side?" She stared from Vicky to Rashel, her body rigid. "You just wait. Just wait until I tell people that
Rashel is the Cat and that she's really on the Night World side. You just wait."
She's hysterical, Rashel realized. Even Vicky was looking surprised at this, as if she were uneasy at what
she'd started. "Nyala, listen-" Rashel began.
But Nyala seemed to have reached some peak of fury at which nothing from outside could touch her.
"I'll tell everybody in Boston! You'll see!" She whirled around and plunged toward the stairway as if she
were going to start doing it right now.
Rashel stared after her. Then she said to Vicky, "You'd better send a couple of the guys to catch up to
her. She's not safe alone in this neighborhood."
Vicky gave her a look that was half angry and half shaken. "Yeah. Okay. Everybody but Steve go after
her. You guys take her home."
They left, not without a few backward glances at Rashel.
"We'll drive you back," Vicky said. Her voice wasn't warm, but it wasn't as hostile as it had been.
"I'll walk to my own car," Rashel said flatly.
"Fine." Vicky hesitated, then blurted, "She probably won't do what she said. She's just upset."
Rashel said nothing. Nyala had sounded-and looked-as if she meant to do exactly what she said. And if she did...
Well, it would be an interesting question as to who would kill Rashel first, the vampires or the vampire hunters.
Wednesday morning dawned with gray skies and icy rain. Rashel trudged from class to class at
Wassa-guscus High, lost in thought. At home, her latest foster family left her alone-they were used to her
going her own way. She sat in her small bedroom in the townhouse with the lights dimmed, thinking.
She still couldn't understand what had happened to her, but with every hour the memory of it was fading
steadily. It was too strange to fit into the reality of life, and it became more and more like a dream. One
of those dreams in which you do things you would never ordinarily do, and are ashamed of when you
wake up in the morning.
All that warmth and closeness-she'd felt that for a vampire? She'd been excited by a parasite's touch?
She'd wanted to comfort a leech?
And not just any leech, either. The infamous Quinn. The legendary human hater. How could she have let
him go? How many people would suffer because of her lapse in sanity?
Who knows, she decided finally, maybe it had been some kind of mind control. She certainly couldn't
make any sense of it otherwise.
By Thursday, one thing at least was clear in her mind. Vicky had been right about the consequences of
what she'd done. Rashel hadn't thought about that at the time, but now she had to face it. She had to make it right.
She had to find the kidnapped girls on her own- if girls were getting kidnapped. There was nothing about
missing teenagers in the Globe. But if it was happening, Rashel had to find out about it and stop it... if she could.
Okay. So she'd go back to Mission Hill tonight and start investigating. Check the warehouse area
again-this time, her way.
There was one other thing that was clear to her, that became obvious as she got her priorities straight.
Something she had to do, not for Nyala, or for Vicky, or for the Lancers, but just for herself. For her
own honor, and for everybody who lived in the world of sunlight.
The next time she saw Quinn, she had to kill him.
Rashel moved along the deserted street, keeping to the shadows, moving silently. Not easy when the
ground was wet and strewn with broken glass. There were no sidewalks, no grass, no plant life of any
kind except the dead weeds in the abandoned lots. Just soggy trash and shattered bottles.
A grim place. It fit Rashel's mood as she made her way stealthily toward the abandoned project
building where Vicky had brought them Tuesday night.
From its front door, she surveyed the rest of the street. Lots of warehouses. Several of them were
protected with high chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. All of them had barred windows-or no
windows-and metal freight doors.
The security precautions didn't bother Rashel. She knew how to cut chain-link and pick locks. What
bothered her was that she didn't know where to start.
The Night People could be using any of the warehouses. Even knowing where Steve and Vicky had
fought Quinn didn't help, because he had jumped them. He'd obviously seen them lying in ambush and
deliberately gone after them. Which meant his real destination could have been any of the buildings on this
street-or none of them.
All right. Patience was indicated here. She'd just have to start at one end . .
Rashel lost her thought and leaped back into the shadows before she consciously realized why she was
doing it. Her ears had picked up a sound-a low rumbling coming from somewhere across the street.
She flattened herself against the brick wall behind her, then kept her body absolutely immobile. Her eyes
darted from building to building and she held her breath to hear better.
There. It was coming from inside that warehouse, the one down at the far end of the street. And she
could identify it now-the sound of an engine.
As she watched, the freight door in the front of the warehouse went sliding up. Headlights pierced the
night from behind it. A truck was pulling out onto the street.
Not a very big truck. A U-Haul. It cleared the doors and stopped. A figure was pulling the sliding metal
door down. Now it was making its way to the cab of the U-Haul, climbing in.
Rashel strained her eyes, trying to make out any signs of vampirism in the figure's movements. She