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wondered what the rest of it looked like, and if there was some special meaning to the beautiful pattern.
    She had an almost irrepressible urge to trace the interesting markings with her fingertip. Maybe her tongue.
    “Tell me what you told your friends about the attack you witnessed at the club.”
    She swallowed on a dry throat, shaking her head to bring herself back to the conversation. “Yes. Right.”
    God, what was wrong with her?
Gabrielle dismissed the peculiar race of her pulse and focused on the events of the other night. She recounted the story for the detective, as she had for the other officers, and, later, her friends. She told him every horrific detail, and he listened carefully, letting her relay it all uninterrupted. Under the cool acceptance of his gaze, Gabrielle’s memory of the slaying seemed more precise now, as if the lens of her recollection had been sharpened, the details magnified.
    When she finished, she found Thorne clicking through the pictures on her cell phone once more. The line of his mouth had gone from grim to grave.
    “What exactly do you think these images show, Miss Maxwell?”
    She glanced up and met his look, those wise, piercing eyes of his boring into her. In that instant, a word skated through Gabrielle’s head—incredible, laughable, terrifyingly clear.
    Vampire.
    “I don’t know,” she said lamely, speaking over the rising whisper in her head. “I mean, I’m not sure what to think.”
    If the detective didn’t suspect she was nuts yet, he would if she blurted out the word that was now swimming through her mind, chilling her to the bone. It was the only explanation she had for the gruesome slaying she witnessed that night.
    Vampires?
    Christ Jesus. She really was crazy.
    “I’ll need to take this device, Miss Maxwell.”
    “Gabrielle,” she offered. Her smile felt awkward. “Do you think forensics, or whoever does that sort of thing, will be able to clean up the images?”
    He gave her a slight incline of his head, not quite a nod, then pocketed her cell phone. “I will return it to you tomorrow evening. You will be home?”
    “Sure.”
How was it he could make a simple question sound more like an order?
“I appreciate you coming by, Detective Thorne. It’s been a rough few days.”
    “Lucan,” he said, studying her for a moment. “Call me Lucan.”
    Heat seemed to reach out to her from his eyes, along with a stoic understanding, as if this man had seen more horrors than she could ever comprehend. She could not name the emotion that passed through her in that moment, but it sped her pulse and made the room feel sapped of all its air. He was still looking at her, waiting, as if expecting her to comply at once with his request to speak his name.
    “All right…Lucan.”
    “Gabrielle,” he replied, and the sound of her name on his lips sent a quiver of awareness shooting through her veins.
    Something on the wall behind her caught his attention. He glanced to where one of Gabrielle’s most acclaimed photographs hung. His mouth pursed slightly, a sensual quirk of his lips that hinted at amusement, perhaps surprise. Gabrielle pivoted to look at the image of an inner city park that was frozen and desolate beneath a blanket of thick December snow.
    “You don’t like my work,” she guessed.
    He mildly shook his dark head. “I find it…intriguing.”
    She was curious now. “How so?”
    “You find beauty in the most unlikely of places,” he said after a long moment, his attention focused now on her. “Your pictures are full of passion….”
    “But?”
    To her bewilderment, he reached out, stroked a finger along the line of her jaw. “There are no people in them, Gabrielle.”
    “Of course there…”
    She started to blurt out a denial, but before the words reached her tongue, she realized that he was right. Her gaze lit on each framed photograph she kept in her apartment, her memory touching on all the others that hung in galleries and museums and