The sun set over the small town of New Venice casting long shadows across its streets and doorways, plunging the dusky sky into wild color. Nearby, in a set of ruined buildings along the edge of a weed choked manmade lake, Tallah-Ahn-Ri was just waking. Although waking wasn’t really the word for it, perhaps emerging was better for she didn’t much ever sleep in the human sense, but then she wasn’t human.

This evening though she kept the lids of her eyes down for a while longer, trying to remember something. Was it a dream? Did she still dream after all this time? Or had something happened while she was resting? No, she would have been aware of anyone in her tower. She had dreamt.

She opened her eyes, surveyed her surroundings, and flipped down from her loft to catch the sunset as it lit up the evening sky. Her ultra-sensitive eyes reveling in the wild streaks of red flaming across deeper tones of cobalt blue and purple. She rarely failed to wake up in time for it and as long as she waited until the sun itself slid below the horizon it didn’t bother her eyes. She watched until it was dark and the stars were inviting her out into the night air. Then she pulled on her boots and decided to walk into New Venice.

On any night that she was working she would have pulled on her gear – kevlar vest, leather jacket, swords, steel-reinforced gloves. But tonight she was home and home was now safe and she was among friends. Walking the short distance to town would give her a chance to fully wake up and survey a little territory on foot. It was easy to miss things from the bike. She slid on her dark glasses against the glare of electric lights and went out.

In town Jerry left the house where he had been staying to look for Mark and Sean. He too slept in the daylight but out of habit but not of need for he was human and lived in the Dark World. But right now what he wanted was company and news from the outside of town so he headed for the garage where he hoped they’d be working on their bikes. The mechanic there had overhauled the engine in his truck and was in the process of stapling a patch onto a rusted-out fender so the visit wouldn’t be wasted in any case.

The street was lit up by electric lights – the residents here never let them go dark. But it would not have mattered; he was accustomed to the dark and wore his amber glasses most of the time. The air was cool and comfortable as he walked. Few people went outside once the sun went down, mostly those who had drawn patrol duty on the outer edges. It was about time for the patrols to change. He saw a man with a heavy coat and hat walking away towards the edge of town, his rifle up on his shoulder. Jerry stopped, that feeling that there was something he should know went running up his spine.

He froze, senses gearing up, the hair on his arms starting to prickle. There, to his right, he could see something flitting in and out of the shadows just behind the light. A man, or what looked like a man, was making his way down the street following the man with the rifle. The way he moved, flowing from pool of darkness to pool of darkness, careful concealment, his translucent skin. Jerry fell into step behind him and reached into his jacket for his knife.

Tallah approached the outskirts of the town in the darkness, intending to find the boys and check up on her people. She should probably start planning her next trip into the city soon but she was enjoying the peace of the last few weeks. She stopped and surveyed the territory. Something was different, something was wrong.

She stood still for a moment, letting her senses take over. She was too far from her tower to go back for her gear. She’d have to go find the boys, lock down the town until they found out what it was. Looking up the street she saw a man walking out towards the edge of town with a gun up on his shoulder, making his way out towards night patrol. Further down the street was Jerry, following him at a distance. Then a third figure stepped out of the shadows; tall, well built, with hair like a black river running down over his shoulders. He was wearing a long black coat over his jeans and long-sleeved shirt. He fell into step between Jerry and the man with the hat, matching his steady pace with long strides.

He was a vampire and Tallah knew him. They were friends, sometimes more. He must have come asking for her. She exhaled and stepped out into the road to meet him. The man with the hat passed by her with a polite nod. She didn’t recognize him, but her eyes were on the other vampire. His name was Rebel and she wondered why he was in New Venice. Then her senses geared up and things started happing in slow motion.

Rebel locked eyes with her, reached into his coat with his left hand, pulled out a steel-dart gun and raised it at her head. At that same moment Jerry was matching his movements behind him, pulling out his heavy silvered throwing knife and casting it, hitting Rebel in the back of the shoulder. He jerked, the gun went off, the dart flashed by an inch from her face. Tallah spun around as it passed and found herself face to face with the man in the hat. She heard an explosion and something ripped through her solar plexus. She jerked back. People were yelling, running. Tallah crumpled to the ground and saw no more.

Tallah was lying on her back on the ground. Pain, everything was pain. She struggled to get up. Strong hands held her back. She was choking on her own blood. “I can’t breath! I can’t breath!” Her own blood was gurgling out of her. Voices were shouting with anger above her. They were fighting over her. She fought them. Tried to escape. Hands were holding onto her. She was dying. She was going to die.

At the sound of the rifle discharge people came running out of their buildings to see what was happening. The man who had shot Tallah quickly faded back into the crowd and vanished. Some of the crowd separated Jerry and Rebel who were trying to kill each other in earnest now. At the town doctor’s direction Tallah was carefully lifted and carried to the basement of the general store where an emergency infirmary had been set up as there were no hospitals this far out. Someone had pressed a folded bed sheet over her abdomen but it was already soaked with dark blood by the time they were able to lay her upon the table. All the while she was fighting them, fighting off death.

“Tallah? Tallah!” The doctor was a veteran of many grievous injuries wrought by plough and scythe. Most of the gunshot wounds out here were either superficial or fatal – there was no middle ground. “Do you know where you are?”

Her eyes cleared for a moment and she tried to speak, coughing up blood from her mouth. He shoved a stiff plastic tube between her jaws and sucked out the obstruction.

“Listen to me. Somebody shot you.” He leaned over her. “I need to work on you. I don’t have anything to give you for the pain. I need for you to let me work inside you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He didn’t expect to get any reasonable response from his patient. He was tying her hands and legs down with leather restraints as he spoke. Thrashing around would only make her die faster.

As he lifted off the bed sheet he could see two things right away; that it was a single bullet and not a shotgun blast, and that he was going to have to sew things back together or she’d have no chance of making it. “Can anyone here get me some morphine?” he shouted as he pulled on a pair of gloves. “Morphine? Heroine? Anything would be welcome right about now!”

Mark, Sean, Rebel and Jerry had pushed their way into the room. They looked down at what was happening on the table. Mark turned away. Sean spoke up. “I think I have something.” He turned and hurried out again.

The doctor didn’t have time to wait. He had to start cutting away the ruined flesh so that he would have a clean edge to sew. Tallah reacted immediately, busting loose the restraint on her right arm and striking out blindly. Rebel and Jerry grabbed her and held her down.

“Tallah,” Rebel spoke firmly to her. “You have to lie still. You have to let him do this.”

Sean returned a moment later with a small black case. “I have some liquid ‘sinthe.”

“I don’t have any idea of how clean this is or how much to give her.” The doctor looked at the milky white fluid doubtfully. Tallah was gasping with pain and distress. “It will have to do. Hope it doesn’t kill her.”

As the needle went in she relaxed and began to breathe in great exhausted gasps. “Don’t let me die,” she whispered as she faded out. “Please don’t let me die.”

“What’cha readin?”

“This book I found. It’s got a lot of old pictures in it. I think she wrote it. It’s pretty cool.”

“Can I see?”

“Tough life.”

“Count your blessings…”

“…lest God think you have too many…” Tallah-Ahn-Ri, newly returned from the dead, opened her eyes and surveyed the room. Her voice was little more than a rough whisper but it made those around her jump.

She looked around through foggy eyes. She was home, in her lair, and there were many people there. People that she knew and loved well. “This can’t be good.”

Rebel sat down next to her bed and placed a restraining hand on her shoulder. “How do you feel?”

“What are you doing here?”

Jerry scooted his chair closer and shot Rebel a look. “Do you remember how you got hurt?”

She blinked up at the ceiling for a moment and then reached for her abdomen.

Jerry held her back. “The doc says don’t touch!”

Finally she whispered, “I’m tired.”

“That’s ok. Go back to sleep. We won’t leave you here alone.”

Mark leaned over. “If you start to hurt too much just yell. Doctor Sean’ll give you something.”

Tallah closed her eyes and faded back into the darkness from where she had awoken.

When she finally awoke only Jerry was in the room with her. “Hey there.”

Tallah regarded him for a moment before speaking. “Where is everyone?” She was surprised by how bad her voice sounded.

“Out on patrol. They still don’t know where that guy is. The one that tried to kill you.”

She gave this some long thought. Her brain was working very slowly. She was stiff from being on her back for so long. Trying to roll onto her side was no good. It just wasn’t going to happen. “I can’t…” It was no good, she was stuck and her back and legs really hurt.

Jerry leaned over and adjusted her pillows. “That better?”

“Yeah,” she croaked. “Tell me everything.”

“There’s this Stalker. Rebel says his name’s Johnson. He’s been killing every vampire that he can find.”

“What else is new?”

“He kills anyone, mortals, vampires, doesn’t care. Opened fire in a nightclub in the city couple of weeks ago. Killed a bunch of kids that were standing between him and his target. Doesn’t follow the Dark Law.”

Tallah hissed between her teeth. The Dark Law was the accepted code of those whose paths crossed between darkness and light. It was what prevented outright war between mortals and vampires. It was what maintained delicate balance between the races. Those who broke the Dark Code lived outside of its protection. Those like Tallah enforced it. The penalty for breaking it willfully was death.

“Gotta find him Jerry.”

“You don’t go findin’ anyone for a long time. You’ll tear all that out and the doctor will have to sew you up again.”

She lay silent for awhile. He thought that she had gone back to sleep. “Then what?”

“Seems he came looking for you. Asked for you in town. Rebel was following him, trying to get a chance to kill him.”

“He should have let us know. He had no business tracking him through my digs without letting me know.”

“Yeah. He and I already had a little talk about that. Anyway, he shot you on the street. Blew a damn big hole in ya! Doc had us bring you here after he fixed you. Thought that you’d be safer here.”

“Home.” Tallah motioned around her. It was a terrible clutter of odd things. Easily over a hundred years of accumulated history. “I don’t come here much. Only when I want to lie in for a while.”

“Yeah. I can see that. Some of the girls from town came in to help take care of you and straighten up a little.”

Tallah shifted around. “They didn’t throw anything away did they?”

The sudden panic in her voice made him sit up. “Don’t worry. They didn’t toss anything, just piled it out of the way.”

“OK. I know it’s weird, but you start to forget after a while. You need to keep all this stuff around just to remember who you were… who you are. You know what I mean.” She finished awkwardly.

“Yeah, I know.” He felt it too. A person’s past life tended to fall into dim memory after enough time living like they did. You might forget where you came from, who you were. A lot of vampires took new names after they had forgotten their own.

“Jerry?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me your story.”

He hung his head. It wasn’t one that he liked to recall, but they weren’t going anywhere for a while. “OK. I grew up down south, near where the Clear Water runs down into the gulf…”

Tallah lay back and listened quietly. This she already knew from his out of place dress and accent, but this was going to take a while to build up.

“There’s a big human settlement down there; farms, factories, not many vampires. Not the kind of place you ever expect to see them, you know? I signed on to work on an oilrig up north when I turned 18. Good money, put down enough to buy a little house on some land. Worked four months on, four months off. Came back with a new truck and big wad of cash. Married my high school sweetheart when I turned 21.”

Tallah knew this story. She had heard it many times in many forms from very many people. It always ended the same way.

“Sherry had red hair and blue eyes, real pretty. She always said that she’d wait for me and she always did. She’d drive out and pick me up at the bus station when I came home and we’d spend about two weeks… you know, making up for lost time. The kids started coming, three boys and a girl.” He stopped, pulled an old leather wallet from the inside of his jacket and handed it to Tallah. Inside were old beaten up photographs of a girl with her long red hair in French braids and a flowered dress, two boys wearing cowboy hats and toy six-guns, and a baby in blue footie jammies. Behind these was a black and white snapshot of an older couple, he had a suit on and she wore her hair up in a beehive. There was no picture of Sherry. Tallah knew the rest of the story by her absence.

“Beautiful.” She passed the wallet back.

Jerry sat silent for a while, flipping the pictures of the children over and over. “I guess it was being in the house with the kids alone for months at a time that did it. She told me she was ok, that we needed the money to take care of the kids and my grandparents. Then I got a letter from my mom telling me to come home. She said that she had seen people going in and out of the house at night but Sherry would lie to her about it. I went to my foreman and showed it to him. He wrote me out on a fake knee injury. I flew home without telling anyone I was coming.”

“I got there about two days short. My family…” He put the wallet away. “I buried them at our church. Went after those that did it. Never managed to get back home.”

Tallah didn’t have to ask any more. It was easier to just keep going than to turn back and face all that. There was no telling how long he had been living like this. There was a lot happening under the surface there, memories, anger, blame. She saw it when he looked at Rebel, the awful resentment.

Rebel who was proud of his dark blood and loved the night. He had sought out that doorway, walked through without looking back. In the full of his manhood, beautiful and strong, he was the kind that mortal women opened their windows for and Jerry knew it. Like them he lived as a Stalker, enforcing the Dark Law from his own side. He would have sent a steel dart through Johnson’s head if Jerry hadn’t pegged him in the shoulder with a throwing knife by mistake. Tallah wouldn’t have been shot. There was an evil blame between them now and sooner or later it would come back to blows. At that moment Rebel walked in through the door.

Jerry stood up and turned for the door, brushing obviously past Rebel. “S’cuse me.”

Rebel watched him close the door and sat down next to Tallah’s bed. “Hey beautiful.”

“Hey.”

“Hungry yet?”

“Yeah, a little. Got something for me?”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a square cloth bag about twelve inches on each side. She recognized it as an insulated hot bag, made to keep food warm. “Fresh from the source.”

She unzipped the package and pulled out the clear plastic bag, it’s warm dark contents sealed tight. “You’re just full of surprises. Thanks!”

“That’s me. One big wrapped package.”

Tallah patted his arm as she settled back to feed. “You’re the best. Thank you.”

“Your friend out there doesn’t seem to think so.”

Tallah pressed the warm bag up to her lips and allowed her teeth to emerge. “He’s a good guy. Saved my ass a couple of months back. Not a bad person to call a friend.”

“Sorry. I haven’t seen that side of him yet.”

Tallah lay back and let the warm fluid flow over her lips. Her eyelids drooped and she started to breathe deeply. Finally she let go and concentrated on the feeling of warmth that was spreading through her. She still hurt but at least she wasn’t wanting for anything other than a sense of peace. “I want your word that you two can keep from killing each other until this is over. I’ll need all of you on my side for this one.”

Rebel took the empty bag from her hand, stood up and looked down at her. “I don’t apologize for what I am. I’m proud of it and I’m not gonna kiss anybody’s ass to make them feel better about it.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m just asking for no hostilities. ‘K?”

“Give me a good reason. If it wasn’t for him you wouldn’t be lying there with a zipper through your middle.”

“I’ll give you seven; four of them were his kids.” Tallah pulled the blankets up around her shoulders to keep the warmth in. She could feel the dawn coming on. “I’m depending on you to lead this hunt for me if I can’t get moving. You know him. You can find him. We need to run him to ground and do him before he walks into another club.”

She stopped. Something out of the way Rebel was looking at her from the corner of his eye said that there was something he wasn’t telling her. “What?”

Rebel shook his head. “Nothing. I need to lie down. Been a long night.”

“Find a spot. I’ll feel safer knowing you’re here.”

She listened to him settle. There was definitely something that he was keeping from her. Usually he was pretty open about things and this concealment was deliberate. Jerry did not come back again that night.

Weeks passed and she healed. At first she only sat up in bed and wrote in her book, journaling her life before she could forget it. Some girls came in from New Venice and helped her to get cleaned up. She felt greasy after the long confinement. In time she started walking again, finding it frustrating that she couldn’t rely on her abdominal muscles to balance and spring. Rebel worked out with her, testing reflexes that had once been too fast for the mortal eye to follow. She gave him a swift kick to the side and felt something pull loose.

“Man!” Tallah sank to one knee, her hands up under her shirt. “That’s nasty!”

Rebel laid an arm across her back. “Hey, you don’t need to open that back up. Let’s call it quits for the day.”

“K. I’d like to get out for a while. This place is getting too close.”

Together they walked out into the night. Tallah’s Harley was carefully hidden behind a set of ancient iron doors. Rebel’s vintage Indian stood next to it. “Feel like a ride?”

She ran her hand over the smooth black and silver gas tank. It was full and firm under her touch. “As a matter of fact I do.”

Tallah discovered that the bike was to heavy for her to lift. The weeks of enforced bedrest had allowed her muscles to waste. She cursed her own weakness under her breath.

“Here.” Rebel took the handlebars, kicked the stand up, and swung up onto the seat. “Climb on behind me.”

She was a little irritated that he didn’t ask first, but then he never did. “Watch the start. She’s temperamental.”

They roared out into the night along roads long untraveled. Tallah wrapped her arms around Rebel’s chest and let him do the driving. This was somewhere they had both been before, and the feeling was comforting. He pushed the throttle on the big machine open and took it up through the darkness, mounting a steep hillside until they could see everything for miles around them. Tallah threw back her head and howled with the joy of speed and acceleration. The moon sailed above, turning everything silver and gray.

Finally he pulled them over and she laid her head on his back, neither of them speaking for a while. Tallah was the first to break the silence. “I want to know what you’ve been keeping from me.”

At first he was silent, looking forward and away from her. Then he turned and looked down at her. “Listen, this guy, Johnson, he was hunting in the New Quarter before I caught up to him. He ran, I didn’t have time to find out how much damage...” He shrugged. “Maybe none, but I wouldn’t count on it after what he did to you.”

Tallah gritted her teeth. The New Quarter was an area where vampires and mortals lived openly side by side. It wasn’t allowed in most of the inhabited areas, deeply taboo. But there were places where the races intermingled freely and everyone looked the other way. She had friends there, lovers, they all did. “Anyone I know?”

“A few I know for sure. Tuffi, Smooth, Remo, some others. Some went missing, I don’t know for sure… Lucas…”

He felt her stiffen and then slide off of the bike. She walked with her hands in her back pockets down the road a little ways and then stood with her head down. He knew that this last news would trouble her most of all. After a few moments he swung off and followed her.

“He knew what the risks were,” he said softly, standing behind her.

“Yeah,” she said a little hoarsely. “We all do. Thank you for telling me.”

They rode back slowly and in silence. Tallah made up her mind that, able or not, the next nightfall they would find him.

They hit the road three days later. Rebel had picked up the trail in an isolated area, far away from the city where the man could blend in and disappear.

“I think this is where he goes to ground.” They were perched on a bluff overlooking a river valley with their lights off. Rebel had led them all out here with the news that Johnson had returned. “It took me six months to find his trailer. That’s it on the island.”

“Running water,” commented Tallah. “We need to find a way to get over there.”

“I thought vampires couldn’t cross running water,” Jerry commented.

“Some can’t,” she replied. “It’s different for all of us. I don’t have a problem with it.”

“Are we sure he’s in there?” Mark and Sean leaned back against the truck, impatient.

“He hasn’t been here in a while,” answered Rebel. “I saw lights going on and off. Think he’s settled in.”

Tallah checked the straps on her kevlar vest. “OK. This is what we do…”

The little silver trailer stood in a small clearing in the trees – isolated – fortified. The insides of the windows were papered over and weapons stood at the ready in every corner and doorway. He was inside – awake - aware that they were coming for him. He knew that they would come after he had failed in New Venice, and that he was going to have to kill every one of them.

Johnson sat alone in the darkness cradling his rifle in his arms. His breathing was very slow and quiet. He was listening for the rustling sound of flight, the catlike foot tread, the beating of a heart; anything that would tell him that they had arrived. Outside Tallah and her crew were carefully slipping past his perimeter alarms, going slow so as not to let him know the direction of their advance.

They surrounded the trailer. No one spoke. Tallah signaled Mark, Sean, and Jerry to circle around to the other side. The trailer had wooden latticework skirts, so there was no getting underneath without broadcasting their presence. There was only one door, but that didn’t mean that he had only one way out. If he slipped away from them now he would be ten times harder to catch later on. Tonight it was all or nothing.

She signaled to Rebel who leaped up and landed firmly on top of the trailer’s roof and then sprang back an instant later, flipping backward down to earth. The impact was answered immediately by a blast from within that opened a six-inch hole in the metal. A blast that would have blown Rebel’s face off had he stayed planted. The door and windows exploded in at four points. They had to get in at him without getting their heads blown off. Johnson was shooting wildly, pellets exploding in every direction.

Tallah didn’t wait for him to run out of load, he would have weapons at the ready. She darted past the door, firing in as she went by, hoping that she didn’t nail any of her own people by mistake. He jolted back, firing off a round into the air. She raised her weapon for a second, better aimed shot when another figure emerged from the back room. Tallah froze.

“Jerry, what are you doing?!” she yelled. “Get out of there!”

Johnson staggered around to face him. There they stood, face to face, weapons up. Neither of them moved.

“Guns down!” Tallah jumped up the steps, revolver pointed to the center of Johnson’s head.

“Don’t pull the trigger,” Jerry whispered.

Tallah heard an expletive muttered behind her as the others followed her inside. She knew that if she or any of them fired at Johnson from this range they’d hit Jerry too. “Jerry, don’t do this.”

“I have to.”

She wasn’t sure who he was talking to. The two men stood staring at each other as time stretched out.

“Put the gun down. I’ll walk you out of here.”

“Jerry, we can’t let him leave. You know that.”

“Com’on man. Let’s go.”

Johnson stirred slightly. “How could you… How could you be with them?”

They all held their breaths.

“Time to go home.” Jerry reached out to take the other man’s weapon.

“Home? I don’t have a home. This is home.” The sound of his voice made their teeth grit.

“No, it ain’t.” Jerry’s voice was very soft, as if he were speaking to a small child.

“My wife, my kids… They were all home. I wasn’t.”

“I know. Neither was I.”

“Drove out to the neighbors to run the combine through his fields. Came back two days later…”

Jerry nodded. “Two days too late.”

This man poured out his story in his grief. Seven kids, his wife, a hired girl alone in the farmland of Nebraska. When he returned home he had found the dogs first. “All of them, like they were animals.” His voice was shaking. “My wife and oldest boy tried to use my hunting rifle. My babies pulled out from under their beds, out of the closets. Why?”

Jerry shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“I never found those that did it. I just hope that every time I kill one…”

Jerry looked into this man’s face. He was old enough to be a grandfather. Gray hair, wrinkled skin, rigid backbone. Only his eyes were sharp and alert. How long he had been living like this there was no way to know. The man looked down at his gun and raised it to his shoulder.

“I miss my oldest boy the most, every day. I miss my wife and the others too, but Robby and I, we were close.” Then he tilted the weapon up to his temple and pulled the trigger.

“No!” Jerry lunged forward but he wasn’t quick enough. The blast made them all jump as it ripped through the sudden stillness. Blood and matter spattered across the wall and the man went straight down. As he fell Tallah could see the look on Jerry’s face, as if he was seeing himself take his own life. Then she understood.

After a moment of silence Jerry carefully removed the man’s discharged weapon from his hand and pulled an old quilt off a chair to cover the body with. Tallah patted his shoulder softly as she went by. Rebel turned away.

“Let’s get a search on, find his stash.”

They started digging through the trailer, trying to find the collection of trophies that every killer brought back from their hunting. Sean flipped up a bench seat next to the kitchen table. “Got it.”

Slowly they went through the odd collection of things. Much of it was pretty old and they didn’t recognize them. There was more hidden here and there. It was obvious that this man had been hunting for decades. Then they found some pieces that were new – a distinctive ring, a belt buckle, a wallet, a denim vest with dozens of buttons and patches sewn over the front and back.

Tallah pulled this out into her lap and laid her hands on it. There was a large hole in the front left panel and the neckline was soaked in dried blood. There was no longer any doubt about the fate of its owner. She hugged it to herself. “Lucas…”

The others looked up at the sound of her voice. Rebel motioned them outside. They went out and pretended to check out Johnson’s trap system. Pretty soon they heard it – the sound of her voice rising from within in a high keening wail.

Jerry looked back at the trailer. “Was he a friend?”

Rebel nodded. “Very good friend.”

Days later, after they had buried the body, collected the weapons, loaded up the personal items Tallah stood outside the silver trailer watching it glow in the moonlight. Mark and Sean had already headed back to New Venice with the weapons, Rebel back to the New Quarter to let them know. Now only the old pickup was left parked on the bluff and Tallah needed to collect its owner.

Stepping up into the doorway she knew where she would find him. He was sitting by the bed before rows and rows of old photographs spread out on the faded coverlet. He had his own wallet in his hands, flipping the pictures over and over in the dark.

Tallah stopped behind him and watched. His back was rounded over, his head down. “Jerry?”

No reply.

“Hey, we have to get moving soon. Been here too many nights as it is.”

“There’s no one to remember them now.”

“Jerry you can’t stay here anymore. You’re going to end up like he was. I want you to come back to Venice, stay with one of the families. They need you there.”

“I don’t know what to do…” His voice choked off with tears.

She leaned down and wrapped her arms around him from behind, laying her head down on his neck as he shook beneath her in the darkness. She understood then; he had seen his own existence in the eyes of that man, known his utter desperation and loneliness, felt himself pulling the trigger. There was nothing to do but hold him in his Dark Night until it passed. In the morning she would take him home to be with his own people and to leave forever this world of darkness. His time was past.

End of Part III: The White Stalker