Buddha said it was good to live in the moment. In the Vedas, she’d read that there was only the moment. Her species had no holy books, just records of their possessions. Her mother had told her, “Humans have holy books because they’ve journeyed closer to God than we have.”

She noticed that the smell of the samlor driver was washing over her, blown back by the breeze. She took a deep drag on her strong Thai cigarette, attempting to blot out the delicious scent.

It did not work. Okay, she thought, I’ll go with it. She looked at the driver’s sweating back. A thirty-second struggle and she’d be fed for another couple of weeks. The thing was, the hotel had written down her destination in Thai for him. He would not deviate from the route. She needed to get him to go down some darker side street. “Speak English?”

He did not respond. So she’d have to jump him right out here if she wanted him, and that would never do. You did your kills in private, and you destroyed all trace of the corpse. Even Miriam Blaylock followed those two essential rules.

The driver’s skin rippled, his muscles surged. Mentally, she stripped him of his black shorts and T-shirt. She imagined laying him down upon a wonderful big bed, his penis like a cute little tree branch. She would kiss him all over and hold him closer and tighter, filling her mouth with his salt sweat and her nose with his every intimate smell. Her mouth would anesthetize his skin as the feeding began and in a few delightful moments, his blood would be sweeping down her throat.

She closed her eyes, arching her back and stretching, forcing his smell out of her nose with a rush of air. Think about opium, she told herself, not blood. Later, she would smoke to relieve this damned hunger. She needed to get back to familiar territory before she fed. It wasn’t safe to do it in an unknown place.

Too bad her flight to Paris, where the European conclave was held, didn’t leave until tomorrow evening.

This Asian conclave would end with dawn, and she’d have liked to have gone straight on to Europe. She could feed easily in Paris; she knew the city well. She’d hunted there recently—no more than fifty or so years ago, when it was swarming with Germans.

Of course, she might meet a man here in Chiang Mai. If she did, her new husband would attend to her need for prey during the pregnancy. If she wasn’t leaving tomorrow, she’d be staying in Asia a long time.