Her virtue for a handheld missile launcher.

Now that might be fun. And for a second, she thought about conjuring one out of thin air, just for shits and giggles. It would be exciting to see a fireball explode under those rotator arms, and then watch as the twisted, no-longer-flight-worthy carcass careened into a building. Or maybe the thing would pull a Ping-Pong ball and ricochet into a couple of skyscrapers, the flanks of the stone and glass constructions like rackets to send it back and forth.

People would definitely be killed, and not just the pilot. Maybe a transformer would get overloaded and become a secondary source of fun and games. Chaos. Sirens. Humans tripping over each other, trampling puppies and kittens, babies rolling like melons down the street.

Yay. Rah.

She should get right on it.

Or maybe . . . she would just keep wandering.

As she resumed her promenade, she played with her short skirt. It was vintage Escada, a poufy, poppy-colored, polka-dotted flounce that was only long enough to cover her thong. She’d put it on along with a little muscle shirt and fifteen “Like a Virgin” sautoirs, the crosses and beads and chains tangling in a mesh over her breasts. For shoes, she went straight-up Carrie Bradshaw—Jimmy Choos from 1991. In a pink that ever so slightly clashed with the skirt. No purse because she had just plain forgotten, and she didn’t need a coat in the cold because, hello, demon.

It was a good outfit. Chosen from her wardrobe with forced care.

An attempt to self-medicate with fashion.

In the back of her mind, she heard Dr. Phil say, And how’s that working for you?

Not well, Phil. Not at all, actually.

She took another pretend shot at the helicopter, and then her child’s version of an autoloader disappeared as she sneezed and had to cover her lower face for decorum. Fuck. That smell. It was like someone had tied a dead raccoon to a stick and sprayed the bloated nose-nightmare with drugstore perfume—

Devina stopped, her senses threading out.

In slow motion, her head turned on its spine and she narrowed her eyes on an alley, about which nothing seemed remarkable: There were fire escapes spiderweb’ing down the back sides of some older buildings, a couple of dumpsters . . . and miscellaneous pavement trash that collected in doorways, the city’s version of dandruff.

None of that mattered. What held her attention were the two male figures about a block down from the intersection she was standing in. One was lying faceup in a classic pose of supplication, arms flopped out to the sides, boots lolling at the ends of his ankles. The other was bending over as if he intended to kiss the first, but not with passion. It was more like the Grim Reaper coming to claim a soul, menace and death marking the exchange, something consumed from the one who was a victim by the one who was a predator.

As a tingle curled in Devina’s gut, the sensation was at once achingly familiar and utterly alien. It had been that long.

And it wasn’t just that two men getting it on was awesome.

Something swirled around the tableau of dominance and submission, and it wasn’t the stench.

Evil. Pure, high-octane evil was down there in that alley. It was . . . her, but not her, her essence captured and held within the flesh of the one that was on the ground . . . and yet he was not what interested her. No, she was enthralled by the one who was now opening his mouth. Now beginning to inhale. Now . . . drawing up and out of the parted lips of the supplicant a black ether, breath, but not breath.

Devina stepped into the shadows, and cast a spell around herself, ensuring that she was indistinguishable from the bricks and mortar she abruptly had to lean against. Beneath the aggressor, the body of the victim jerked, the chest rising up, the head falling back as if in great ecstasy or great agony. And that was when she saw the slice across the throat and the black blood oozing out of the jugular vein.

Whispers deep in the core of her sex became stirrings . . . which expanded to an honest-to-demon need, the pilot light, long dimmed, flaring to life and heating her body.

The sounds of the transfer, of the consumption, were like the sucking and smackings of a blow job, erotic in her ear, the gurgling, the gasping, the clicking of the dead man’s mouth, fuzzing her brain as her blood began to race. Heat pooled between her thighs and did not stay put, the transforming tide washing upward into her breasts, her nipples tightening, her heart racing such that her plump lips parted and she drew in a quick gasp.

The next thing she knew, her hand was under her skirt and between her legs, the rubbing and pressure a compulsion that was sweetly served by her fingers. Meanwhile, the man on the bottom, the one with the slit throat, began to tremble and jerk, sure as if that which was being extracted was presenting some kind of resistance to its removal. The faster and more torturous his quaking, the faster and more rigorously Devina stroked herself—

She orgasmed just as there was a howling screech.

The release made her squeeze her eyes shut, and for a moment, she was so suffused in pleasure, she forgot she was standing against a building in a shitty alley in a not-so-hot part of Caldwell.

When her lids eventually lifted with languorous delay, there was only one man where before there had been two, and the one who had been doing the inhaling listed to the side and fell over onto the ground. Was he dying? He barely breathed, his skin pasty white, his fingers twitching, his legs jerking, as if poison was in his system. Meanwhile, evil emanated from his very pores. He was a resplendent repository for all that was vile and depraved, a black hole of the kind of thing that coursed through her own veins.

He was her twin.

When he seemed to stop moving, Devina took a step forward. And another.

She didn’t want to be alone anymore. She was tired of these cold, empty streets, this listless existence, this . . . isolation.

If he died right here? It was too much of a loss to bear even if she didn’t know him. She had been an empty shell since she had landed back in the hustle/bustle of this world, wandering the night like a lost soul, pining after an angel who had despised her rather than loved her.

But this man? This . . . whatever he was?

He would not despise her. And she would have him for her very own—

“Cop! I’m here!”

From out of thin air, an entity coalesced and knelt by the man. Devina’s man. Before she could kill it, her doppelganger reached for the new arrival with unsteady hands.

“Fuck, V. God . . .”

“I gotchu. Come here.”

With impossible gentleness, the entity reached out and gathered her man close, holding him to a chest that was broad and strong. And then a nightmare happened. The two became one, their bodies entwining, as a horrible, awful light began to glow. The illumination was the antithesis of everything Devina had been attracted to, a beneficence that cleared conscience and cognition at once, that eased suffering, that provided miracles too unlikely to even be prayed for. It was the force that returned the lost to the loved one, that rescued the drowning, that gave the first breath to an infant who should not have survived the birthing canal.

Devina stumbled back in disgust.

She was of a mind to murder that interloper, the one who had brought the unwelcomed light to the delicious dark. It was hard not to feel betrayed by his presence, even as she was aware that hers was a very one-sided sense of violation.

The contact between them and the glow that surrounded their bodies didn’t last forever. Even though it felt like it persisted for an eternity.

And when whatever process or procedure was done, the evil was gone, only the two men remaining. Except—no. These were not men, were they. They were other.

They were vampire.

Okay, that was fucking hot.

Jo had been a rule abider all her life, and it was probably the adopted thing. She had always felt if she didn’t do what she was told, she would get sent back to wherever the reject kids got returned to, like a microwave with a faulty latch or an alarm clock that didn’t go off or a suitcase that had a handle broken.

And Jesus, when you had a police officer pointing a gun at you? All that yes-ma’am inclination ratcheted up even higher.

“Put the weapon down now!”

As her hand followed her brain’s command to release, she had a moment when she prayed this wasn’t a Quentin Tarantino film where the damn thing would hit the ground and somehow go off into her knee, scaring the policewoman into shooting her full of holes as well—all while some seventies standard played in the background and the man next to her suddenly had wide lapels and a desire to talk about what quarter pounders with cheese were called in Europe.

Except it didn’t go down like that.

The man next to her might have kept the lapels of his leather jacket just the same. But he somehow caught the gun before it had dropped more than three inches from her hand.

And nothing happened.

The policewoman didn’t start pulling her trigger and there were no more verbal commands from her, either. She just stood where she was, crouched behind the cover of her open door, gun trained straight ahead.

“Come on,” the man beside Jo said. “Let’s go.”

He put the weapon back in her hand and started forward.

“What are you doing?” she said, staring at her gun as if she’d never seen it before.

“She won’t be a problem. But we’ve got to move.”

Jo looked up into the stark face of her very questionable savior. He was utterly calm, almost bored—while he had his back to a member of the Caldwell Police Department who two seconds ago had been trigger-happy.

But who now seemed like she’d swallowed an Ambien. Or twelve. Maybe fifteen.

This is my answer, Jo thought. This man is what I have been looking for.

As she nodded and they took off again, she was aware that the choice to go with him was a threshold, and having crossed over it, she would be wise not to take for granted that she was going to like the answers she found. This quest thing she had been caught up in had always been frustrated up until now. But sometimes, there was comfort to be had in the unattainable. You didn’t appreciate it, however, until you got the kind of information that you only wanted to give back.

Too late, though. She had voted with her feet.