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Rom felt the first stirrings of the night with some imperceptible circadian measure. A hint of darkness on the breeze. A smoky flavor of yearning that woke in his blood, sharpening his senses, rousing him.

Night. It moved over and around him, whispering, inciting. He lay quietly and savored it.

The early night hours had a song all their own. A song that drew restless crowds, searching for some nameless fulfillment of an unknown desire, to prowl through night streets and clubs, losing themselves in the urgent rhythms of night music.

Rom knew the crowds, knew their boredom and the glitter of their seeking eyes.

They were all the same. They inhabited the night worlds of a thousand cities and centuries, mimicked each other unknowingly in carefully executed exhibits of individuality, moved to the same restless rhythm. They searched in vain for the nameless desire that called them into the night and sometimes settled for the heat and promise in the eyes of a stranger, only to wake to the cold light of day that held no mysteries.

In the day, there were only gritty eyes, aching temples and mouths dry with the taste of stale cigarettes and vanished wraiths of night promises.

Rom preferred the night. He always had.

He came fully awake and sat up on the hard sofa, smoothing back the once-again fashionable length of dark hair that was not much disturbed by his quiet, motionless sleep.

His heart throbbed with the beat of city traffic and the far-off pulsing of a bass guitar. Night. He smiled, feeling it around him like a living cloak of mystery, shining with the soft fires of distant stars.

Valentine was awake, too. Rom knew it, and thought he could sense the disturbance in the air currents signaling his approach long before he heard the soft sound of feet on carpet, then the rustle and muttered curse as body and unexpected object collided.

“Careful,” Rom murmured, too late to be any help. “You’ll step in the pizza.”

Val responded with a low growl and a sharp curse. When he spoke, his tone made the words sound like more curses. “Pizza. You got garlic.”

“It amused me.”

“It’s disgusting. Get it out of here.”

“It’s part of our cover,” Rom said in a mild tone that nevertheless held a thread of something that hinted at granite. “Nobody raises a brow over two wealthy young men who only work at night if they’re software designers. Youth is the byword of the industry. So is eccentricity. So is pizza.”

“I’m not eating this,” Val muttered, not calmed by the speech.

“Of course not. We donate it to the homeless behind the building,” Rom said. “Ignore the garlic. It’s a standard ingredient.”

“You ignore it.”

“I have been.”

This was the undeniable truth and it silenced Val’s grumblings. He continued to brood, however, as he prowled the office. Passing the desk chair, he hooked one leg around it to draw it up, sat in one fluid motion and tapped at the computer keyboard, disturbing the fractal pattern laboriously arranged by the screen saver.

“Get any further with this?” Val asked. It was the closest he came to apology.

Rom accepted it. “Not really.”

Val tapped some more, symbols dancing across the screen at his command. “Huh. I’ll work on it awhile.” He continued, the silence broken by the swift, steady tap of keystrokes.

“Do that,” Rom agreed as he stood and stretched to his full height. “I’ll take this down.” He reached for the cardboard pizza box, delivered hours earlier. “Hungry?”

Val shook his head. “Not yet. You?”

Night sang, hummed, buzzed in his senses. Sharp. Urgent. Dark. “Yes.”

“You’re going to go watch her again. You’re obsessed with that woman.” Val came straight to the point, laying open the real source of the tension that had been growing steadily between them.

“I like her music,” Rom answered in neutral tones.

“You liked Mozart’s music, too, but you didn’t follow him around.”

“I went to his performances.”

“You didn’t want to convert him. You want her, though.” Val tapped furiously at the keyboard. “I know what’s coming. Girl stuff everywhere. Girl things hanging in the bathroom. Waiting for you to get on with it is worse than living with it will be. I wish you’d just do it.”

Rom paused, wondering how much he should say in answer to that. Women were something of a sore point with Valentine. Over two hundred years of grief and celibacy would do that. “She’s sick,” he said finally. “You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but I can smell it on her skin. I didn’t want to take any of the time she had left, but now her time is running out.”

Rom had been watching her for years. He’d waited, giving her the chance to find a mortal love, a family, all the things he couldn’t offer her, things he couldn’t bear to deny her. Now he would offer her the only ever after possible for her, before the hidden killer that ate away at her took even that option away.

“Get on with it, then. Don’t let her die. It’s a real bitch waiting centuries for the woman you love to be reincarnated.”

Val was a mass of tension. Inevitable, given that he’d spent centuries waiting for his lost love to be returned to him and had decided after the early decades of grief-imposed celibacy to just keep on waiting. He had so much tension bottled up that the others had taken to avoiding him and his hair-trigger temper at all costs about a hundred and fifty years ago.

“Has it crossed your mind that the gypsy might have been wrong?” Rom asked, not unkindly. Since the topic was open, it was a good time to discuss it without fear of it leading to mortal combat.

“It crossed my mind about a thousand times in the first year. Everybody needs something to believe in. I believe in gypsy prophecy.”

“Has it occurred to you that if she does come back, she won’t remember you, she won’t recognize you, and you’ll have centuries of pent-up sexual frustration driving you that no human woman could withstand?”

Val stopped dead. He whipped around to look at Rom, and the motion tossed his long blond hair streaked with white, gold and amber around his shoulders. The expression on his face was frightening.

Finally he said, “If she remained human, it might be a problem. But I will teach her to love me again, she will accept my kiss, she will transform, and she will survive being the recipient of my pent-up sexual frustration, thank you very much. Now go do something about yours.”