woman hadn't been lucid, between the drugs and her own incredibility, the police thought she had torn her own neck open. Apparently she was claiming that Tom Cruise--a vampire version of him--had attacked her, and that he had promised to "give you the choice I never had."

Cruise had declined to comment.

Ash didn't find a whole lot of humor in the story, he was more concerned with wondering if he could fax a copy to Mary-Lynnette's hotel. And that made him feel disgusted with himself for caring so much about her opinion of him when it was so over.

Maegan woke up first. She blushed when she saw him, and apologized for wearing his clothes.

"Don't worry about it," he said. She looked a damn sight better in them than he ever had. "Hungry?"

She leaned against the doorway, looking at him thoughtfully, and said, "You aren't a normal guy, are you?"

Ash closed the newspaper. "Not really."

"And Rowan's not a normal girl."

"No."

She considered a moment before saying. "Do I want to know?"

"Not if you're going to see her again."

"She's going back to Oregon in a few days."

Wow, they were already talking about the future. "My girlfriend lived in Oregon for a year and half while I was here."

Maegan lifted one eyebrow. "And where is she now?"

Ash couldn't help laughing a little, until he heard a punitive voice from the hallway call, "Ash?"

He was up and past Maegan before she knew what was happening. He swept Heather up from against the wall, taking the weight off her trembling legs. She breathed a great sigh and collapsed against him.

She smelled strange, as if she was wearing a perfume made of cinnamon. "Hi," he said, lifting her up. Rowan had clothed her in an elaborate white nightgown and he bundled it around her now.

"Where am I?"

"You're in the apartment. Come sit down."

"My throat is dry."

Ash was vaguely aware of Rowan entering the picture and drawing Maegan away. From the kitchen floated vague explanations of a younger sister and a terrible illness. "Rowan," he called, "I need to start an IV. Can you bring in some blood?"

The lamp in Heather's room had been knocked over, and shattered to pieces when it hit against the hard-edged bedpost. Ash brushed the shards of porcelain off the pillow case and lay Heather down above the tangled sheets.

"I want to stand up," she murmured. "It feels like I've been laying down forever."

"Only two days."

Her eyes blinked rapidly as she tried to focus on Ash. "My mouth hurts. And I'm thirsty."

"Rowan's coming."

Ash knelt beside the bed and trapped one of her limp hands between both of his. His breath was coming quickly, not from the exertion of lifting her, because her weight was nothing, but stark anxiety. Would she damn him for this?

"Aunt Rowan? She's here?"

"She's here."

Heather's free hand fumbled at the top buttons of her nightgown. "I'm hot. What happened?"

Ash wet his lips and tried to think of some evasive answer, the sort Nurse Hathaway was always giving on ER when some critical little child wanted to know where her dead parents were. "You're going to be fine," he told her finally. "Everything is fine."

"Shae? Where's Shae?"

"He's with Mary-Lynnette."

"And he's okay? And Mom?"

"They're okay. Nobody is hurt."

"But...." She grimaced, and Ash could see the pulse beating in her raw, red gums. Fangs trying to break through. "There were razors, and fighting. I thought I-"

She stopped, and began to blink again. "Didn't I?" She pulled her hand away from Ash's grip and jerked back the sleeve of her nightgown. Ash's fingers clenched in the corner of the comforter until the fabric ripped.

Heather looked up at him. Tears dripped from the corners of her eyes. "I knew you would take care of me," she said, and threw her arms around him.

Rowan to the rescue again. While Ash sat on the hallway floor, stunned, caught up between screaming and passing out, Rowan settled Heather with a bag of blood and quenched her first thirst. He heard the words rush past him, "prove," "Mom," "good father," "take care." He couldn't speak and he couldn't seem to think properly.

Maegan came and sat down beside him. "Do you want a glass of water or something?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"A martini?"

Ash didn't answer.

"She's immature, Ash, that's all it means."

They sat together on the curb outside Ash's apartment, an hour past dusk. Birds called their goodnights to each other, and slowly the flow of cars passing on the nearby highway thinned out like the last efforts of a dying heart.

"She may be immature," Ash agreed, "but it still got me to make her a vampire."

"True. It didn't occur to you before to wonder?"

"I thought she was unhappy and scared and wanted it all to stop. I didn't think she would try to kill herself so that she could prove to Mary-Lynnette that I wasn't a total bastard. The cuts were so deep..."

"She had faith in you."

"She still does."

Tern glanced at him thoughtfully. "Is that bad? You've done what comes naturally to you, and you haven't let her down so far."

"Yeah, but I will eventually. That's how these things work for me."

"You have a self-esteem problem."

"I didn't before she showed up."

"Yes, you did. You've always had one."

Ash rolled his eyes. "Then why didn't you mention it before?"

"I never thought you were in a position to get over it before."

He put his head in his hands. If he were emotionally stable enough just then to think clearly, that might have made sense. Maybe even profound sense. As it was, the blinding glare of the headlights as a heavy old Ford pulled into the parking lot seemed like the light of Heaven shining in his eyes.

He was up and opening the driver's side door before Nina had time to unbuckle her seat belt. "I'm so glad to see you," he breathed, pulling her into his arms so carelessly that her feet lifted up from the pavement.

Nina laughed and kissed his cheek. "Going to put me down, or are you too happy for that?"

He didn't respond, only buried his face in the crook of her neck. "Or are you not happy at all?" she asked more softly, and climbed out of his arms. "Let's go inside, it's cold."

He didn't feel cold, but he allowed her to lead him inside. Heather was dozing, dizzy and overwhelmed, resting before she saw Shae and then went out for her first lesson in hunting. Tern was watching over her, and Quinn wouldn't be bringing Shae over for at least another hour. Ash followed Nina through the apartment and into the bedroom, which Rowan and Maegan had generously vacated in favor of Maegan's less crowded house. Instead of the bed, he climbed into another arm chair, this one positioned by the window so that he could watch the moonrise. It was covered in black leather and stuffed with down, and it gave and made little farting noises as he leaned back, propping his feet on the matching hassock, and drew Nina onto his lap.

He sighed and wrapped his arms around her waist. Her back was small and warm against his chest. He'd finally gotten up from the hallway floor that morning and walked half a mile to the nearest pay phone, from which he spent an entire 90 minute phone card talking incoherently about Heather and responsibility and the meaning of destiny.

"What if this is all a plot, you know?" he'd asked, turning frantically from side to side as he spoke, compulsively putting the phone receiver to one ear and the other. "Like, maybe Heather is going to be this really big vampire who will accidently kill a human who would have turned out to be the fourth Wild Power--" he disregarded the fact that Nina was still very unclear on exactly what a Wild Power was, "--and she can only become a vampire if my fighting with Mary-Lynnette makes her so crazy that she has to prove that I'm a good person inside. So what if because of that, God decided that Mary and I would have to be soulmates? See, so it doesn't have anything to do with me. I'm not supposed to learn from this at all, and I don't have to keep trying to make lessons out of it and become a better person. I can just say, Fuck Mary and the horse she rode in on, and go about my business, and as long as Heather still kills this person so that the destiny of the world isn't altered, I don't have to worry about it, right? Because my conscience is really getting to me something awful, like maybe I'm making some evil vibe by continuing to push her away. But if it isn't even about us, then I don't have to worry about it."

The hysteria had passed, finally, and he'd returned to the apartment covered in sweat but feeling some how clearer. He'd called the Glass Doctor, taken a shower, and paid the guys replacing the living room window. He'd called his land lord and apologized profusely, claiming Mary-Lynnette was severely manic depressive, but wouldn't be returning any time soon. He had personally apologized to his neighbors and mailed some flowers to the waitress in the hospital. He began to regain his sense of control.

Now he lay the side of his face against Nina's and kissed the curve of her chin. "How's Heather doing?"

"Normal, I think. Quinn's coming over to take a look at her in a little while. And to bring Shae, she really wants to see him."

"Yeah." Nina's right hand reached up and her fingers curled the ends of his hair. "Is there anything I can do?"

"You're doing it."

"Anything I can say?"

"I didn't freak you out too much this morning, talking about me and Mary-Lynnette, did I?"

She tilted her face enough in his direction that he could run the tip of his tongue over her lower lip. He realized with a start that he was hungry for her, for her body and her warmth, and let his hands slide up under her sweater until they were pressed flat against the skin of her stomach.

"Yeah, but you freak me out whenever you talk about her. I freak easily."

Her eyes closed, and her lips clung to his as he pulled teasingly away. "You aren't afraid you'll lose me?"

His fingers made quick work of the buttons on her skirt, and Nina's legs bent and straightened restlessly. "Sure I'm afraid. But I'm afraid I'll lose you lots of the time, and it just keeps not happening, so..."

Her voice broke off suddenly into a sharply withdrawn breath as Ash's hand eased inside the cup of her bra.

"I wasn't expecting this when I came over here," she told him faintly.

"When the mood strikes..."

"Want to move to the bed?"

"I don't think so, Rowan had sex with that girl on it last night." He was shifting as he spoke, trying to stretch out beside her instead of underneath her, but the bend in the arm chair wouldn't conforming to his hip. "I can't quite see myself wrapped up in the same sheets where they got all sweaty and damp and-"

"Enough," Nina groaned. "Doesn't this thing recline?"

Ash groped for the wooden bar, and suddenly they were laying flat into a tangle of arms and legs and half-discarded clothing. He smiled and kissed her full on the mouth, and delighted in the muffled sounds that were coming from her throat. They grew more fervent as time went on, and despite feeling an intense wash of desire, for the first time Ash didn't loose himself to passion. He was aware always of her heart beating beside his, the increasing speed of it, the heat that rose to her skin, signals she unconsciously emitted.

It began to rain outside, hard, pricking rain that attacked the bushes outside his window in sloppy splashes. Lightening turned their bodies black and white, the slope of Nina's hip silver. Even as they eased together and her breath began breaking, Ash was aware that more than his body was responding.

He'd never made love before when the love was more important than the making.

They lay together afterward, catching their breaths. Ash's arms were cramped and aching from holding her so tightly. He twisted around and dragged a thin blanket from the floor, tucking the edges between Nina's skin and the sticky leather. He rarely got cold, but he knew that Quinn and Shae would probably be coming over soon, and he hadn't locked the bedroom door.

"I feel strange," Nina told him. Her words made warm winds on his throat.

"So do I. Not bad strange, just...."

"Fulfilled?"

"Yeah. Why doesn't it usually feel like that?"

She hesitated and ran one fingertip around the edge of his ear. "I guess usually I want you and tonight I needed you. And vice versa."

"You were afraid, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"You didn't have to be."

"I know that now. I'm not anymore."

"Good."

He kissed her forehead, then her cheeks, then her lips. Her response was sludgy, sleepy, and he listened to her soft breathing as she dozed off in his arms.

There was a gentle tap on the door.

"Come in," Ash whispered. If it turned out to be a human, he could raise his voice in a moment.

No, only Quinn came inside. He closed the door carefully, and then walked quickly to stand beside the window. Ash should have been embarrassed, but he felt only safety, the stupidly comfortable sensation that whatever Quinn thought, Nina wouldn't care.

"Mary-Lynnette is here," Quinn said.

His voice was low enough that Ash could hear it, but there was no chance of waking Nina.

"Oh," Ash whispered. Mary-Lynnette seemed a thousand miles away, someone from so long ago. "What does she want?"

"To see Heather. And also to make peace with you, she says. I'm driving her to the air port in half an hour."

Ash closed his eyes for a moment, tired dread filling his stomach. "I suppose I should go say goodbye."

"That would be good of you."

Quinn's eyes turned in his direction for the first time, drifting dispassionately over Nina's form beneath the blanket. "You're really fallen for this girl, haven't you? I hadn't realized it before."

Ash stared at the old man in front of him, and wondered about his youth, all those crazy years before he met Rashel. He wondered if perhaps that was why Quinn understood his feelings for Nina better than Tern did, because he had been forced to find his own solace among humans.

"No," Quinn said, reading his thoughts guiltlessly. "I never loved humans, Ash. What comfort I took, I found among my own. Humans were....dead hope."

He was intrigued, but also aware that Mary-Lynnette was only a few rooms away, and some blood tie that still remained between himself and Heather was telling him that she was waking up. "Someday," he said, "you'll have to tell me about it."

Quinn turned back to the rain beyond the glass. "Perhaps some day I will."

He didn't stop Shae when the boy reached out to hug him. In becoming Heather's sire into the Night World, he had effectively accepted responsibility for them both. A particular calm had over-taken him that was making it possible not to freak out when Shae whispered thanks to, "Dad."

"Can I see her, please?" Shae asked. His eyes were wide and yellowed at the edges, he looked pathetic.

"Go ahead." He wanted to add a warning at the end of that, it seemed to fit, but what warning could he give? To a frail boy like Shae, Heather the vampire was almost indestructible.

Nina was asleep in his room. Quinn followed Shae down the hall. Ash was alone with Mary-Lynnette.

"Hi," was all he could think to say. There were bruises on her wrists, but other than that she looked fine, good even. He wished the hurts they were both feeling could be a little more physical, a little less deniable.

"I came to apologize," she told him.

Ash stepped back. "Oh."

She gestured to the living room. "Want to sit down and try this one more time?"

"All right."

They went to opposite ends of the couch. Ash drew his knees up to his chest and kept his eyes lowered as much as possible.

"I lied the other night," she said, "when I told everybody that I took a job with computers. I didn't. I'm working for God."

Ash looked at her before he could stop himself. "What?"

Mary-Lynnette ran a hand through her hair and chuckled. "I got recruited to work in God's office. Don't look at me like that, Ash, it's not crazy. Vampires and witches and werewolves exist, why not God? And it's not like I've actually gotten to meet him, I just work for him. Kind of ironic, actually; my job is arranging the meeting of soulmates."

She stopped and started laughing. "Things have gotten so weird. My whole life centers around the bizarre and impossible now. And I just wanted to be a scientist."

Ash realized she was crying while she laughed and inched closer. His instinct said to hug her, but if he did and the chord came to life, he didn't know what would happen, and the last thing they needed was more complications. So he just stayed quiet, and handed her a box of Kleenexes from the coffee table.

"Thanks," she said, wiping her face. "Sorry, I didn't come here to cry. I have this spiritual advisor that says if I can't change something that's hurting me, I should at least learn to accept it's lessons, and I just realized that I haven't done that at all with you. I keep telling myself that I'm better than you are, and the fact is we're pretty equal, I just hide it better."

She looked so miserable that Ash couldn't help patting her knee through her jeans. They were thick enough that he didn't have to worry about starting anything, which was good, because he was so blown away by what she was saying that any sort of spiritual connection might have knocked him unconscious.

"Shae keeps telling me all these horror stories about our life together, how much you and I hurt each other and hurt them, and how even when he was sick all we could do was fight."

"It was a different world, Mary," Ash tried to tell her. "Stop beating yourself up for something you haven't even done."

"I haven't done it, but I still could. I'm just afraid that we're only going to hurt them."

He wanted to tell her that they wouldn't, but that wasn't absolutely true. "We'll do whatever we can," he promised instead. "Listen, Heather wasn't even trying to hurt herself. She slit her wrists because she wanted to prove to you that I would take care of her."

"What?" Mary-Lynnette's mouth twisted. "That's insane."

"I know. I can barely believe it myself, but that's what she told me."

The rain was pounding outside, but it sounded muffled through the new glass of the window. "And you did take care of her," Mary-Lynnette said.

"Once, maybe, but I'm not cut out for parenthood."

"Finally, something we agree on. We aren't ready for this. I'm not ready to give up being selfish and self-involved."

She waited. "Neither am I," Ash admitted. "But it doesn't change the situation. Sometimes you have to grow up even when you don't want to. They aren't babies, they don't need constant supervision, just someone to hold onto when things get strange."

Mary-Lynnette's eyes were a soft blue, like the unbroken surf of the sea. "You really think you can do this, don't you?"

"I don't know, but....I feel like I have a lot to learn from them."

"They aren't guinea pigs."

"I know. But they aren't made of glass, either."

She leaned back, as if understanding that she wouldn't be able to change his mind. "So you want them to stay here?"

"For a while, at least. Until Heather can hunt on her own without getting herself thrown in jail. Thierry's office can probably get them into a school. It'll be like having roommates a little younger than I am. Weird but...."

He shrugged. "I think we'll all be okay."

Her face was hard to read. "Where do I fit into this?"

"Where do you want to fit in? I understand that you don't want total responsibility for them, that's cool. But I know they wouldn't want you to vanish. Especially Shae."

"We've gotten pretty close in the last couple of days," she agreed.

"Excuse me," Quinn interrupted. Ash turned and saw him standing in the doorway. "Ash, Nina just collapsed in the hall."

He was up in a flash, closing Heather and Shae into their room as he moved with preternatural speed to the side of his bed. Nina laying on her side, face half buried in the pillow, and her arms were splayed out as if she hadn't bothered to move them after Quinn put her down.

"Nina?" Ash asked. "Can you hear me?"

"I'm here," she told him weakly. He flipped on the bedside lamp and saw the light glistening on a sheen of sweat on her forehead.

"What's wrong?"

He rolled her onto her back and watched her blink rapidly. "Glucagon, under the sink," she whispered. "Can't swallow."

"Ash? Should I do something?" Mary-Lynnette asked from across the bed.

"There's a Glucagon Emergency Kit under the sink in the bathroom. If you could-"

"I already have," Quinn told him, breaking open the kit.

Ash took Nina's hand and rubbed it. Her muscles were trembling finely under the skin, and her heart was racing. "You don't want to test your sugar level first?"

She didn't answer, and Ash saw her fighting to swallow again. "Okay, don't worry. I'll take care of you."

Quinn handed him a load syringe, and Ash rolled Nina's arm toward him. He sighted the vein the same way he would have if he was hunting, and slid the needle cleanly into her arm. Her eyes half-closed, then began fluttering.

"Should I call an ambulance?" Mary-Lynnette asked. Ash shook his head. This had happened twice before, it probably just meant that Nina had forgotten to eat dinner and been asleep when the tell-tale symptoms set in.

"She'll be better in a minute or two."

"She's type I?" Quinn asked, and he nodded.

"But she hates hospitals."

He used the sleeve of his shirt of wipe the sweat of her face, and in the process, noticed the blood at the corner of her mouth. "Nina?" he asked. "What the hell?"

Her eyes rolled back in her head and she passed out. Shae's voice came from the doorway. "Dad?"

Ash ignored him. "Nina? Nina, can you hear me?"

He opened her jaw and peered inside, only to find that blood had pooled in the back of her throat. "Call the hospital," he said. "Hurry."

"Where's she bleeding from?" Quinn asked.

"I don't know. She shouldn't be....this isn't a bleeding disease."

Ash sat Nina up and rolled her head forward so that the blood could leak out of her mouth before she drowned in it. Fear was thick in his stomach, mingling with a horrifying sense of helplessness.

"An ambulance is on its way," Mary-Lynnette said.

"Is she okay?" Shae asked.

"Get them out of here," Ash told her. He wrapped Nina in the blanket from his bed and carried her into the living room. "Quinn?"

"What?"

"Where'd Tern go?"

"He left once I got here with Shae and Mary-Lynnette."

"Okay, uh...." He couldn't think calmly, he just wanted to scoop Nina up again and rock her until she slept easier. "Do you have to take Mary to the airport?"

"Not if she's willing to miss her plane."

"No, that's all right. Nina will be okay, I think. Go ahead and take Mary, and I'll go to the hospital with Nina."

"What about Heather and Shae?"

"They'll be alone, but they can take care of themselves. There's blood in the fridge if Heather gets hungry."

Quinn frowned as if he didn't like the plan, but didn't complain. "Mary-Lynnette," he called. "Get ready to go."

Heather touched Ash's shoulder. "She'll be fine," she told him, with startling confidence. He nodded distractedly and then jumped as Nina's body went into a seizure.

"Don't hold her down," Quinn said quickly, stepping between. "Shae, go get a spoon."

"What the hell is going on?" Ash cried.

The night they'd met, she'd been having an insulin reaction, but even after a car accident and a trek through the rain, she hadn't started seizing. He winced as her teeth cut into her lower lip and blood drizzled down her chin.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Heather lick her lips.

"Heather," he said firmly, "go back to your room with Shae. I'm taking Nina to the hospital, I'll call from there." When she didn't respond, he pushed on her arm until she rocked. "Heather, go. Now."

A moment later he was watching Quinn wedge a spoon in Nina's mouth to keep her from swallowing her own tongue. "This isn't normal," he told Ash.

"I know. I've never seen her like this." From outside came the wail of an ambulance, and as Ash went to the front door to let the paramedics inside, he caught of a glimpse of Heather standing in the hallway, her eyes lingering on Nina's frail form.

Finally, the apartment was quiet.

"She's going to recover, right?" Shae asked. He stood hesitantly in the living room, his breath coming quickly.

"Yes. We just needed time."

Heather stepped forward and wrapped her arms tightly around her brother's waist. His head fell onto her shoulder, loose and heavy, and she peppered his face with kisses. "There's time now," she told him.

Mary-Lynnette sat at the end of a row of linked chairs and fiddled with the magazine in her hands. "I feel guilty leaving now," she said.

Quinn sighed subtly. It had taken over an hour to drive to the airport, and now the plane had been delayed coming in because of the increasingly violent storm outside. "Why's that?" he asked.

"Seems inconsiderate of me."

"Having you around won't make it easier for Nina to recover. If anything, it will probably make her sicker."

Mary-Lynnette frowned at him. "Thanks."

Quinn didn't respond, only tilted his face upward as an announcement came over the intercom. "We regret to inform you that USAir flight 116 to Lincoln, Nebraska, has been cancelled due to weather complications."

Mary-Lynnette groaned. "Now what?"

"I can take you back to the hotel, or Ash's apartment. Heather and Shae are probably still alone there."

She nodded. "Heather and Shae it is. Don't let me forget to call my roommate and tell her not to pick me up."

"Fine." He picked up her flight bag, and they started back toward the parking garage.

"I don't get it," Nina said. Her voice was dry and crusty, and her body slumped against the pillows as if her skin were too loose. "What happened?"

Ash was laying beside her in the hospital bed, much to the doctor's charign, and had his arm wrapped around her waist. The crisis was over, she was conscious and lucid, and her seizure appeared to have done no permanent or even serious damage.

"Have you ever had a CAT scan?" the doctor asked.

"No."

"Then I don't want to rule out epilepsy. Also, it might have been a reaction to the Glucagon, or simply to having your blood sugar shifted too quickly. It was 68 mpd when you arrived here, and that was after your injection."

"So you want me to stay here tonight?"

"Definitely. We'll keep you under surveillance, make sure you're back to yourself, and in the morning we can run a few tests to make sure this was a one-time thing."

When they were alone again, Ash kissed Nina's temple. "You want me to stay here tonight?"

"Nah. I'm no fun when I'm sick."

"I don't mind."

"You left the kids alone, didn't you?"

"They aren't babies."

"Yeah, but Heather's a vampire now, and she still doesn't know what she's doing. You should get back to them, I'll call you in the morning to let you know everything's all right."

"Okay."

He kissed her again and climbed onto the floor. "Should I let Chelsea know you're here?"

"No, she'll call my parents."

"She might bring you chocolates."

"Chocolates mess up my sugar. It's only one night, I don't need anyone holding my hand. Besides, I'm really tired already."

By the time Ash left, she had already fallen asleep.

He met up with Quinn and Mary-Lynnette in the parking lot outside his apartment. "Hey," he said. "What happened to the airport?"

"My flight was cancelled," she told him, as they ducked through the front door and out of the rain. "How's Nina?"

"Doing good. Aside from low blood sugar, they can't find anything wrong with her. She's staying there tonight, and they'll run some tests tomorrow."

Mary-Lynnette nodded encouragingly, and Ash felt a strange rush. This was the longest they'd gone without fighting since she arrived, and it felt...nice. Companionable. They'd never be able to be together, they'd kill each other, but they might be able to make it as polite friends.

Later on, he would think that there should have been debris. The front door should have been hanging open, or better yet, torn from it hinges. Bits of plasterboard and emptied IV bags should have been scattered over the floor. Sprays of blood should have covered the walls.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

The apartment looked perfectly normal. The television was on but muted, showing a midnight broadcast of Biography, and Shae and Heather had squirrled together and fallen asleep on the couch. They were covered in a thick afghan made of mohair that Ash had never been able to talk himself into using, and they looked like kittens, resting against each other.

"Isn't that cute?" he asked Mary-Lynnette in a small whisper. She smiled grudgingly at him.

"Ash," Quinn called, keeping his voice down as well. "I'm heading out."

"Okay, thanks for everything."

"Anytime," Quinn replied, and then in a dry, sarcastic, and strangely nostalgic tone, repeated, "Anytime."

The front door closed and the apartment was quiet again. Ash glanced at Mary-Lynnette warily. "You staying here tonight?"

"I didn't realize you'd be here with them."

"No, I don't mind." Please let me avoid killing her in the night, God, he thought. "I'm going to make coffee, you want some?"

"Sure."

He retreated into the kitchen to make the one human thing that never let him down: caffeine. He was about to turn on the bean grinder when it occurred to him that he might wake Shae and Heather, and made a mental note in the future to grind while they were awake. At the bottom of yesterday's grindings he found just enough to make a strong pot for two.

Then he heard the whispering.

"Oh god, no, jesus, Ash, please, no, oh god...."

Mary-Lynnette's voice was barely above a breath, but strained as if she were trying to raise it.

"Please, Ash, come here, it can't be...."

He turned toward the kitchen door and a veil of dread settled over his skin. He knew, without question, that a milestone had just passed under his feet, that something irrevocable had happened in the living room.

"Ash, I need you just this once...."

She was sitting on the floor a few feet from the couch, legs bent to one side as if they had fallen out from under her. Only her mouth moved, forming tiny, flat words that he had strained to hear. The rest of her body was taut, paralyzed, forgotten perhaps.

"Mary-Lynnette?" he said. He wanted to crouch beside her, but her stance frightened him, her stillness waited to crash down around him and drag him into whatever had terrified her so.

Heather opened her eyes and blinked sleepily. "Mom?" she asked.

It was the first time Ash had heard her call Mary-Lynnette by that name. He stepped forward and Mary-Lynnette's eyes flashed his way, more alive than the rest of her, a dazzling blue.

"Ash," she whispered frantically, "look at him. Look at him, Ash, what she's done to our baby...."

Ash looked at Shae and saw nothing unusual. His chest rose and fell in slow rhythms, there was a healthy flush to his cheeks. His smooth skin was partially hidden by locks of silken brown hair that seemed to slid over his face. He looked beautiful, ethereal....

Unnatural.

Ash heard the breath he sucked in more than he felt it. It sounded wet and sloppy in the silent room. Mary-Lynnette's head fell to the side, to where she didn't have to look.

"You....," Ash whispered, almost as softly as she had a moment before. He looked at Heather, beautiful Heather who reminded him so much of his own mother, who had sworn to be his redemption. "You...."

She gently rolled Shae off her shoulder and lay him down on the couch. Her motions were infinitely tender. "I had to," she said, coming to stand only a foot in front of Ash. "He was dying."

"Dying," Mary-Lynnette repeated. She had lifted her face and was staring uncomprehendingly at the inert figure on the couch.

"It was the cancer," Heather began to say, and then stopped and shook her head, as if she was regretting some grave mistake. With an air of both relief and pain, she said, "We're not your children."

Ash had to move. The air was suffocating him. He skirted Heather and reached out for Mary-Lynnette, lifting her onto her feet and into his arms without ever touching her skin. She leaned weakly against him, not protesting.

"We were never your children," Heather said. "Not in this time line or any other. We aren't human, we aren't vampires."

"What are you?" Mary-Lynnette asked.

"There's no name for us. And if there were, you wouldn't be able to understand it. Maybe we're aliens of some sort, or more highly evolved beings, I don't know."

"Then why...."

Ash couldn't speak any more than to whisper, "No, no, no," against Mary-Lynnette's hair.

"He was dying," Heather went on. "Of all the forms we could have taken, yours was the only one where there was a chance for such severe healing. Not only that, but a grant of immortality."

She raked a hand through her hair again. "We agreed to come here because we knew it was the only place where this sort of chance existed. We fabricated a story, we created home videos. It was nothing but the blink of an eye for us."

"But you couldn't heal him?" Mary-Lynnette asked.

"No." Ash couldn't believe how normal she looked, as if this were just a poor grade she was trying to explain. "We exist in a different way, but we don't have this kind of magic. No one does."

"So you came here."

"Yes. We quietly manipulated you against each other, helped induce your fights so that my distress would seem real. We made you love us as much as we could. Nina's illness tonight was my doing, so that we could be alone while I changed him." She shrugged. "In all honesty, we were not expecting that we would come to love you the way we have."

"Love us?" Mary-Lynnette shook her head and pushed Ash away, standing on her own again. "How can you claim to love us? Do you have any idea what the past few days have been like? Ash and I have scarred each other, we're done things we're never going to recover from."

He let his eyes fall on her, follow her. Did she mean that? Was she really here fighting for him now?

"It was his life," Heather replied. "I had to save his life."

She turned back to the couch and ran her hand down the side of Shae's face. He woke quickly with a deep breath, and his arms reached out for her without seeing. She lifted him easily and looked back at Ash. "I know it seems crazy to you now, but later, when you can think it through clearly, I want you to remember how much you did for us, and how eternally grateful we arm."

Ash finally found his voice. "Why us? Why choose me and Mary-Lynnette?"

Heather paused a few feet from the front door. She looked at Ash again and he saw so much of himself in her eyes, not only the same thick golden lashes and deep black pupils, but the stone behind them. Wouldn't you have done the same? her expression asked, and he knew without wondering that he would have. For Rowan, or Kestrel, or Jade. For Mark, even.

"I chose you because you would have made shitty parents," Heather told him simply, her gaze drifting to Mary-Lynnette. "It was easy to start fights between you and claim emotional abuse." Then she focused on Ash again. "And because you need the practice."

They stood in silence in the living room until the tea kettle on the stove began screaming, and even then, it took an incredible effort for Ash to make himself move. Mary-Lynnette followed him dumbly into the kitchen, and then said, "They're gone? Just like that?"

"They were never here," he said. "They never existed."

He put the kettle on a cold burner and then idiotically placed his hand on the hot one. Swearing and jumping back, he found Mary-Lynnette's fingers wrapping around his wrist, and then her arm drawing him close until they were pressed together so tightly Ash couldn't breathe.

"We did the right thing, didn't we?" she asked. "As much as I love you, it never would have worked."

He closed his eyes against her hair. She loved him, that was all he needed to hear to forgive her everything. "We did the right thing," he said, and forced himself to step away. With a shaky smile, he added, "We're still doing it."

He brought Nina home from the hospital the next day, not to her dorm room, but straight to his apartment with the fresh-sheeted bed and carefully raised thermostat. Rowan--Maegan in tow--came by to cook an interesting Chinese dinner that was completely American but Nina thought tasted better than the real thing, and then they talked for a few hours about the world and the millennium, and how strange matters of the heart are.

Later on, alone, Ash curled up beside Nina as she rested with her eyes closed. "You and Mary-Lynnette part on okay terms?" she asked.

He lay his head on her shoulder. She smelled like oatmeal soap. "I think so. She gave me her number, in case there's ever another weird emergency."

"You sound almost hopeful," Nina remarked, yawning.

He leaned over and turned off the bedside lamp. "I'm going to miss them. For a while there....it seemed like something I could grow to like."

She patted his knee, and he leaned down to pull the crisp, ironed sheet over her hips. "You were good to them, even if you didn't know quite what you were doing."

"I guess."

The bed was cool and comfortable, and Ash was relieved to find himself back in his lair of sloth, even if the world of responsibility had seemed for a moment very attractive. Nina was pale and soft beside him, she breathed deep and drifty as if she trusted him.

"You know what's weird?" she asked. Her words were muffled as she forced them to form through lethargic lips.

"What?"

"When they were running those tests on me today, they found out that the stuff I've been taking the last couple of months, that insulin substitute, is doing weird stuff to me."

"Like what?"

"They aren't sure yet. The doctor said he thought it might have messed up my immune system, and maybe the chemical levels in..."

She trailed off, and Ash rolled onto his back. For a moment the thought wouldn't come, couldn't get through his mental defenses, and then it surfaced as a quick, hot memory.

You need the practice.

"Nina?" he said. His voice was hollow and empty, and only soft breathing came as a reply. "Nina?" he said again, more urgently.