Then suddenly he was lying in the gutter, filthy and bruised, his hair caked and crusted with grime, sweat, an empty bottle clutched to his chest. People walked over him, sniffing in distaste, someone stealing his boots right off his feet while Gabriel sang quietly to himself off-key, his eyes closed, heart screaming with a pain so violent that Sara wanted to weep for him, for all he had been, all he had lost.

But the image shifted again, and she was there. In that tiny room. Seeing through Gabriel’s eyes the loveliness of Anne’s arm in the moonlight, his desire to capture her. She felt the fuzziness of his mind, understood the languor, the sharpness, the pleasure of the powerful absinthe-and-opium cocktail. Then the confusion, the sharp shock when he realized that Anne was dead, her blood on his fingertips. The shift from pleasure to horror in the minute it took his fog-filled brain to process what the smell, the wet feel on his fingers was. The smack of death, harsh and ugly, ripping into his daily stupor.

The vision cut off before she could see Anne’s face, but it was enough to understand the horror of the moment, the self-hatred, the grief, the guilt.

Sara whispered, “Gabriel. I’m so sorry.”

It wasn’t possible that he was immortal, not by the standards of the reality she had always lived in, but she knew it was true. She had seen it, felt it. However it was possible, whatever it meant, he was the same man.

He squeezed her hands. “So it was me who found Anne Donovan dead. She was the girlfriend I told you about who was murdered, and for a hundred and fifty years I wondered if I could have done that, if I could have been hallucinating, blacked out, and taken a knife and killed her. I had to know. I had to find some way to deal with the answer—to make it right, for Anne.”

“Why would Marguerite do that to Anne?” she asked, glancing back at Jocelyn. “And please tell me my friend is going to be okay.”

“She’ll be fine. When we’re done talking, I can wake her up. She won’t remember anything.”

He was holding her hands so tightly her fingers hurt, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him to ease up. The solidity of his touch was comforting and she suspected he actually needed to hold on to her, to reassure himself that she was still there, standing with him.

“Marguerite did all of this because she was jealous. She was jealous of women Raphael was involved with. He had visited Anne earlier that night before I got there, and Marguerite must have seen them together. She seems to have concluded that her relationship with Raphael was more than it was, because I don’t think they were ever actually dating.”