By Anne Fraser and Barbara Zuchegna
With assistance from Sharon Pickrel and Jean Lamb
Copyright 1999

Chapter Twenty-Five

When Richard emerged, finally, from the small room Adrian had not been able to enter all day, Adrian was awake ... had been awake for a couple of hours, and his mood had not improved with his waiting. Richard hardly looked at him, or at Jake or Will or Ed Perry, all of whom had been sitting here, waiting with varying degrees of impatience for what they had all decided was their suddenly irresponsible commander. It was, surprisingly, Ed Perry who spoke up.

"You know, they've had the Exalted waiting for you for almost two hours."

Richard stopped in his tracks, and after a moment, turned to face Ed. "Let them," he said precisely, "wait."

He started to walk on, and Adrian jumped up from the stool where he'd been sitting and said angrily, "And where in the hell are you going?"

Richard sighed with ill-concealed impatience. "I am going to take a bath. If you have something you wish to discuss, you are welcome to come with me." Before Adrian could say anything else, Richard looked back at the others for a moment. "I would appreciate it," he said, "if someone would find Ardeshir and send him to me."

Jake, the "someone" Richard was looking at when he said it, found himself already on his feet and moving without thinking at all. He caught himself, annoyed, and stopped. Adrian, he saw, was trailing after Richard, out of the room.

Will said, rising, "I will go, Jake. Ardeshir is at the house of Farjad Dulabi."

"Oh, hell ... no." Jake put a hand on Will's shoulder, pushing him back down. "I'll go. I just wish I knew how he does that. He says, 'jump,' and I find my feet off the floor before the words are out of his mouth."

Will didn't seem disturbed. "He has been doing it for all of his life, Jake. He was trained for command from his earliest childhood."

"Yeah, well ... I wasn't trained to obey. And I keep doing it anyway."

Will nodded. "That is because he asks nothing of you that is not correct. Ed is wounded, as am I. You are not. You knew that, as did he. But I am happy to go, if it bothers you."

Jake shook his head and went. Will was right. But it was hard to get used to.

When Richard made his wishes known, in the kitchen of Ardeshir's house, the women hurried to obey, setting up the small tub in the adjacent room and bringing the pots of hot water in from where they had been sitting, in the desert sun, through the day. Adrian sat, sullen and silent, while the women stripped Richard and settled him into the tub ... like a goddamned Roman emperor, Adrian thought.

When one of the girls brought out the scented shampoo, Adrian had had enough. "What in the hell," he seethed, "do you mean by locking me out of the place that was supposed to be mine while we were here?"

"I didn't," Richard said, simply. His eyes were closed while the girl worked the herb-scented lather through his hair.

Then T'beth had. Damn. Adrian should have known that. "You knew I was out there, in the corridor."

"Yes."

"And that there wasn't anyplace else I could go."

"On the contrary. Farjad Dulabi's entire house had been prepared for the Exalted. Anywhere in his house, you would have been quite safe."

Oh, shit. Adrian had forgotten that. But he said, "Then why, when I knocked, did you ask T'beth if there was somewhere else I could go?"

The girl was pouring clear water over Richard's head now, so he couldn't answer immediately. When she had finished, he wiped his eyes with one hand and grinned at Adrian with just a bit of embarrassment. "Adrian, forgive me ... the truth is that, at the moment, I had forgotten it myself."

Oh, hell. Adrian felt the anger he had nursed since he awoke draining away. It wasn't as if he hadn't known, from the beginning of this whole thing, that Richard and T'beth were going to find each other ... interesting. He'd known that back in Toronto. And no one knew T'beth better than he did. She was not about to cuddle up with him for the day and leave Richard waiting outside. Adrian was old news; he hoped, by now, that Richard was, too.

He was saved from having to answer Richard's sheepish apology by Ardeshir's appearance, bowing. Richard gave quick, but courteous, instructions, and Ardeshir bowed again and left.

Adrian found himself intrigued by Richard's orders. "So ... what're we supposed to be doing tonight?" he asked.

Richard thought about it for a moment. "First," he said, "we are going to teach a short course in responsibility."

Adrian eyed him doubtfully. "Are you sure this is the best night for you to be talking about that? Isn't someone likely to ask why you didn't show up at sundown?"

"Only a fool," Richard said unconcernedly, "depends on teaching by example. Our students will feel nicely superior if they can, among themselves, discuss our own lapses ... and they will be moved, we can hope, to show us how much better at the task they, themselves, can be."

Adrian was beginning to wish that Richard would stop saying "us." "And how does that lead to you and Jake and I playing dressup?" What Richard had sent Ardeshir to do was to find appropriate local clothing for the three of them.

"Well," Richard said, rising now as one of the women wrapped an oversized towel around him, "I don't know about you, but if we're going to attack the palace in Saravan, I don't want to stand out from the crowd."

By the time Adrian was dressed in his Lawrence of Arabia getup, T'beth was fighting to keep a straight face. It wasn't the clothing ... the flowing burnoose, the long scarf falling from the cord around his head, the tunic and leggings and soft boots beneath it all. It was the pose Adrian struck as he asked, "How do I look?"

"If I answer that," she said, "we're going to fight again." T'beth, who was going along, had refused to shed her leather pants, but had agreed to the enveloping burnoose she held now, over her arm.

"Jealousy," Adrian smirked. He was perfectly aware that he looked great in just about anything ... and even better in nothing.

Their "fight" didn't come close to some of their past battles. He had pouted about being locked out; she had told him to fuck off. End of fight. Richard, at least, had apologized.

T'beth had kidded him, too, about watching Richard take a bath, and it dawned on him that, until she said it, he hadn't thought of it at all. He just never seemed to think of Richard in any sexual way. And T'beth seemed to have come, after a certain amount of experimentation, to very much the same conclusion. "Richard," she told Adrian, when he asked, "can be a great fuck or a great friend ... but not both at the same time. I would rather he was my friend ... but I'm not sorry I tried the other, first." And she would say nothing more about it. She would probably have been surprised to know that Adrian had long ago come to the same conclusion ... even without the experimentation.

Jake came in, without knocking; he could pick up on their thoughts enough to know that he wasn't interrupting anything. "You ready?" he asked. "Our fearless leader is showing signs of impatience ... and all of Ardeshir's houseplants are shriveling up and dying."

"Jake!" T'beth came to stand in front of him, her eyes doing a quick and approving survey. "The sheik look becomes you."

Adrian was smiling at him as if he thought so, too. Adrian had had sex on his mind virtually non-stop since he'd been picking up on Richard's and T'beth's antics, and he kept giving Jake those looks ... the "mournful puppy who just needs a little love" looks. Jake felt like batting him one.

Instead, he suffered T'beth's good-natured hug ... she had been remarkably good-natured ever since she'd emerged from her lengthy session with Richard, and said again, "You ready? If he has to come back here, he's gonna be courteous enough to skin someone alive."

"In that case," Adrian said sweetly, "as you are the only one among us who qualifies as 'alive,' perhaps we should wait and watch the fun?"

"Knock it off, Talbot," T'beth said shortly. She had wound her arm through Jake's and was turning him toward the door. "We're coming right now. If Adrian wants to play games, let him wait for Richard by himself."

The vampires of Sa'idi never really had a chance. They had remained at Farjad Dulabi's house, patiently courteous, because they had been told that the man who had been in command of the group who had discovered the means of restoring them now wished to speak with them. But it was a lofty courtesy, from superior beings to one whom they regarded as a vastly inferior creature ... an unexalted mortal who had earned some small measure of appreciation from them, but in no other way of any more consequence than any other mortal from whom they deigned to take the blood that sustained them. Richard, as anyone who knew him could have told them, was about to alter their perceptions to an alarming degree.

Jake, instructed to attend this little gathering with Adrian and T'beth, almost pitied the Sa'idi vampires as they watched Richard take his place before them. They had no idea.

Along one wall of the big main room of Dulabi's house, the village elders and Ardeshir sat, eagerly watching. The three ancient sisters, Jake thought, looked more predatory, leaning forward in their chairs, than any of the vampires in the room. The vampires themselves were a mixed lot, of various ages ranging from about twenty-five or so up to about fifty. Nine men and seven women who had grown up in this village, who had served their people here in some significant way, and who had been "exalted" as a reward.

Richard, questioning the village elders yesterday, had learned a bit more about them. Bizaya, the vampire who had created their line, had gone back to his home in Africa long ago; these people were all descended of the slaves who were brought here against their will hundreds of years ago. Most of them had been turned long ago, and were more African in appearance than most modern Sa'idians, without the admixture of local blood that had created the variety of types that characterized the village now.

Like most vampires of whom Jake had heard, these had long since grown bored with their unlife. They had all, at one time or another, left these mountains and tried life in the outside world, and one by one, they had returned, jaded and indifferent. They associated little with mortal humans ... probably for the same reasons that made Adrian so unhappy. It was difficult to watch people you knew and cared about age and die while you went on, unchanged. It was easier not to care.

But unlike Adrian, who still tried, these creatures had given up on any contact with mortals beyond that necessary to get the blood they needed to survive. For the most part, they did not prey on the people of Sa'idi, except on those rare occasions when the villagers sought them out, imploring them to exalt someone who had served their people in some exceptional manner. Instead, they spent their time in the larger town of Saravan, and their existence was virtually unknown to most of the people there. Like Adrian, they could feed and then make their victims forget. Over hundreds of years, the idea of vampires in this part of Iran had become a remote legend ... until Zanjani had turned Bahram Bakhtiar's get loose on the people here.

When the people of Sa'idi asked for help from the men and women in this room, it was given ... too little and far too late, which was what Richard was about to point out to them. Jake, who was becoming something of an expert in knowing when Richard was about to be very, very courteous, could have told this bunch what they were in for ... but they wouldn't have believed it.

Ardeshir, on Richard's instructions, had placed a large table at one end of the room, with chairs facing the Sa'idi vampires. Richard waved a hand toward these, indicating that Adrian, T'beth and Jake were to sit there. He took his place in front of the table, looking down at the watchful vampires. With another sharp jerk of his hand, he summoned Ardeshir to stand beside him to translate.

He said, without preliminaries, "The Kanums Mahasti, Souri, and Assieh, who keep the history of their people, tell how long ago, the first of your kind came to the people in the shadow of the snowy mountain and made his home among them. He was welcomed, and the people provided for him, as they have ever since provided for all of his kind."

The Exalted looked puzzled ... and a bit bored. They knew all this; every one of them had grown to adulthood in this village, before they became Exalted, and the stories were as old as their race.

"In return," Richard went on, his voice irritatingly patronizing, "he gave to them the arts and sciences of the civilization from which he had come ... and he made the people stronger than their enemies in that place. He gave them the means to survive as a race.

"He understood something that has been forgotten here. He understood that from those who take, there is a corresponding responsibility to give. It was a bargain he made with the people, and he kept it faithfully."

A few among the Exalted, Jake could see, had begun to understand where this was leading, and their faces had become tense and indignant. But no one interrupted yet.

"When the Arabs came among the people, and took them into slavery," Richard said, "there was one among the Exalted ... Bizaya, who understood the bargain as well as his sire. He suffered their slavery with them, to care for his people in this new country, and found this place in the distant mountains where they, and he, would be safe."

And now Richard's voice took on the tone Jake could have warned them was coming. Contempt dripped from every word, as searing as acid. "But Bizaya failed, in the end, to keep the bargain. He left his people here, without teaching to those of you he had created that for what you take from the people, you incur a responsibility to care for them. He left the people of this land, not with Exalted Ones, but with parasites."

Ardeshir, standing behind him, translating, stumbled over this last word, but said it. The translation was met with small gasps from the triplet elders, but silence from the Exalted themselves. All of them understood now, and eyes had begun to glow in anger all over the room.

Richard wanted them to fight back. He said, "Who speaks for the Exalted?"

A tall, broad-shouldered man, who had the appearance of being somewhere in his early forties, stood up from among the seated vampires. On his dark face was imprinted an expression of disdain. In a low, rumbling voice, he spoke calmly but firmly, and Ardeshir quickly translated. "Is this all that you wished to say to us? Mortal, we are aware that we owe you our gratitude for what you have done here in our service. But your small life is as the dust beneath our feet, to drift away and vanish with a breath of wind. It is not your place to lecture to those who are exalted above you."

Richard nodded his agreement, but there was nothing servile in his manner. "You're quite right. It is not my place; it is yours ... or that of one of these others here. But as you will not assume the responsibility that is clearly yours, someone else must do it for you. You are not Exalted, as was the ancient one who first came to the people, as was Bizaya who suffered with them when he could so easily have deserted them. You are parasites ... living off the body of the people and returning nothing of value to them. Bizaya ... and certainly the ancient one who created him ... would hide their faces in shame to be of the same race as those of you in this room."

The dark, beautiful woman named Niloufar jumped to her feet, indignantly. If she remembered being punched out by Richard the night before, she gave no indication of it. "That's not true!" she said. "When our people came to us, pleading for our help, we gave it ... and were almost destroyed."

"And were saved from destruction, were carefully protected, by these same people, at great risk to themselves," Richard agreed. "But why did they come to you ... pleading for your help?"

"Because of Bahram ... he who joined with the Ayatollah of Saravan..."

"And why," Richard interrupted, "was Bahram allowed to do this? Why, for that matter, was the man who ruled the people from Saravan allowed to be the degenerate tyrant that he was? Where," Richard said, "were you ... all of you ... when he was chosen? Where were you the first time he acted outside the law? Where were you when the first woman was stolen from her family, the first girl-child carved up with his knives? Where were you when money was stolen from the people, when their livelihoods were destroyed? Where were you when they were afraid to appeal to the laws of gods or men for relief?"

The tall man who had spoken first said now, impatiently, "We do not interfere in the day to day affairs of mortals."

"Forgive me, but you do," Richard said with calm insistence. "Daily, you feed from them. You take what you need to survive ... and give nothing in return." When the vampire opened his mouth to speak, Richard raised his hand, and Jake wasn't at all surprised that the vampire closed his mouth and waited. Richard said, "In my country, I was born into a family of kings. We were taught from the cradle that, as we were privileged above all other men, we had responsibilities above all other men. We were not to wait until we were asked for help; we were to conduct the business of the realm to the greatest benefit of all its citizens at all times. This is the price of being exalted above common men. And it is a price you have not been paying since Bizaya left you to return to his home in Africa."

Watching the faces of the Sa'idi vampires, Jake could see that they were already beaten. They just didn't know it yet. Richard was hitting them in their pride, and pretty much destroying it. He was right; they had always had the power to take care of their people, and they hadn't used it for the benefit of anyone but themselves. He was teaching them what power is supposed to be used for, and how badly they had failed. And he had them too shame-faced now to react with either anger or indignation.

He kept talking, and the tall man took his seat again while everyone in the room gave all their attention to the stern but no longer contemptuous lecture a mere mortal was giving to them. Richard took them through the responsibilities that are inherent in accepting a state that is raised over others. And at one point, his own voice carrying a note of wonder, he said, "And what greater challenge can there be, what more fascinating exercise of the mind and all the gifts of nature, than the wise governing of those who give you that power over them? You exist in a state of constant ennui, with no interest in the life that goes on around you ... and yet it is in that life, in the ordering and beneficent care of that life, that you will find a purpose that will stretch your every ability to its limit and occupy your every hour with problems and puzzles, the solving of which will give you a satisfaction like no other."

He was speaking from personal experience, and the ring of truth in what he said was reaching all of them. Jake watched the annoyance fade from every face, to be replaced by shame and then by interest, and finally by an almost eager fascination. And Richard was telling them nothing more than the simple truth ... but they would have accepted it from no one else.

At the end of it, he told them, "In Saravan, the guards who were employed by the Ayatollah Zanjani have taken over the palace and have destroyed the government of the city. Tonight, I mean to drive them from that place and re-establish that government. I need your help to do it."

He didn't wait for anyone to answer. He sent Ardeshir outside to get a bucket of sand and had the table where Jake and the others had been sitting brought out into the middle of the room. With the sand poured onto its surface, he began, with one finger, to draw the layout of the palace in Saravan, to a degree of detail Adrian found incredible. It was hard to believe that Richard, in that one night of running through the corridors of the palace, could have noted and remembered so much.

"This," Richard said at last, his finger resting on the table, "is the immediate objective. This is the harem area, and within it are the women Zanjani stole from their homes and families, and brutally mistreated. These women had the courage to help in his overthrow; they have been promised our help, and must receive it if they are still alive."

Finished, he looked around at the waiting faces. "If there are questions, now is the time to ask them. Once we are engaged, there will be no time for anything but obedience."

There were no questions. Ardeshir was sent to get firearms for the Exalted, who were speaking quietly among themselves but with an unmistakable air of excitement ... something they probably had not felt in centuries.

Jake followed Adrian and T'beth outside, shaking his head in wonder. "I still don't get it," he said. "He talked to them for ... what? Fifteen minutes? Ten? And I could have got up there and said exactly the same thing ... and they probably would have torn my throat out halfway through it."

T'beth's arm snaked through his again. "That, Jake," she said, "is why he gets the big bucks ... or used to. Hell ... he's got me ready to go run a country somewhere."

"Not Canada," Adrian said quickly.

She reached out and patted his face. "Not even Toronto," she said sweetly ... or as sweetly as T'beth could. "Since we already have the vampire king of Toronto among us."

She was referring to Adrian's abortive attempt to take over the vampire community of Toronto, the disaster that had first brought Adrian and Jake together. Adrian decided not to be offended. "Who knows?" he said. "After watching how Richard does it, the next time I try, I just might surprise you."

After Richard's lecture, the Sa'idi Exalted were ready for a fight. They filed out of Farjad's house, whispering to each other, looking back over their shoulders, and otherwise gearing themselves up to go whip some butt in Saravan.

Shapour, their spokesman, waited for Adrian. He had been watching the foreign Exalted Ones closely. T'beth was a known factor; she was originally from Sa'idi even if she was not one of their Exalted. It was not Bizaya's blood that had turned her, but she was still their own. It was the little Englishman with the beautiful eyes that fascinated Shapour (and nearly every single other one of the Exalted). Why was he allowing that admittedly forceful mortal to command him? Why was he here at all, what did he care about this part of the world? Did he represent a threat; was he trying to become the leader of the Sa'idi Exalted?

Was he available?

Adrian saw Shapour hanging back, studying him. He looked around for support, but Richard and T'beth had already gone off with Ardeshir to discuss tactics or some damn thing, and Jake was hanging around with them. Shapour was a big guy, and he didn't look that friendly. Maybe he was upset about an upstart little squirt of an English vampire being here.

Well, the guy couldn't speak English, right? So anything he said by way of an insult would go over Adrian's head; and Adrian was reasonably sure that Richard wouldn't let anybody beat him up. So he let Shapour join him, wondering how they were going to communicate at all.

"Tu parle francais?" Shapour demanded.

Oh. "Oui," Adrian admitted. "Qu'est que tu vu?" If the big guy was going to use the informal tu, then he would, too, dammit.

"I want to talk to you. In private," Shapour said in French (for the sake of the reader, this will now be magically translated into English).

Merde. But Adrian, curiosity aroused, agreed. Shapour led him to one of the blacked out rooms in the house and shut the door.

"What do you want?" Adrian asked again, gauging his chances of taking Shapour down if it became necessary. He wasn't going to get out of this without being hurt, dammit.

"I was watching you," Shapour replied. "You watch that boy, the half-blood; you want him."

Adrian's eyebrows shot up. Oh, he hadn't been expecting this. But the expression in Shapour's eyes was bordering now on sheer lust. My, my ... he was a big, strong specimen...

"That is none of your business," Adrian said crisply. "What does it matter to you whom I watch?"

"He does not want you," Shapour said. "You waste your longing on a mutant. What you need is a real man."

"Oh, you think so?" The devil danced in Adrian's eyes. "If you happen to find one, do let me know, will you?" He started for the door.

Shapour growled and caught him by the shoulders. "He is right here, and he will teach you a lesson, little English boy."

He drew Adrian's burnoose off and cast it roughly aside. Boots, leggings and tunic soon followed. There was a low divan in the room, and Adrian shortly found himself bent over it.

He was expecting to get laid, not soundly spanked. When Shapour's large, hard hand started whacking him, it came as quite a surprise, and not a welcome one. But Shapour was strong, too strong for Adrian, and he perforce had to suffer the consequences of his too-glib tongue.

Only when he had Adrian's cheeks a nice glowing red did Shapour stop spanking them and spread them instead.

The anger out of his system, Shapour was surprisingly gentle. After he'd slaked his lust, he was willing to cuddle on the divan, pillowing Adrian's head on his dark, hairy chest. Adrian, lonely and starved for affection, forgave Shapour for the spanking and lay pretending that this session had meant more than just another bout of meaningless sex.

"Why do you want him?" Shapour asked. "The half-blood, he does not love boys, so why?"

"It's complicated," Adrian replied. 'Don't press it,' he pleaded silently. 'Don't shatter the illusion just yet...'

"There is no one else?"

"No." Damn.

"But you are beautiful. Men and women both must follow you like newborn colts follow their dam. You could have your pick of any man or woman you wanted."

Adrian sighed. "I want Jake."

Shapour looked at him and laughed, not mockingly but with genuine humor. He gave Adrian another slap on the ass, a friendly one this time. "Ah, you want only what you cannot have. That is a sure way to heartbreak, Englishman."

"Tell me about it."

Shapour's big black fingers traced a line down from between Adrian's nipples to between his legs. "Let me ease some of your pain, Englishman," the African offered.

Dimly, as Shapour's lips replaced his fingers and began to ease quite a bit of Adrian's pain, the actor found himself remembering that Richard et al were probably wondering where the hell he was. Richard was going to be very courteous.

Fuck him. Right at this moment, Adrian wasn't in any shape to report to Richard, anyway.

Richard was going to be courteous enough to peel skin.

If Jake thought they had been crowded in the ATV on the way back from Khelat, he remembered it now as positively roomy. Even with most of the Sa'idi vampires in the back of the "borrowed" pickup truck, the ATV was packed as comically full as one of those little cars at the circus that somehow disgorge dozens of clowns, all of whom seem happy as hell about it.

Jake wasn't happy about it.

The only blessing was that Richard had decreed that Will would stay behind temporarily. As Will took up as much room as any three normal-sized people, this was all to the good. Unfortunately, there seemed to be plenty of others to take his place. This was because, as Richard said with ill-concealed impatience, it was necessary to take with them a number of local people who would "borrow" additional vehicles with which they would return to Sa'idi to load up the men of the village, who would then follow Richard's shock troops into Saravan. There was very little point, Richard said, in taking over the palace if his entire force was going to fall asleep with the sunrise.

Good point.

Happily, the vehicle "borrowers" did not have to go with them the whole way into Saravan. There were a number of farms and sheep ranches between Saravan and Sa'idi where vehicles could be temporarily commandeered. Each time they stopped at one of these, one or two "borrowers" would exit, with the following reorganizing of the remaining group in the ATV. After about four stops, breathing became a real possibility, but it never became comfortable.

They were dropped off, as they had been before, several blocks from the palace. The difference Jake noticed at once was that there was no glow in the sky of a lighted area anywhere in the town. It was unrelievedly dark everywhere, since the guards had disabled the already barely functional power station.

The palace, with its own generator, was the only building in town with electricity, and the floodlights mounted on top of the exterior walls, pointing down, were all on. The place loomed like a mountain ... massive and incredibly ornate, its extravagant exterior only hinting at the opulence within.

Richard's plan of attack rested on two main objectives: to locate and secure whatever means of communication was located within the palace to prevent the guards from calling for help from the capital or from some nearer military base, and to get someone into the harem as quickly as possible. He had harked back to Ardeshir's story of the Sa'idi woman who had taken care of T'beth in the harem, and who had smuggled out her notes. The woman had said there was way into the harem through the basement, and this was what they would have to find.

And again, when they had worked their way into the park across from the rear of the palace, it was to Adrian that Richard turned. Their first need was to know how many guards were within the palace and roughly where they were located. And that meant that someone was going to have to go inside ... someone who could "broadcast" what he learned to someone outside. Jake could almost see Adrian swelling visibly inside his damned burnoose as Richard explained what he wanted; between Richard's unquestioning confidence in him and all the Sa'idians calling him "Exalted One," Adrian wasn't going to be fit to live with for a long time to come. Hell ... Adrian wasn't fit to live with at any time. But he was going to be worse.

Unfortunately, Adrian's previous means of entering the joint wouldn't work this time. There were more guards in evidence ... and less discipline. The group of half-a-dozen lounging by the rear entrance was talking among themselves, smoking, some of them squatting on their heels while others leaned against the palace wall. The corridor behind them was dimly lit, but the far end could not be seen.

"Do you sense any more of them in the corridor behind the entrance?" Richard asked.

Adrian shook his head. "No. The guards they had on the kitchen entrance are gone. All I can feel is the bunch you can see from here. And some of these aren't entirely sober, Richard."

"Can you get past them?"

Adrian thought about it. "Probably not. I can approach them unseen, but there are too many of them, and no way to get through them without touching one of them. Anyone I touch would see me immediately."

"Can you make them believe you aren't there?"

"Not for sure. One problem is that some of them have been drinking, and that clouds their minds ... I can't reach them as easily. I can try, but I can't guarantee that it will work with all of them." Adrian was studying the sheer face of the palace wall. "I might be able to go in from above."

The wall was at least forty feet high; Jake had seen Adrian make some pretty incredible jumps, but nothing that spectacular. 'Talbot,' he thought, 'what in the hell are you talking about?'

Adrian didn't bother to answer. Richard just clapped Adrian on the shoulder and said, "As quickly as possible, Adrian. I want all of this group inside the building before Will arrives with Ardeshir's people."

Adrian nodded and faded away into the darkness. Jake, in response to Richard's quick hand signal, joined Richard at the edge of the tree shadow, looking out across the street to the rear entrance and the quietly talking guards over there. He was, he knew, supposed to be Richard's receiver for whatever Adrian sent back.

But Jake still couldn't figure how Adrian was going to get to the top of the palace wall ... until he heard T'beth make a small laughing sound beside him and he turned to see her pointing down toward the corner, at the far end of the palace. "I'm never gonna let him live this down," T'beth said, snickering. "Adrian Talbot, superhero."

Jake, following the line of her pointing finger, couldn't believe what he was seeing. Adrian, burnoose flapping in the breeze, but out of sight of the guards at the entrance, was shinnying up the telephone pole on the corner ... a pole that was perhaps half a dozen feet higher than the palace wall ... and only ten or twelve feet away from it.

'Oh, shit,' Jake thought, 'the little bastard is going to fall and squash himself like a bug.'

T'beth's voice, in his mind, was vastly amused. 'No, he's not. But when he gets to the top, I'll lay you ten to one he can't resist striking a pose before he jumps."

She was right. Adrian, with his unnatural strength, managed to climb the pole with ease, and with an acrobat's grace, to actually stand on the crossbrace when he reached the top. And, before he made his jump across to the palace roof, damned if he didn't stop for a minute to throw the flapping hem of his burnoose over his shoulder and look just as idiotically heroic as all hell. T'beth buried her face against Jake's arm to keep from laughing out loud. Jake, who had imagined the little bastard losing his balance from fifty feet in the air to splat on the pavement below like a water balloon, just felt sick.

Richard, who had watched the performance with appreciative indulgence, said only, "It's something of a shame that he didn't have a good line to quote at the moment, isn't it?"

"He did," Jake said.

Richard looked at him curiously.

Jake wasn't laughing. "He said, 'This is one small step for a vampire...'"

Richard looked puzzled, but Jake didn't bother to explain.