It would be just getting dark as the train pulled out of the Gare du Nord, but that would be sufficient.

As he turned over the pages of the Journal, the top of his mind sifted and sorted the mishmash of Serbian demands for independence from Austria, Russian demands for justice in the Serbian cause, another massacre of Armenians by the new Turkish government, plots by the Sultan to regain his power, and the Kaiser's pursuit of ever faster battleships and ever more powerful artillery, while some other part of his thoughts seemed to see through those reports to the uses the Austrian Emperor-or the Czar or the Kaiser, for that matter-would have for a vampire.

In any direction he looked, the possibilities were terrifying.

Europe skated the rim of cataclysm, that much he knew. The German Kaiser was praying, literally and publicly, for an excuse to use his armies; the French were burning with pride, rage, and the old wounds of the Alsace. The Empire of Austria was trying to hold on to its Slavic minorities, while the Russians trumpeted their intention of backing up those minorities' "pan-Slav" rights. Asher had seen firsthand the weapons everyone was rushing to buy, the railway lines being constructed to carry men to battles, and in Africa he'd already seen what those weapons could do.

Would men who contemplated sending other men into machine-gun fire-or contemplated turning machine guns on soldiers with only rifles in their hands- shrink from handing over a political prisoner or two per week to someone who could slip into consulates, workshops, departments of navy and army utterly unseen?

He turned the page and, for a moment, saw their faces again in the dark of his mind. The coarse and powerful Grippen. Ysidro's enigmatic disdain. Bully Joe Davies. The beautiful Celeste.