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death.” Intense blue eyes held his, and he remembered the chill that shook him in that moment.
    In the years that followed, Zee tried to become a better man. He channeled his impulse for aggression into martial arts for a few years, and then tried to subdue it with yoga and meditation. He studied the religions of many cultures. He painted. Bit by bit the bookstore filled up with titles of interest: an eclectic mix of classic literature, genre novels, old and rare texts, things mystical and weird. His art extended from the canvas to hanging sculptures. Some things he sold in the store. But he had developed the habit of painting from dream, and some of these he kept in his apartment upstairs, off-limits to customers and friends alike.
    The old man had begun, in the last few years, to seem unreal, despite the regularity of bank deposits showing up in Zee’s account. The woman continued to make regular dream appearances, but he had begun to doubt she would ever materialize, and now, at last, here she was.
    Climbing the stairs to his apartment, Zee paced the length of the wall where his dream paintings hung. So manyyears, so many dreams. Vivian figured in most of them. There were also dragons.
    The doorbell rang.
    Not the dinger that went off when someone entered the store, but the doorbell to the back door of his apartment, the one accessed by climbing the narrow fire escape stairs. In the entire time Zee had lived here, nobody had ever rung that doorbell because nobody ever climbed those stairs. He’d always considered the buzzer as a practical joke from a builder with too much time on his hands.
    It rang again, and he felt a hiss and slither of time, a sense that this was not the first time he had stood at this juncture, with an abyss of darkness opening in front of his feet.
    The feeling passed. Only a doorbell, not a call to arms, but still his body felt changed when he crossed the studio into the living area and opened the door—subtly charged, all of his senses expanded.
    A strange woman balanced easily on the narrow steps. She was tall, with striking hazel eyes under delicate brows. Trying to categorize her, he ran up against the word
alien
. The eyes a little too widely spaced, the nose too perfect, something vaguely wrong about the mouth. No makeup or jewelry, and the long black gown she wore was out of place in Krebston.
    The hair on the back of his neck stood on end; he felt the once-familiar rush of adrenaline.
    She looked up at him through thick lashes, hesitant, insecure. “Hello—you would be a friend of Vivian, yes?” Her voice was lightly accented, and he ran the gamut of known languages through his brain and failed to find a match.
    His own hand was already in motion before she struck with the knife. He blocked the thrust, grabbed her wrist, twisted the knife away from her. Before she had time to scream, he had wrenched her into the room and slammed the door behind both of them. He pinned her against the wall with her own blade at her throat. It was carved from stone, slightly curved, and stained with blood.
    The sight of it moved him.
    He leaned his weight into her, pressing the flat of the blade against her white throat so that the skin puckered along the sharp edge but didn’t quite break. “If you scream, I’ll kill you,” he said.
    It was intended as a threat, but he realized with a shock that he meant it.
    The knife felt alive in his hand. An infinitesimal amount of pressure and beads of crimson appeared on the pale skin. He swallowed, tasting desire.
    “Warlord,” she said, almost purring. “We meet at last. Step back. You’re not going to kill me.”
    His hand withdrew of its own volition. His right foot stepped back and the left followed, even though his intent was to stand and fight.
    Delicate as a cat, she stepped past him and he followed her down the hall, into the studio. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
    Looking back over her shoulder she smiled. A lover’s smile,