The only problem with working undercover was dealing with the hours. Not so much the long hours, though occasionally that sucked, but the guilt of not spending every waking moment working when you were undercover. It wasn't a job you started at nine o'clock and did your eight hours for. No matter how late you stayed up the night before, as soon as you woke up, you felt the need to do battle with the forces of evil.

The clock read six thirty and they had an eight-o'clock meeting with Agent Zheng. It was, though, a perfect morning, and Atticus didn't want to stir. He and Ru were tucked together just right, the morning light through the window sublimely pale, and the cries of gulls mixed with the deep horns of ships. He could lie, watching Ru sleep, and feel a fragile peace. So fragile that moving, let alone questioning it, would shatter it all.

Then Ru stirred, opened his eyes, and smiled sleepily. "Morning."

"I love you," Atticus whispered.

"Good." Ru kissed his jaw and snuggled back down into the blankets. "Because I love you too."

And then Ru was asleep again, and the moment hadn't passed so much as changed. Atticus's happiness solidified, and he felt now that he could get up, shower and let in the world.

Kyle was waiting when he came out of the shower, two sweaters in hand.

"What do you think, the gray or the green?"

"What?"

"Which looks better on me?" Kyle held up first the green sweater. "The green brings out my eyes—don't you think?"

"What's the special occasion?"

"We're having breakfast with Indigo this morning." Kyle overlaid the green sweater with the gray. "This is much more macho, though, don't you think?"

It took Atticus a moment to connect "Indigo" with "Agent Zheng." "You've got to be kidding me. Agent Zheng?"

"She's a complete babe." Kyle ducked back into his connecting room and returned—sans sweaters—with a color photo of Agent Zheng. "She's really sharp. She has a mind like a diamond."

"Who uses a machete to cut through red tape," Atticus sang.

"Are you saying I don't have a chance?"

"I'm not saying that."

"If she knows you two are . . . you know . . . it's not like I have to compete with you."

Atticus sighed. He hadn't counted on Kyle wanting to join them at breakfast. "She knows. What did you find out about her?"

"She's twenty-six, like moi,and an Aries, extremely compatible with a Virgo like me. Her tax records claim that she's single and owns a luxury one-bedroom studiocondo in Pittsburgh." Kyle crooned the word "studio." "You know what that means—no live-in boyfriend. Her hobbies are science fiction and mystery novels, motorcycles, and cooking."

Cooking?The stocked refrigerator in Zheng's hotel room took on new meaning. "My God, she's a nerd's dream come true."

Undeterred, Kyle went on. "She's got a Suzuki Katana and a Ford Mustang, a black belt in judo, and is the Pittsburgh field office's top scorer in pistol."

Atticus shooed Kyle back into his room so Ru could go on sleeping. They'd been out late, working through the addresses Agent Zheng had provided. The places were so scattered that they drove nearly two hundred miles just to hit the first two.

On Kyle's laptop various windows were open to lingerie models.

"And the lingerie relates how?"

"These are all things she ordered last month from Victoria's Secret."

He was going to have to have a long talk with Kyle about what the words "find out everything" really entailed. "I don't know, Kyle. Women wear things like that when they have someone to show it off to."

"You think so?"

"Yeah."

Kyle dropped into a sulk.

"What about the Ontongard?"

He looked unhappier. "Either Indigo sanitized her reports completely or there just isn't anything. She joined the FBI in 1999, and I've been searching through five years of reports, but so far, officially, the only 'aliens' she's dealt with are Russian Mafia and Chinese Tongs. I'm sorry, Atty; I'll do some more digging."

Atticus went to gaze out Kyle's window, looking down on Boston Harbor. Fog masked all but the wharf at the foot of the hotel and its collection of sailboats and cabin cruisers. It felt like the fog extended through his soul; Atticus knew he wasn't human, but who was telling him the truth? Could he believe Agent Zheng merely because she was on the side of truth, justice, and the American way? Was "alien" any saner than "werewolf," "angel," or "demon"? Who knew the truth and who was deceiving themselves?

In the long run, did it really matter? After what he and Ru found yesterday, he knew that the cult needed to be stopped.

Deciding that Ice's instruction to Ascii might indicate a general direction to look, they investigated the northernmost addresses on the list. The New Hampshire farm had indeed been sold and the new owners were an investment banker from Boston, his pregnant wife, and their two children. After what they learned at the next site, Atticus nearly drove back to the farm and told the banker to pack up his family and flee any chance of interacting with the cult.

Zheng's list had innocuously noted: burn site.The police report had been dryly worded. What they found was little more than secluded acreage on the edge of extensive wetlands. There had been cinder blocks stacked around the bonfire, making crude fire tunnels, but they'd been numbered and hauled away to FBI crime labs. The ash had been gathered for bone fragments, the ground scraped for evidence, and all that was left was scorched earth and the scent of long-dead fires.

He searched anyhow, crouching in the cold wind, fingering the marshy edges of the clearing. In the break between two slightly singed bushes, he found where a woman had crawled through, missing a left arm and a right foot, burning hot enough to scorch the ground she scrabbled over. In a low hollow, fifty feet from the incinerator, she broke into a collection of mice—but that hadn't saved her. The cultists had smashed the mice with sledgehammers, doused them with gasoline, and burned them. The police missed or ignored the pitifully small, charred bodies. Atticus steeled himself to pick one up, breaking open the heat-mummified remains to find intact DNA.

The cult killed the mice while they were still caught between two species. This cell was a mouse. That cell was . . . well, one couldn't call it human.

"Is that what I think it is?" Ru had whispered from behind Atticus.

"Yes." He dug a hole in the damp, loose soil and buried the mice. There was nothing else he could do; he couldn't take them to the police and say, "These were a woman—someone just like me."

It was a chance encounter with the incinerator's neighbor that exposed the rest of the horror.

"They did it at night—to hide the smoke," she'd said only after they'd shown her ID. She had the doors of her car locked, and the window cracked only a finger width. "The wind usually blows west to east—so it goes out over the wetlands, but one night last fall I could smell it—I live the next lot down the lane—so I called the fire department. They needed to bring in a psychologist for the whole department—it was like something out of a Nazi death camp."

Ru tsked. Atticus hung back, letting Ru finesse her. People liked Ru and opened up to him. "It must be terrifying to have something like that so close to home."

"We've bought a dog and a gun and had alarms installed on all windows and doors."