Ellison looked at Dorian with his usual expression of fatherly concern. Dorian had hated it at first, but now he felt himself softening a little. Not that Ellison needed to worry about him, but still it was nice that somebody gave a fuck. “Can I take you for something to eat?” Ellison asked; he was somber, unsmiling. “We haven’t had a chance to catch up for a while.”

Dorian shook his head. “I’m . . . kind of supposed to be somewhere.”

“Band practice? Did you find a drummer yet?”

“No. Well, Steve says his cousin knows this girl who plays the drums, so maybe. But she lives like fifty miles away, and we haven’t even met her. They’re supposed to drive up here sometime.” As Dorian spoke he found himself wondering what would happen if he said something completely different: “Look, I really need your help. It’s about my girlfriend . . .” If only Ellison weren’t in the FBI, Dorian thought, it might be worth taking the chance.

“It sounds like it might be difficult to schedule practice times, then. If your drummer lives that far away.” Ben Ellison sounded distracted, and Dorian suspected that he was only going through the motions of having a normal conversation, just the way Dorian was doing himself.

Somehow they’d started walking together in the direction of the dock. Between the buildings the sea appeared as a huge dark blot where all the ordinary human things, houses and cars, were simply canceled out. But in a way, Dorian thought, that darkness was his real home, at least as long as Luce was living there. How was he going to shake Ellison? “Steve’s about to get his driver’s license, though, so we’ll be able to go there for practice. It could work out all right.”

“Not if you—” Ellison’s voice leaped higher and then broke off abruptly, and he shook his head hard. They had stopped in a place with no streetlights, and Ellison’s broad body appeared as a black silhouette against the charcoal sea.

Dorian was confused. “Not if I what?”

“Dorian, I’m . . . facing a dilemma.” There was an unmistakable ring of sincerity, even desperation, in that low voice, and Dorian started. “There’s something that I know I need to say, and soon. Someone I care about is putting himself in a position of extraordinary danger, and I’m the only one who can warn him.”

The sudden shift in their conversation was too weird, Dorian thought. Warn someone? What was the guy talking about? “Then why don’t you?”

“Because the young man I need to warn is frankly untrustworthy. And I don’t know whether I can make him understand the danger he’s facing without revealing information that could be . . . quite sensitive.”