"He's already beaten one wife to death, haven't you, Buford? Using his fists." Alex wriggled out of Phillipe's grip and jerked the man upright. She drove her foot into one of Buford's knees, then the other. He went gray in the face and sagged, unresisting, between her fist and the wall. "Just his fists."

"How do you know this?"

"I can see it all," she said, a faraway look in her eyes. "After she was gone, he tossed the house and had a buddy clock him in at work early for his alibi. The police thought it was a burglar who did her." She glanced at Phillipe. "What?"

"You know this man?"

"No."

He had watched the change in her eyes as she told the bully's story. The lovely soft brown was eclipsed by amber, and her pupils were long and narrow. "But you know his crimes."

Alexandra blinked. "Yeah. I do. But only if they're murderers. Only if they've killed, or will kill."

Phillipe knew of many Kyn talents, but not one like this. "How did you read him so completely?"

"He was thinking about the first one, and the new one. The girlfriend he put in the hospital last week. Broken ribs, cracked jaw. She's pressing charges, so tonight he was going over to finish the job. Not anymore, though." Alex let the unconscious man drop to the floor and bent down. "How about I break his neck? A nice, clean T-3 fracture should do it, and he can do his time as a quadriplegic. See how he likes being helpless in a place he can't escape."

Phillipe crouched down and checked the man's lower limbs. "He's already helpless. You broke both of his legs."

"Good," Alex said, and took his hand in hers. "We can go now."

Chapter Twenty

Michael kept some distance between him and Alexandra while she performed her surgeries on the Durands. Phillipe had advised him to do so after relating details about the incident at the bar, and the unusual talent Alexandra had displayed.

"She is very angry with you, Master. Being with you has made her more Darkyn, less human. She wishes to be left to do her work, and to find the answers she seeks about our kind."

"It is not the way." Michael wanted to find her, drag her to his chamber, and keep her there, making love to her and feeding her his blood until she shed the last of her human self. "The sooner she reconciles herself to me, the happier she will be. She is mine."

"No, she is not," his seneschal said without hesitation.

He eyed Phillipe. "She carries my blood and my seed in her body now."

"She stands between two worlds. She must decide for herself to which, and to whom, she belongs." Phillipe gave him a wry look. "She cannot be yours, Master, if you must tie her like a horse in order to ride her."

Michael gritted his teeth and stayed away, immersing himself in safeguarding the jardin and looking for the hunter from Rome. He obtained updates on Alexandra's progress with the Durands through Phillipe, but otherwise left her alone.

Alexandra worked ceaselessly, divided her nights between Jamys and Thierry, performing the operations to repair the boy's crushed hands in the early evening and working on Thierry's shattered legs late in the night. The surgeries were highly complicated procedures that kept the doctor utterly preoccupied, according to Phillipe, and Heather working until she staggered with exhaustion. When Alexandra requested a second, backup nurse to spell Heather, Cyprien had the Kyn working at Charity Hospital send over a surgical RN with enough experience to keep up with Alexandra.

Marcel and Liliette hovered anxiously outside the separate operating rooms, and Michael stayed with them when he could. Jamys remained in his catatonic state, but he looked better each time Alexandra operated on him. At last she finished and it was time for Marcel to have his foot repaired.

"It unmans me to say this," Thierry's brother told Michael, "but I am afraid."

Cyprien thought of the long hours he had spent under the knife. "So was I."

Alexandra was able to correct the deformities in Marcel's foot with two procedures. After the second, Marcel walked normally for the first time in his life.

As Alexandra and Liliette watched, Thierry's brother made one trip down the hall and back, and then pulled the doctor into his arms and wept against the top of her head.

"No pain," Marcel was saying. "Mon Dieu, no pain."

Alexandra held on, patted his back, and made some soothing noises. She looked over Marcel's shoulder and saw Michael at the end of the hall.

He wanted to go and tear them apart from each other. Instead, he kept his expression neutral and his mouth shut as Alexandra accepted Marcel's watery thanks and gave him a little peck on the cheek. Michael would not chase her down, would not drag her to his chamber.

Not yet.

Michael was still brooding over Alexandra when a courier from Chicago delivered a package from Valentin Jaus. In it were the dossiers Jaus had prepared on the four men who had attacked Luisa Lopez, the payment Michael had promised to give Alexandra in exchange for her services to the Durands, as well as a report on her brother, recently returned from Rome and currently on a leave of absence from his parish.

Jaus's investigator noted that upon arriving from Rome, John Keller had been detained at customs and searched. A copy of the customs officer's incident report, which among other items noted Father Keller's poor physical condition, was included in the package. Even more interesting, John Keller had taken his leave and flown to Atlanta only one day after arriving in the States.

Michael picked up the phone and called the suzerain in Atlanta. "Locksley, it is Michael. Very well, thank you. I have a favor to ask."

Atlanta, with its monstrous traffic and maze of business offices, had swallowed John's sister.

It took forty-seven phone calls to find the last hotel Alexandra had stayed at, an economy inn that catered to the business class. Four blocks down from the hotel, John found the bar from which she had called Leann Pollock.

"I don't get a lot of hotel trade in here," the bartender warned him. "They cruise the bars downtown." He took Alexandra's picture from John and studied it. "Oh, yeah, the babe. She was here."

"Did she meet someone?"

The bartender shook his head. "Sat at the bar, kept to herself. Wasn't drinking. Left me a big tip." He handed the photo back and looked again at John's clerical collar. "She in trouble?"

"I hope not." He thanked the man and gave him a card from the hotel where he was staying, along with his room number. "If she happens to come in again, will you call me, please? It's important that I find her."

The trail went cold there. No one in the area around the bar remembered seeing a woman matching Alex's description, so he went one block over and began showing her picture around the shops and businesses.

As John was coming out of a diner, he nearly walked into three scantily dressed women loitering at the corner. The photo of Alex fluttered to the ground. "Excuse me, ladies." He tried to pick up the picture.

"Well, hell, there goes the neighborhood," one of the women said. She scooped up the photo and examined it. "This your girlfriend?"

John tried to smile. "I'm a priest."

She patted his shoulder. "That's okay, honey. We got a special price for preachers. Volume discount, you might say."

The other two prostitutes snickered.

"Do you ladies work this neighborhood regularly?"

Their smiles disappeared. "Yeah," one of the two that had laughed said. "And we don't need nobody come round here talking Bible and chasing off our tricks."

"I was only wondering if you'd seen my sister." John nodded toward the photo. "Her name is Alexandra, and she was in the area a few nights ago."

The three women huddled over the photo, and it was the third who nodded.

"I saw her, that night the cops rousted us off the street. She was with three big guys. She looked pretty pissed off. They had her over there for a while." She pointed to the recessed doorway of a women's clothing store. "Thought she was doing the cutest one, you know, with the way the other two stood, blocking the view from the street."

John had better luck with the store proprietor, an older man who had been working late that night and had listened to Alex's conversation with the man in the black trench coat.

"Sure I remember that bunch. Scared the shit out of me. From what I heard, I thought they might be mixed up with that child molester who got murdered over in the alley three streets over. I wrote everything down so I wouldn't forget, called it into the cops." The man reached under his counter and took out a notebook. "That girl was your sister?" he asked as he flipped through the pages.

"Yes, sir."

"Here it is." The man folded back the notebook. "Yeah, started with her telling him she won't go back to New Orleans. Said she'd kill him. Then she touched his face all over, queer like, with her fingers, and asked him about his surgery."

A patient? "Was he scarred?"

"Not that I could see. Handsome fella." The store owner read over his notes. "He told her he was sorry. She asked him to leave her alone and she didn't want to do it with him no more." He shook a finger at John. "See, that's what made me think they did that sick piece of shit over by the storage place. I felt bad that I reported it and then come to find out he had a little girl over there. Then I call the cops, and they blow me off like it wasn't important. No never mind to me. If that bunch killed that rapist, they should get a fucking medal, I say. Oh, pardon my French, Father."

John wondered why the police hadn't seized the connection between the two cases, or the description of Alexandra, whom he had listed at the missing-persons national database. "Was there anything else they said? Where they were going?"

"All I got here is that the guy talked her into doing it. Said he'll help her burn someone in Chicago—all she has to do is come to some place with a fancy name. I wrote it down, too." He turned the page and studied the dense writing on the back. "Here you go. Lah-fon-tane. Sounds Frenchy to me."