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not want any of us in the triumvirates to be alone, ma petite.”

“You’re afraid that the council or Mommie Dearest will try something else.”

“Aren’t you?” he asked.

I thought about it and could only nod. He smiled and touched my face. “Then I will watch with you.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s an ongoing police investigation. I can’t share it with civilians.”

He gave me a look. “I hardly think I qualify as a civilian.”

“But you aren’t a cop, either.”

“I can spell our so-helpful Micah with the weretigers, but you can’t be alone. If the council tried for you when you had no one to touch, I am not sure what would happen.”

We debated, not quite argued, but in the end we compromised. Nicky stayed with me, because if I ordered him not to tell anyone what he saw, he’d have to do what I said. Damian got to stay with me for the same reason. Something about him being a vampire servant made it almost impossible for him to refuse a direct order from me. I tried not to give him orders much, but I seemed to have a lot more control over him than I did over Nathaniel, and for that matter a lot more control over Damian than Jean-Claude did over either Richard or me. Since I was the first necromancer in vampire history to have a vampire servant, none of us knew why Damian had to obey me when the rest of us didn’t have to obey anyone. It was just another mystery. Anyone who might know the answer to it was trying to kill us right now, or on the run from the Mother of All Darkness. We’d figure it out later, but right now I had a crime scene to look at.

I realized that I was glad to have something else to concentrate on besides our personal or metaphysical problems. Police work wasn’t always simple, but it had clear-cut goals. You figured out who did it, or what did it, and you caught them, or killed them. Problem solved. When crime busting is easier than your personal life, something has gone seriously wrong.

The fact that the underground of the Circus of the Damned had a computer room still seemed weird to me. Most vampires weren’t big on technology, or modern inventions that hadn’t been around when they were “alive,” but Jean-Claude was an early adapter and he was insisting that all his people know the basics. Hell, he had some of the dancers taking turns with online blogs. They were on Facebook, MySpace, and even Twitter, whatever that was. It was getting to where I was the least tech-savvy person we had. That seemed weird, too. I was the human being, sort of; wasn’t I supposed to be better with this kind of stuff than the vampires?

The only light in the computer room was the soft glow of monitors. Valentina was at one of the terminals with the chair cranked as high as it would go, so her five-year-old body could reach the keyboard. She was dressed in a pink dress that was all lace and bows down to white tights and patent leather shoes. No one made her dress like the proverbial little girl. It was actually a step forward from the centuries-old clothing that she’d come to us with. The delicate triangle of her face was painted ghostly by the monitor’s glow. She was staring at something on the screen so intently that she didn’t seem to hear us.

I had a horrible thought. She and Bartolome, who was stuck at twelve, had both been in the underground when the ardeur hit everyone. What had happened to them?

“Valentina,” I said.

She startled visibly and hit some buttons. The screen flickered, and then there were pictures of little cartoon animals floating over it. She began to move the mouse as if she were concentrating on the children’s game. She might actually enjoy the game, but whatever she’d been doing moments before hadn’t been a screen full of big-eyed cartoons. She only looked five. In reality she was older than Jean-Claude. Actually both she and Bartolome were two of the oldest vampires in St. Louis. They were trapped in children’s bodies, but they weren’t children.

She glanced behind her, smiling, the intensity that I’d seen on her face when I first came through the door gone. She turned a perfectly good little girl’s face to me. She could even make her eyes fill with that naïve light, but it