8

Garreth stood at the window, staring out at the twilight-reddened sky. Lukert died last month. The bitch Luck strikes again. Dead end . . . literally. Finis. He rubbed his forehead. Now what?

Out of the churning in his mind, one thought rose: Lane's apartment. It still drew him. She had lived there, called it home. Pieces of her, collected and kept over the long years and many changes of identity, filled it. Those pieces must indicate what she was and where she had come from, if only he could put them together right.

Driving to the apartment, he approached the door with caution. He had been invited in once. Would it still hold good, as the legend said? Or would the fiery pain bar him again?

At the door, his body still felt cool and comfortable. He leaned against the door, willing himself to the other side. Still no pain touched him. There was only the wrenching that he had come to associate with moving through barriers, uncomfortable but not painful, and in a moment he stood in the hallway.

How dark it had looked that first time he walked down it behind Lane Barber. No more. Now he saw it as gray twilight. For once he felt grateful for his vampire vision; he could move around the apartment and study it all he needed without lights to arouse the curiosity and suspicion of neighbors.

He stepped into the living room . . . and stopped cold still. It had been stripped clean! The furniture remained, but the paintings, the sculpture, the books and objects on the shelves were all gone.

Garreth ran for the bedroom and jerked open the closet. Her clothes still hung inside. In the kitchen he found the few items in the cupboards untouched, too.

He went back to the living room to stare at the empty shelves. When had she come back? Sometime in the last few days, obviously. She had come back and taken the items that were important to her. How did she know the apartment was not being watched?

Perhaps because she herself had been watching?

He sat down in a handy chair. Could it be she had never left the city at all? He bit his lip. Never left the city. Why had they not thought of that?

Perhaps Serruto had and simply neglected to mention it to Garreth; after all, Garreth had not been deeply involved in the investigation since his injury. He found it easy to imagine how they missed finding her. After ridding herself of the car or hiding it, she probably checked into a hotel in some kind of disguise. With her height, she could even pass as a man.

She had stayed, and watched, and when it was safe, had picked up her belongings. This was one very cool lady. What was it her agent had said about her? All ice and steel inside. Really!

A shiver moved down his spine. The maiden is powerful. Beware of such a maiden. Made of ice and steel and with over forty years head start on him in vampirism and living experience, did he really stand a chance of finding her? What might she do if she suspected he was after her?

Then he shook his head. Personal danger should be the least of his worries. His life was already gone. All she could take away from him now was existence. On the other hand, she had the capacity to harm a great many more people if allowed to continue unchecked.

Very well, then . . . he must keep going. He needed a direction, though. Any help he might have gained from her belongings had disappeared. He had to proceed on what he already knew.

What did he know?

The writing paper still remained in the desk. He took out a sheet and itemized his knowledge. She came, probably, from a Germanic background. She sometimes used Germanic names. She spoke German and Russian.

He made a note to find out through one of the local universities the location of German and Russian groups near each other in the United States around World War I when she was born.

Could any of her belongings regionalize her? Too bad he did not know rocks well enough to describe those in the type tray to a geologist. If all of them were childhood "treasures" as other objects in the tray seemed to suggest, and if two or more came from a single geographic area, it might have been a lead. All he remembered, though, was the black shark tooth. Was that something he could use?

The apartment had given him as much as it was ever going to. He left, checking out the window beside the door to make sure the street was clear before passing through to the porch, and drove down to Fisherman's Wharf.

A few of the shops in the area remained open, catching late tourist trade. He wandered into one. "Do you have shark's teeth?" he asked the girl behind the counter.

She took him to a section where the wall displayed small circles of jawbone lined with rows of wicked teeth. He studied the teeth. They looked to be the same shape as the teeth he had seen, but were all white, not black.

"Do you have any black shark's teeth?"

She blinked. "Black? I've never seen black ones before."

He tried a similar shop farther down the street with the same results. The two clerks and a customer there had never seen or heard of black shark's teeth, either.

The time had come, he decided, to seek expert advice. In the morning he would call one of the universities and ask them where black shark's teeth came from.

Morning. He chafed at that. Why did it always have to be during the day when he could accomplish anything? He crossed Jefferson and began wandering through the arcades of the Cannery, peering into its shop windows fuming in impatience. Nothing was open when he felt most like working. Lane had taken convenience from him, too.

Then, in the window of a jewelry shop, he saw them . . . earrings, hooped for pierced ears, with small black teeth dangling from them! The shop had closed, of course, but a light still burned and he could see someone moving around inside. Garreth rapped on the window.

A man came out of a back room. He shook his head, pointing at the sign in the window stating business hours.

"I just want to ask a question," Garreth called.

I'm closed, the man's mouth said.

"I just want to know where those earrings come from!"

Come back tomorrow.

Garreth groped in his jacket pocket, then swore when he remembered there was no longer a badge to pull out and dangle before the window.

"Sir," he called, "this is very important. I must—"

But the man shook his head a final time and walked out of the room, leaving Garreth swearing in frustration. The question would have taken only a minute to ask and answer. The shopkeeper would have opened up fast enough for a badge. So why did he refuse Garreth that minute?

Because I don't have a badge; I'm only a civilian now.

And as the implications of that beyond the present inconvenience sank in, Garreth saw how truly alone he stood against his quarry, and he shivered in the cold wind blowing down his unprotected back.