and gold streaking the bot?tom of the clouds. "Just wait until sunset."
"Why? What's going to happen at sunset?"
Between one heartbeat and the next, a silver shadow flickered in her eyes. "I have no idea... "
"Then why... ?"
"... but I've been promised a story."
7:43. Celluci looked up from his watch and squinted out the window. The setting sun had turned the other building a brilliant white-gold. Whatever was going to happen, wasn't going to happen for another five min?utes. He still had time to stop it.
His right thumb rubbed the scabbed puncture in the hollow of his left elbow.
Four minutes.
Still time.
Three minutes.
It wasn't because she was responsible for, at the very least, the deaths of the two young men whose spirits haunted Henry. It wasn't because of what she'd done to him personally.
She'd used their hope when hope was all those peo?ple had.
Two minutes.
The law could deal with murder, but if Henry's ghosts didn't have the right to deal with the death of hope, who did?
He saw the flaw in the plan at 7:47. By then, it was too late.
Henry'd spent the day wrapped in a theatrical blackout curtain, lying on the floor of the walk-in closet. Although wide open to suggestion, the Pettits had not been easy to get rid of. Having found him, they wanted to stay with him. He'd barely had time to gain his sanctuary and twist the door handle into an unusable chunk of metal when sunrise claimed him.
7:48. Sunset.
They were there. He could feel their presence more strongly than he'd ever felt it before. The air around him was uniformly cold, and when he drew in his first breath, it seemed to move reluctantly into his lungs, coating the inside of his mouth and throat with a frigid film.
Wormwood and gall. He swallowed reluctantly.
His hand rested on the switch of small desk lamp he'd brought into the closet with him. Too bright an illumination would be of no more use than the dark?ness; the overhead light would blind him and wash the spirits out to near invisibility.
When he turned the switch, he could see the two ghosts who'd haunted him from the beginning pressed up tight against his feet. All around them-all around him-were others. He couldn't count their numbers, they kept shifting in and out of focus-here a young woman with the corner of her upper lip pierced, there tormented eyes peering out from under a fringe of hair. Faces. Bodies. The invisible chorus made manifest.
Fear.
It rose off them like smoke, filling the space too thickly for even Henry to endure.
Dr. Mui turned from the window and peered into the shadows of her apartment. One hand rose, an in?voluntary warding against the sudden feeling she wasn't alone.
"I should turn on a light."
Her voice traveled no farther than the edge of her mouth, unable to make an impression on the silence.
One step back. Two.
Her shoulders pressed against the glass.
Henry found himself pressed back into the corner without remembering how he'd gotten there. The closet had filled with the amorphous shapes of the dead, only the original two maintaining form. And they seemed to be waiting.
Waiting.
For what?
He just wanted them to go away. He had his mouth open to demand that they leave him alone when he remembered. It wasn't him they wanted.
"Who's there?"
They were coming closer, whoever they were.
"There's a safe in the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk. Just take the money and leave me alone." The last word slipped from her control and rose al?most to a wail before it faded.
The doctor's feet continued to push against the Mexican tile on the floor. The window creaked be?hind her.
He could feel her life. She wasn't in the next room, but it didn't matter. Her heart beat so loudly he could have heard it from the other building had his own heart not been pounding nearly loud enough to drown it out.
I am Henry Fitzroy, once Duke of Richmond and of Somerset, Earl of Nottingham and Knight of the Garter. My father was a king and I am become Death. I do not cower before the dead.
The Hunger rose to meet the fear and gained him ground enough to rise to his feet. Dark eyes narrowed. "Well," he demanded, "are you going to let her get away with it?"
There could, of course, be only one answer.
Dr. Mui had dealt out life and death with brutal efficiency, protected from pangs of conscience and wandering regrets by armor built of diamond-hard self-interest. The accusation in the