become thick and sharp. Even now he reached up to idly scratch at the dry, cracking skin around the protuberance at his right temple. Before he even realized he was doing it he had peeled a strip of parchment-like skin away and his nail — his claw — had struck something beneath that was hard and marble-smooth, like a tooth.
Danny froze.
Shit.
It was one thing to think it. Another to discover the truth.
He sat up in bed and stripped off his headphones in the middle of a Blink-182 tune. Danny swung his legs over the side, hitched up his baggy black pants and went to the mirror above his dresser. There was a small light on the bureau and he clicked it on, then plucked off the shade for better illumination. He bent over and stared at himself in the mirror. Sure enough, where the bump protruded from his skull above his right temple the dry skin was gone. Beneath it, something else had been revealed. Something sharp and enamel-hard, black as oil.
A horn.
Oh my God, he thought. Then he gave a laugh that sounded weak and trembly, even to him. Maybe not my God after all.
Danny reached up to scratch away the dry skin that encased the horn on the left side of his head and it was like tearing at a scab. It came away with little resistance. His upper lip curled back in disgust and he saw his teeth, which seemed longer and sharper than ever to him.
'Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck me,' he snarled. 'This just so completely sucks.'
In the mirror he saw motion behind him and he turned and stared at the woman who had just stepped into his room. She had mocha skin and long, raven-black hair, dressed like a fashion model, and wore the most playful smile he'd ever seen.
'I don't know,' she said. 'I think they're kind of cute.'
Storm clouds roil above the city of New York, a thunderstorm pregnant with the promise of heavy rain. It's All Hallow's Eve and the year is Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-Eight. Far, far below, the city is alive with teeming life, hidden within cars and beneath umbrellas, New Yorkers determined to enjoy the night in spite of the storm.
Dr. Graves grits his teeth and his breath comes too fast. His heart hammers in his chest and the torn muscles in his shoulder burn. With one hand he grips the railing of the observation deck, the rest of him dangling over the side, rain sluicing off his coat. The wind buffets the face of the Empire State Building, helping him to cling there. But if it should shift direction, Graves knows he will be dead.
Since birth he has worked to hone his body and his mind, urged on by his widower father, who raised his son to be an example of what their people could accomplish if only they set their minds to it. Anyone else would have let go already. The pain that sears up each finger and along his arm is unimaginable. But Graves refuses to let go. Too many lives are depending on him. He's not going to give Zarin the satisfaction of taking his life.
Dr. Graves feels his fingers slipping. The rain has made the railing even slicker. The air itself is moist and it is hard to breathe. He closes his eyes and slows his breath, forces his pulse to match it. Then, with a grunt, he hauls himself up and shoots his free hand upward, latching onto the railing. With both hands secured, he struggles to pull himself up.
His eyes are squinted against the rain and the wind whips against his back. Exhaustion seeps into his bones. He is stronger than an average man, with ten times the ordinary human stamina. He has worked to make his body the pinnacle of human physical achievement, yet Dr. Graves is not superhuman. He draws a long breath, knowing that should he lose his grip he will be little more than a smear on the pavement far below, washed into the sewers by the punishing rain.
Thunder shatters the heavens, rolling through the storm clouds above. Lightning strikes the needle atop the Empire State Building, followed by booming thunder even closer than before. He thinks of Zarin and the storm, the pure rain falling upon Manhattan, and he knows that he has no choice but to live. He must live.
Dr. Graves seethes, muscles popping as he drags himself upward until he can get an elbow on the railing. A sudden gust of wind nearly dislodges him, and then he is able to throw his upper body over the edge, and he is sliding over the railing and onto the observation deck. He tumbles into a wet and heaving ball upon the floor of the deck, rain still soaking him, but it takes him only a moment to catch his breath before he is up once again. Graves stands in a crouch, expecting an attack, but apparently Zarin has already presumed Graves has been dealt with, for he is nowhere to be seen.
Alarm stabs his heart. If Zarin is gone, then it may be too late to stop him from seeding the storm clouds with his poison, from having a deadly, toxic rain fall all over the city. Cradling his right arm, the torn shoulder muscles throbbing in agony, he rises and begins to run along the outer edges of the observation deck.
Graves rounds the corner and Zarin is there, a short, ugly little man bent over a tray of small canisters, each tied in a net and attached to a large balloon. Zarin is filling a balloon with gas from a portable tank, and Graves knows at once that it is helium. And now he knows how the madman plans his attack. The poison canisters must have timers. The balloons will carry them into the storm where they will spray toxins into the air, and the rain will become fatal.
Wiping the water from his eyes, Dr. Graves shouts Zarin's name and races at the killer.
Fog encroaches at the edges of his vision, enshrouding him, and for a moment Graves is lost. Then from out of the fog he sees a figure emerge… it must be Zarin!
But it is not.
Gabriella is wearing a dress he bought for her that falls upon her curves in such a way as to make his heart and lips both stutter. She smiles at him, her chestnut eyes brightening, and the fog begins to thin. There is an electric hum around him and Dr. Graves feels as though he is awakening from a terrible dream. He glances about and finds himself in the familiar setting of his Washington Heights laboratory. To many he is an unwelcome neighbor, but the prestige of his reputation balances out their concerns about the color of his skin, and the fact that Gabriella's does not match his own.
'Leonard,' she says, her voice still thick with the sultry accent of the little fishing village on the northwest coast of Italy where they had met. 'We were supposed to meet your friends at Birdland an hour ago.' There is no chastisement in her voice, only that playful, loving patience. 'Come, now. Enough of science for tonight.'
Graves glances down at the beakers on the table in front of him, at his notebook and the thick black pencil he has been writing with. A warmth spreads through him that has been rare in his life and he leans forward to shut off the burners beneath the beakers, snuffing those small flames.
When he looks up expectantly, she is gone.
The lab is gone.
The air is thick with humidity and the buzzing of flies and the heat is oppressive. Sweat drips down his back and stains his shirt at the armpits, his body so warm that the droplets of it are a cooling relief where they trace their paths on his skin.
Tangled jungle stretches as far as he can see in every direction. Things chitter and rustle in the trees but he pays them no mind. He did not hike all this way to let the wildlife drive him off. This is the Yucatan, where his next step could be into any one of a hundred agonizing deaths. There were far more ways to dive here than there were ways to live. But Dr. Graves was not returning to New York without the object of his quest.
And now he had found it. He held his breath and stared at a cluster of strange, spiny-barked trees in front of him. They twisted in upon themselves, branches intertwining as though in a dance. The Xuithla tree was dismissed by most botanists as tribal myth. Yet here it is. The rarest tree in the world, and if its legendary healing properties are more than legend…
Voices erupt around him, echoing through the trees and Dr. Graves spins in search of their origin. He blinks as the branches seem to reach for him, closes his eyes and lifts his arm to knock them away, and then the sounds of the jungle disappear.
The voices remain.
When he opens his eyes he is in a movie palace on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris. All is dark around him save for the constant flicker of light upon the screen. The voices are speaking French, of course, and he strains to keep up with the translation, trying to make sense of the plot of the film. Even so, he can only lend a portion of his attention to it, for his focus is elsewhere.
His contact is supposed to meet him here, in the theater. The French government has suffered a terrible loss, a theft from the Louvre that seems impossible, with the only clue left behind three single drops of blood tainted with
