From time to time, life will deal me a new experience, something that I never before have encountered. As the years pass, such treasures become hard to find, but one had possessed me now.

The time I spent with Freya that morning had eased my troubled mind. It wasn't quite as powerful as the feeling I got after having drank blood, but it was a close enough substitute. Exhausting myself on her sweet and fragrant flesh had left me calmer and my thinking a bit clearer. It was only a little, but it helped. I cannot express to you how good being with her made me feel.

I decided to take the bull by the horns and to go poke around corporate headquarters of the Chambéry company. I so far had surveilled the place at a distance, but I chose that day to go inside and have a shufti, up close. What is the worst thing that could happen? There was a lot of security, but it otherwise was a public building with people coming and going on various bits of business. There might be something there worth seeing.

And, if nothing else, I would make my presence known. Not that my rivals didn't know I was in the Chicago area—or "da Region," as locals sometimes called it—but they probably did not know I was so close.

The idea was not a thing to relish, but such a move just might flush them out, lead them to come after me. Making myself a target again was a terrible thought, but I'd been on this vendetta against Whitefarrow for more than a quarter century. It wasn't a nonstop campaign, but I'd cut my petty path through his people and his assets. Marion so far was the biggest fish. I don't know that eliminating Isolde would cripple my enemy, but the deed couldn't help but hurt him.

The corporate compound—a campus they called it—was located in a broad park on the outskirts of Evanston. Even in the gloom of the late fall, it was attractive to the eye. And I pulled into the parking area in the midafternoon and began to look around.

Why not start with the main entrance? It seemed to be the normal thing to do, so I sashayed up and let myself in through the broad automatic doors. (Those kind of things have always creeped me out a little.)

The building's reception area was vast, with a security and information desk on the far left, several sets of doors marked Auditorium ahead, and a series of posters, paintings, and information vestibules spread tastefully throughout.

From the sound, some sort of conference was being held in the auditorium. I ignored that.

The displays charted the history of the company, its ties to the local community, and the various businesses and sectors of the economy into which it had poured its resources.

I took a look at the displays. It was very impressive, so impressive that I spent more time than I'd intended looking at the various solar power, international development, and infrastructure growth projects that Chambéry championed and in which they had invested heavily.

There was no telling whether such projects were a smokescreen, but the presentation was great. Isolde had always been stylish and full of flare.

At about the same time that I finished with my self-guided tour, the doors to the auditorium opened. A stream of people followed; some attractively dressed and others in their just barely suitable workaday attire. Many of these folks departed the building, and others still paused to chat.

Most seemed to be moving toward a set of escalators and elevators that were situated on the far side of the security desk. Everyone headed in that direction appeared to have lanyards with security credentials around their necks, but the security officer didn't seem to be checking any of them.

This would be my chance to get past security, but as I moved in that direction in a confident stride, I pulled up short.

A trim woman of just over five feet emerged from the auditorium, speaking as she did with someone to her right. The woman was not quite beautiful, but there was an elegance and a perfectly coiffured aura around her. Of course, there were hangers on. There were always hangers on.

I looked at the woman, examined her from head to toe, and much to my horror was assailed by the deepest sense of warmth and nostalgia. God, but she had a beautiful nose.

"Hello, Isolde," I said as I approached my onetime friend. I cannot tell you the great depth of my surprise at seeing her out during daylight hours. Even greater was my astonishment at realizing she sported a handsome tan.

Everything about her was perfect.

When she turned, and our eyes met, there was not a hint of shock or fear on the woman's face. I was not fooled. No one I'd ever met exhibited such self-control. But a faint flutter of her eyelashes, one that anyone else would take as a sign that she'd been approached by someone whose name she'd forgotten, told me of her intense distress.

She stopped walking, but for a moment she was speechless. I had the knife I often carried with me, but I didn't reach for it. Instead I spoke.

"You look beautiful," I said. There was a warmth and an emotion in my voice that I hadn't intended. It was only then I realized that I was speaking French, the French of Outremer, a variety that only Isolde, of all the people in this room, would understand.

To my continued surprise, she stepped over and kissed me on each cheek and told me how nice it was to see me. There was authenticity in her words. We stood that way for some time talking as old friends do. I'll be honest, I don't remember exactly what we spoke of.

I do recall that we switched languages a number of times, as people like us often did, shifting back and forth between the various pidgin dialects, mishmashes of this that and the other, that only people like us spoke. It was the first time I'd used any such parlance in many years. What people standing nearby must have thought of us.

There was only one point of disquiet in our otherwise amiable conversation. When I asked about her love life, a faint look flickered across her face. What was it exactly? Anger? Fear? It wasn't shame or embarrassment. Asking about a friend's love life was de rigueur among our kind, polite in a way that a normal person enquiring about the health of a friend's family might be. In any event, the woman always had been bold and open about her many triumphs.

There was something there I did not see.

After some minutes of polite and, yes, even affectionate conversation, Isolde begged my pardon. She had work she needed to attend. She hesitated only a moment before reaching over and rifling through the jacket pockets of the young man with whom she'd been speaking. The fellow seemed surprised by her move.

When her hand reemerged, she wrote a few things on a pleasingly embossed business card, the kind fancy folks only gave to their closest acquaintances, before passing it to me.

"We're having a holiday get-together at my place in Kenilworth this evening." She hesitated for a moment. "Adia, I do hope you'll come."

For a split second, my anger again rose. The young man from whose pocket the card had come no doubt was a colleague of Weaver, if not the man's replacement. And murder again entered my heart.

But I wanted to get close. I had to get close to do the thing I needed to do. I certainly couldn't kill the woman now; twenty or more people were nearby. I slipped my mask back into place.

"It's an honor. I wouldn't miss it for the world," I said, pocketing the card.

"Bring a friend if you like. There'll be all sorts of people there." She yet again surprised me by taking me by the shoulder and pressing her lips against mine. There was great warmth and affection in her touch, but I also felt her faint trembling. Whether it was out of fondness or out of fear, I knew not.

We bid one another our friendly goodbyes, and she headed for the elevator. I left through those odious sliding doors and made my way back to my rental car.

I didn't know what to make of any of it. Isolde always was so tightly controlled that it often was difficult to read her, even for her closest friends—someone I never truly was. But despite my fury, I had felt myself succumb to the butterflies of nostalgia in her presence. Perhaps she felt the same.

Should her invitation cheer me? "There will be all sorts of people there," she'd said. The message was clear. It meant that it was an event open to normal folk, people who knew nothing about our true nature. Was that meant to reassure me that she meant me no harm? Or was it her way of warning me not to do anything inappropriate?

That my one-time friend was walking around in public during daylight hours, with scarcely a bodyguard in sight, filled me with the deepest and most profound astonishment. I never thought I'd live to see the day. The more I thought about it, the more it shook me.

But why did it make me feel so? ... Why would such a thing unnerve me? I had been moving about in daylight for many, many ages and once was considered eccentric for it, a complete oddball.

There was something in me that wanted to burst.

I never imagined when I began this tale that I would feel compelled to recite to you the story of how I came to this point. It is such a tale of woe, one in which I sometimes think of myself as the villain. But the need to share is with me now, and I'll try hard not to make my words a burden.

The issue is easy enough.

I met Ben Garcia at a Tucson restaurant back in 1979, and he was the nicest man I'd ever met in my life. I'm not sure why we started talking, but he was guest of honor at a party being held in the backroom and, being the chap he was, was embarrassed by the attention. He sought refuge without, and we started talking and just didn't stop.

Ben must have been in his fifties by then, and was a Korean War veteran, widower, and father to a daughter who had died of cancer three months after her twenty-first birthday. He was a vessel spilling over with love, but with nowhere to pour it. I silently nominated myself for the job.

He was an extraordinary friend, and he taught me much about the world and how it worked. Even more, he showed me exceptional kindness, and he filled my heart and soothed my soul in ways I never dreamed they needed soothing.

Who would have thought after 800 years that I so would have need of a father? But I did, and he asked nothing in return but the chance to share his kindness and his affection.

I thanked that wonderful man by introducing him to the wrong class of people. Ben had retired to his native Tucson after a career as an investment officer at a firm in Los Angeles. A man of my acquaintance, not even a true friend, made some demands on Ben's honesty and integrity with which my friend Ben was unable to comply.

Ben did not deserve to die that way. Over what? Some money?

There is a little quirk in me that when I truly despise someone that I find it hard even to utter their name. Whitefarrow, the fellow was called, the man against whom I waged a vendetta. I can't abide people who take things from me, not even trifles. And Ben's friendship was the thing I cherished most in the entire universe.

I wasn't perfectly sure of how enmeshed Isolde was with my enemy's affairs, but I knew it was considerable. I knew also that Whitefarrow, whose second birth was not too many years ago, was one of the first of us who chose a different life, decided not to live as a scavenger.

He had been a banker in his first life, and many of my kind benefited in one way or another from the investments he managed and the many illicit schemes that he devised to keep himself and others in the green. He fancied himself some sort of mastermind, a latter-day vampire lord—my heavens, the ridiculous things young blood drinkers can dream up.

I slowly had been taking things from him these last years, and now I was here for Isolde. But what was the nagging sensation I was feeling?