Page 121

“Ask him.”

“I don’t have to.”

“Ask him,” said Roake, gently, “when he wakes.”

I said nothing. I felt sick. The cold of the warehouse had crawled into my bones, and the wire had numbed my hands, and on the floor, three yards away, Maksim lay perfectly still with his cheek against the concrete and his eyes half-open. I couldn’t tell if he was conscious.

I thought of the night in the alley. The wet red shine on his mouth. The terrible slow quiet of his footsteps when he turned and walked away.

I do not hunt what is afraid of me.

“You don’t get to decide that,” I said.

“Decide what?”

“That he’s guilty. Because of what somebody else did. Because you lost her.” My voice shook. “I’m sorry about your wife. I am. I can see you loved her. It’s all over your face. But you’re standing over a man who’s bleeding on the floor, and you’re going to torture him, because of what a different vampire did.”

“Not torture. Removal.”

“Same thing.”

“It is not.” His eyes flashed. “It is justice. “

“It’s revenge, and you know it.”

There was a long silence.

Roake looked at me for a while with an odd expression. Then he leaned back, and sighed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“You are very much like her,” he said.

“What?”

“Elena. She had the same habit. She’d look me in the eye when I was being pompous and say precisely what she thought.” His mouth twitched. “She would have liked you. It is a pity.”

“A pity?”

“That I am going to have to hurt you.”

He stood.

He walked to a steel table at the side, and picked up a black leather case, and opened it. Inside, on a bed of gray foam, lay a row of small instruments: scalpels, clamps, a hypodermic. Among them, laid neatly to one side, a coil of thin bright wire that gave off a faint silver glare.

“I will not enjoy this,” said Roake. “I want you to know that. I have never enjoyed it. But I have found, over the years, that a vampire can be persuaded to do a great deal to spare someone he loves. It is the only weakness that is universal.” He drew out a scalpel and turned it in the light. “Your friend has one already, and it is sitting in that chair. Forgive me.”

I felt the cold go through me like a blade.

“You’re gonna do it in front of him?”

“He will wake in about forty minutes. I would like him to see the result.”

“You’re sick.”

“Yes,” said Roake. “I expect I am.”

He came toward me.

I’ve thought about what happened next many times. I’ve told it to therapists and detectives, to my mother, to a man named Dr. Ono whose office smells of lavender. Each time I tell it, it comes out a little cleaner. The truth is that it was messy and stupid and terrifying, and that I got very, very lucky.