The carving knife still in his left hand, Asher got to his feet and said, "Come here."

Ysidro did not move. His slender hands remained exactly as they had been, dead white against the blued steel of the dissected gun, but no more inert than the spider who awaits the slightest vibration of the blundering fly.

"You understand, it is not always easy to conceal what we are, partic-ularly if we have not fed," he explained in his low, light voice. Heavy lids gave his eyes an almost sleepy expression, not quite concealing cynicism and mockery, not quite concealing that odd gleam. "Up until ninety years ago, it was a simple matter, for no one looks quite normal by candlelight. Now that they are lighting houses by electricity, I know not what we shah" do."

Ysidro must have moved. The terrifying thing was that Asher did not see the man do it, was not-for a span of what must have been several seconds-conscious of anything, as if he had literally slipped into a trance on his feet. One second he was standing, knife in hand, between Lydia's sleeping form and the desk where the slim intruder sat; the next, it seemed, he came to himself with a start to find the iciness of Ysidro's fingers still chilling his hand, and the knife gone.

Shock and disorientation doused him like cold water. Don Simon tossed the knife onto the desk among the scattered pieces of the useless revolver and turned back, with an ironic smile, to offer his bared wrist to Asher.

Asher shook his head, his mouth dry. He'd faked his own death once, on a German archaeological expedition to the Congo, by means of a tourniquet, and he'd seen fakirs in India who didn't even need that. He backed away, absurdly turning over in his mind the eerie similarities of hundreds of legends he'd

uncovered in the genuinely scholarly half of his career, and walked to Lydia 's desk.

It stood on the opposite side of the study from his own-in actual fact a Regency secretaire Lydia 's mother had once used for gilt-edged invitations and the delicately nuanced jugglings of seating arrangements at dinners.