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little.
    "Don't ever wake me up like that again, Percy," he said softly.
"It was a close thing."
    Her hands dropped away, and she finally met his eyes. "How
close?"
    He held up his thumb and pointer finger until a hair's breadth separated
them.
    Her shoulders slumped a little. "That close?"
    "That close," he confirmed.
    She sighed, sounding exasperated. And just a little bit sad. "But
there must be a better way to control it, besides pumping yourself full of that
shite," she muttered.
    There was one way, one way to stop the torment, to have some
semblance of a normal life, but he'd never tell her, and he'd never do it. He'd
only replace one torment with another, far greater one. He really would rather
die.
    Percy looked annoyed by his silence. "One day you're going to take
too much, and then I'll be..." She broke off and shook her head.
"Never mind."
    He stood up and strode to where he'd pitched his jacket the night before
and jerked it on. "Don't worry. I'll be there when we bring down O’Connor,
you have my word on that," he said.
    She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but at the mention of
O’Connor, her expression hardened, and something dangerous passed over her
eyes.
    "You bloody better be. We've waited twenty-five years, you and I. I
want O’Connor. I want to punish him for what he did to me. For what he did to
you. I want to watch you rip out his heart," she said in a cold,
conversational tone that would have chilled most people to the bone. But not
him. He understood her perfectly. They exchanged a similar litany of desires
often, as if reinforcing the vow they had sworn to each other when they'd been
reunited by chance over a decade ago.
    Of course, the gruesomeness of their plans for their enemy had changed
when he had changed and had become capable of actually ripping
someone's heart out. He had a feeling Percy reveled in that aspect of his monstrousness.
    She was the only one.
    "But not before you make that son of a bitch give you his name," she added, as she always did.
    As if Elijah needed any reminder of him . The second man's face
– the one who'd given him his scar and killed Percy's brother – was
forever etched in his memory. He'd find out the man's name for Percy, no matter
what it took to extract it from Nick O’Connor's lips. But he had a feeling he
was not going to like what he discovered.
    When Lady Christiana had transformed him, all of his wounds, old and new,
from his ruined eye, to Percy's blade work on his abdomen, down to the very
hangnails on his toes, had healed ... except for the scar on his cheek. Elijah's
memory of that long-ago night was hazy, but he did remember cutting that toff’s
arm open, and the sizzling, streaking pain on his face that had followed. It
had been like acid eating away his flesh to the bone, and he could think of
only thirteen men on earth who had blood like that.
    Newgate Nick, child procurer, whoremonger, murderer, thief and current
king of the Black Market, had remained alive and well all these years, even
after being skewered by a poker, for a reason. He wasn't entirely human. O’Connor's
dominion over the stews was maintained by his personal vampire army, men and
women he'd turned in order to terrorize his competitors – and the general
citizenry – into submission. That meant that O’Connor had to be a Bonded,
for only the Bonded had the blood capable of turning someone into a vampire.
    And that meant the Elder who'd Bonded O’Connor had to have been
the man who'd killed Percy's brother that night, for whatever reason, before
handing Percy over to O’Connor’s tender mercies.
    When Elijah had finally put the puzzle pieces together, he knew that
their simple quest for vengeance had become something much bigger.
    Percy didn't understand this. Like many who conducted their business on
London’s roughest streets, she knew about vampires and the fact that O’Connor
was somehow turning people into them, but she didn't know about the