Panthers. They turned into panthers, impossibly huge and black.

His skin crawled.

Doe removed the camera from his cold fingers and smiled at the look on Gregor’s face. “Exactly my reaction. I think we’re going to have to build a lot more zoos.”

He returned to his chair and finished his cigarette in silence while Gregor lay back against the pillow, suddenly exhausted. He stared at the ceiling, his brain on an endless replay loop. Men with guns; panthers. Men with guns; panthers.

“As I said before,” Doe murmured, stubbing out the cigarette on the plastic arm of the chair, “it’s not you we want. We want her. We want them. Tell us everything you know, and all charges against you will be dropped. And you won’t receive any more visits from the police, I can guarantee it.”

She’d been right about having many enemies, Gregor thought as he watched a fly march across the ceiling tiles above. Her own kind wanted to see her dead, this crazy German bastard wanted to stick her in a zoo…she was going to need more guns.

Gregor turned his attention back to Agent Doe. He smiled, humorless. “I think I just realized I have a terrible case of amnesia. Who are you again?”

Doe shook his head, disappointed. “Why would you protect them? Why would you risk imprisonment? They’re only animals, MacGregor.” He said the word animals with a sneer and a delicate shudder that wiped the smile right off Gregor’s face.

“So are we,” he said, his voice hard. “So are we, Doe, but some of us are better animals than others. She told me what you did to her. She told me about the tests, about the torture. So what does that make you?”

Doe stared at him for a long, long, moment, scrutinizing Gregor’s face from his one visible eye. “I am a patriot,” he finally said. “A protector of our way of life and of our race.”

“Hitler thought the same thing.”

There was another silence, long and cavernous, broken only by the beeping of Gregor’s heart monitor, now wildly erratic.

“Lay down with dogs and you get up with fleas, MacGregor,” Doe said softly, one hand wrapped in a death grip around his cane. He stood slowly, in obvious pain, favoring one leg and leaning heavily on the cane. “This is not over. This is only the beginning. Do you think these creatures will be content to live forever in the shadows? Our information indicates there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands. Maybe more; there’s no way to be sure. But consider what will happen if they one day decide humans have been at the top of the food chain too long. You’ve seen what they can do.” He patted the pocket of his suit jacket where he’d stashed the phone. “And that is only the tip of the iceberg, as they say. They’re killers, MacGregor. They’re monsters. Their potential to cause harm to the human race is unlimited. Consider that carefully when you think of the reasons you are protecting your lady friend.”

He moved slowly to the door. One of the gendarmes saw his approach through the glass and swung the door open for him, holding it as he drew near. He paused in the doorway and looked back at Gregor over his shoulder. His gaze was ghostly pale and eerie as it rested on him.

“You will have plenty of time to ponder all that in prison, I’m sure.”

The hospital door was the kind that had a magnet on it, so when pushed against a wall with another magnet, it stuck and held. Agent Doe passed through the door, but because the gendarme had pushed it all the way open it stayed that way, and Gregor was able to overhear a few words as he made a phone call from his cell phone, walking slowly away from his room and down the hall.

“Thirteen here. Section Thirty. Put me through to the chairman. Yes, I’ll hold.”

He rounded a corner and limped out of sight.

Crouched in the same spot she’d been hunkered down in for the past six hours, Eliana’s legs were numb.

The tall, turreted red brick structure long ago used as a furnace and chimney to burn waste during construction of the Eiffel Tower was dwarfed by the tower itself, but on its little grassy hill directly beside it, provided a perfect, unobstructed view of the surrounding area. She’d be able to see D’s approach from any direction.

She’d be able to see if he brought anyone else with him.

Twilight conspired to paint Paris in a romantic glow perfectly unsuited to her mood. It was cold but lovely; light snowfall tinted the sky all silver and haze and muffled the roar of the cars and buses on the Avenue Gustave Eiffel to the south. The lights from the port on the river Seine snaking by to her north sparkled in long, winking waves off the dark water. The tower itself was awash in gold light from the thousands of lamps that illumed it, a spear of brilliance that rose straight up to the heavens from the heart of the greatest city in the world. Everything was beautiful.

Everything was awful.

She hadn’t been able to string together a single coherent thought all day. After the catacomb police—a separate division of the force tasked with clearing out the cataphiles on a regular basis—had finally left and the dark corridors were once again silent, Eliana had gone aboveground and wandered the streets for nearly a full day, blank-eyed and hollow. She didn’t see the pedestrians Christmas shopping who thronged the quaint, cobblestone lanes and chic boulevards; she didn’t care when she bumped into them and they skittered away, frightened by whatever look must have been on her face.

She could guess it wasn’t friendly. Or particularly sane.

Curiously, she couldn’t feel it. She wasn’t feeling much of anything at all, except a tightness in her chest that wouldn’t go away and a growing tension in her muscles that felt like a winch, constricting. There was a black cloud over her head, descending, engulfing her in darkness.

A tingle of recognition snapped her head around and pulled her out of the morass she’d been lingering in with an abrupt jolt, as if she’d been plucked from quicksand. Her heart began to pound. Her hands began to shake.

Because there he was. Walking slowly toward the ticket booth at the south foot of the tower marked pilier sud, queuing up like a regular person with all the other tourists, there he was, dressed identically to her in boots and black leather, a long coat with the collar turned up against the wind.

He stood out like a lion in a flock of dozing lambs.

A lion that carried, in one large hand, a small parcel wrapped in butcher paper.

Instead of the elevators with most of the tourists who preferred to avoid exposure to the cold, Demetrius took the narrow stairs in the south leg of the tower to the second floor. She watched him as he ascended through the open latticed network of iron until he reached the wide platform. Moving with slow deliberation, shouldering through the thinning crowd who darted aside to let him pass like a school of minnows fleeing from a shark, he went to the railing and looked out. He closed his eyes and stayed that way for several moments, unmoving, his coat flapping and billowing around his spread legs, while Eliana watched from her hidden perch, feeling as if her heart would claw itself out of her chest.

Then he turned his head, and across the distance his eyes found hers, as if he knew where she’d been hiding all along. As if he’d felt her watching.

She stood. She stared back at him. Even with the distance, everything was between them, palpable as rain, bright as summer sunlight. His gaze was heat across her face, his dark eyes burned, just staring at her, not a muscle moving, searing intensity and the crackle of invisible flame. She felt pinned by that look, the stark longing in it, the hunger, raw and real. She felt powerless against it, and suddenly a wave of anguish rose up in her, a longing to match his own, and she had to look away.