Luc closed his eyes as the world seemed to tilt beneath his feet. This is it, he thought. The last sample. The creature is all but gone.

His fingers trembled and fumbled as he prepared his phlebotomy needle, but he managed to find the vein and fill his tubes with the black fluid. When he stepped back the roustabouts released the arm, but the creature didn’t even bother to withdraw it into the cage.

Luc held up one of the tubes and tilted it back and forth. The inky fluid within sloshed around like water.

“And next month?” he said to Prather.

“I doubt very much there will be a next month for this poor creature,” Prather said. “But if you want to pay a visit, just for old times’ sake…”

Prather’s voice faded, replaced by a vision of Milos Dragovic’s rage-contorted features and his coarse voice echoing, Where is my shipment? Where is my shipment?

“I don’t…” Luc’s mouth had gone dry. He swallowed. “You will call me if… when it happens?”

“Yes,” Prather said softly. “We will mourn our brother.”

Struck by the note of genuine melancholy in Prather’s tone, Luc glanced at him but saw no mockery in the big man’s expression.

Feeling as if the tent were collapsing on him, Luc turned to go. He realized too late that he was leaving the back of his neck exposed to the kind of crushing blow that had killed Macintosh. He hunched his shoulders as he hurried for the exit, but no one followed him.

He allowed himself a sigh of relief when he hit the night air but did not slow his pace. No time to waste. He had to get this sample to the synthesizer immediately.

15

“Here,” Milos said, patting the cushion next to his thigh. He wore a double-breasted Sulka suit, pure cashmere navy chalk over a pearl gray thirty-three-gauge worsted cashmere turtleneck. “Come sit by me. I want to share something with you.”

The young model swayed toward him across the deep carpet of the living room like she was strutting a runway. He didn’t know her real name. She called herself Cino—pronounced “Chee-no”—but Milos doubted that was on her birth certificate. She’d probably been born Maria Diaz or Conchita Gonzales or something like that. She’d never tell. And what did Milos care about her given name? All that mattered were the dark, dark eyes under the silky widow’s veil of her bangs, the jutting cheekbones, and the jaguar-lithe body.

Milos watched her move toward him now, her slim hips swaying rhythmically within the tight black sheath she wore. He’d met her two weeks ago at a club opening and had been struck by how thin she was—downright bony. She looked better in her photos where the camera did her a service by adding a few pounds to her anorectic frame. Women this thin did not populate Milos’s fantasies. In his dreams he preferred sturdier bodies, women with more meat on their bones, flesh he could grab and squeeze and hang onto during the ride. Someone like Cino… well, sometimes he was afraid she’d snap like a twig.