"Hm?" As if startled out of his own uncomfortable thoughts. His eyes turned to me, and I found it slightly easier to meet them.

"Can I ask you something?" My left hand eased on my katana, I even drummed my fingers a little bit against the scabbard.

"Gods protect me from your questions, my curious. Ask." Did he smile? If he did it was a fleeting expression, moving over his face so quickly even my demon-sharp eyes barely caught it.

No time like the present. Since you won't explain anything else, I might as well ask for the moon. I plunged ahead. "Why did you Fall?"

I expected him to turn the question aside, refuse to answer it. He would always make some ironic reply before, or simply, gently, refuse to tell me anything of A'nankhimel. Would tell me myths about demons, old stories, tales to make me laugh or listen wide-eyed with a sweet sharp nostalgic terror like a child's-but never anything I could use to find out what I was, what the limits of my new body were. Nothing about himself, or what his life had been like. He would only talk about things that had happened since I'd met him, and even some of those he wouldn't speak about.

As if he'd been born the day he showed up at my door. I never knew dissatisfaction before I met you, hedaira. Today, he cocked his head. Considered the question.

I felt his awareness again, closing around me. His aura stretched to cover mine, the mark on my shoulder staining through the trademark sparkles of a Necromance's energetic field with black diamond flames.

When he spoke, it was soft, reflective. "I lived for countless ages as the Prince's Right Hand and felt no guilt or shame at what I did. I still do not."

No philosophy for me, he'd said, during the hunt for Santino. I don't take sides. The Prince points and says that he wants a death, I kill.

He was silent for so long, his eyes burning green against mine, that I finally found my lungs starving for breath and remembered to inhale. He'd refused to kill me to gain back his place in Hell. I had it on good authority; better authority than if he'd tried to tell me himself. So what did that mean?

"Then, the Prince set me to fetch a human woman and use her in a game that would end with the created Androgyne under his hand. I found myself in the presence of a creature I could not predict, for the first time in my life."

He shrugged, a simple evocative movement. "I did not understand her-but knew her in a way that seemed deeper than even my kinship with my own kind. And thus, my dissatisfaction."

"Dissatisfaction?" I sounded breathless. What a surprise-I was breathless. Damn hard to breathe when he was staring into my eyes like this.

"I Fell through love of you, hedaira. It's simple enough, even with your gift for complicating matters. I don't want your fear of me; I have never wanted you to fear me." He looked as if he would say more, but ended up shutting his mouth and shaking his head slightly, as if mocking himself for what he couldn't say.

I don't want to fear you either. "I don't want to be afraid of you. But you make it so goddamn hard, Japh. All you have to do is talk to me."

"I can think of nothing else I would rather do." He even looked like he meant it, his eyebrows drawn together as he studied me, his eyes holding mine in a cage of emerald light. "I cherish my time with you."

That made my heart flip and start to pound like a gymnasa doing a floor routine.All right, Japh. One more try. One more chance. "What aren't you telling me?" My fingers tightened on the scabbard.

A long pause. The hovercab began to descend, the driver humming a tune I didn't recognize. There was a time in Saint City when I would have known all the songs.

"Like calls to like," he repeated, softly. "I am a killer, Dante. It is what I am."

So, by extension, that's what I am. That wasn't what I meant, I wanted you to talk to me about Eve. I thought about this, turned it over inside my head. "I don't kill without cause." My eyes dropped away from his, to the slender shape of the katana. Fudoshin. A blade hungry for battle, Jado had said.

Jado lived in Saint City. I wanted to ask him about this sword. Yeah, sure. Like I have so much free time. "Anyway," I continued, "a killer's not all you are. If it was I'd be dead too, right?" You've never let me down when it counted, Japh. You even stood up to Lucifer-and pushed him back. You made the Prince of Hell back off. He's scared of you.

He had no pat reply for that. The hovercab landed with a sigh of leaf springs. He paid the cabdriver. I wondered-not for the first time-where all the money came from.

Then again, Lucifer had paid me too. Cash was no problem to demons. Some Magi even said they'd invented the stuff. It certainly made sense, given money's seductive nature and the chaos it could create.

I decided to push a little more, since he was so willing to talk. "So what's this Key, and what's going on that's changed everything?"

He didn't reply for a few moments, watching the cab lift off and dart back into the stream of hover traffic. "Later, my curious. When we are finished with your Necromance friend."

Disappointment bit sharp under my breastbone. I folded my arms, my sword a heavy weight in my left hand. "Japh?"

"Hm?" His eyes returned to me. "More questions?"

If I didn't know better, I'd think he was baiting me. "Just a request. Quit being a bully. Stop keeping me in the dark."

His mouth pulled down at both corners. But I'd already turned on my heel and dropped my arms, heading down Trivisidiro just like I always used to do, the click of my bootheels marking off each step. How about that? I think I finally got the last word in.

I didn't feel happy. What I felt was uneasy, and growing uneasier by the moment.

I blinked at Trivisidiro Street and cast around, vaguely troubled. If I hadn't been so bloody distracted, I would have noticed it right away. As it was, it took me a few seconds before I realized why I was disoriented.

Gabe's front gate was slightly open. Not only that, but the shields on her property line were torn, bleeding trickles of energy into the early afternoon.

I would have gone first, being accustomed to taking point on any job; it was a habit thirty-odd years in the making and difficult to shake. Japhrimel, however, grabbed my arm in an iron grip that stopped just short of pain and gave me to understand with a single vehement emerald look that he was going first, and if I didn't want an argument I would be well advised to just let him.

I was so badly shaken I did. I followed him, my thumb pressing against the katana's guard, right hand clamped around the hilt. I suppose I should have drawn a plasgun, but I was operating on instinct. A blade is the weapon I find most comforting. Give me a sword and some open ground, a clear enemy in front of me, and I know what to do.

It's just everything elsein my life that confuses me now. The thought was full of bleak humor. Gallows humor, meant to take the edge off my nervousness but failing miserably.

My mind turned curiously blank as I followed Japhrimel's black coat and inky head. As he stepped through Gabe's gate, soundless, the static of his attention stretching to take in the smallest of details, the bleeding shields on her property line flushed red and began to fizz.

I calmed the restive layers of energy with a mental touch, deftly binding together holes ripped in the shielding. It was strange, but there was no sense of personality behind the rips and holes.

If another psion had cracked the shields, there would be a distinct stamp, a flavor to the rents. Something I could track, no matter how good the other psion was. That was part of the trouble with the use of Power, it was so unutterably personal. A bounty hunter, like me, developed a set of psychic muscles and sensitivities perfectly suited to tracking. We had to; it was how we did our jobs. I still thought like a bounty hunter, never sitting with my back to a door if I could help it and seeing the world as a tangle of connections, some chance some not, that if pursued systematically with a healthy dose of instinct would lead me to the person or piece of information I wanted. Nobody-especially anybody who has done something to make someone like me hunt them-manages to get through life without randomly bumping into something or spilling some energy into the ether. Everybody fucks up, sooner or later-and fuckups are mostly what a bounty hunter snags on.