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coming to open the warehouse, and the airport was slowly returning to life. As Miriam went among the crowd in the terminal, she found herself coping with strange urges, ferocious urges. She wanted to grab a few of them and tear their heads off and drink their spouting necks with the savagery of the ancients.
    Perhaps she was afraid. A predator experiences fear as an urge to attack. It was why her mother had roared and gnashed her teeth back when — but she didn’t want to brood on that again, not now.
    Her hunger was starting to actually make her bones ache, and her skin was turning whiter and whiter. The dry, corpse-like coldness that marked a hungry Keeper’s skin was stealing her usual girlish flush.
    “Bangkok,” she said to the ticket clerk, producing a Visa card in the name of the traveling alias Sarah had set up for this trip. A French national called “Marie Tallman” had entered Thailand from the U.S. and would leave for Paris. Miriam Blaylock, a U.S. citizen, would return to New York.
    She went to the surprisingly ornate first-class lounge. A hostess came up. Miriam ordered sour lemonade, then sat down and lit a cigarette. She contemplated what had become the problem of her hunger.
    She’d ignored it for too long, and now she was going to have to feed before she left Thailand. Why hadn’t she noticed this back in New York? She could have sent Sarah down to the Veils to bring back some wanderer. At home, she had reduced the hunt to a simple, safe procedure that delivered her prey right into her arms. Sarah found appropriate victims and lured them to the Veils. Miriam consumed them in a basement room built for the purpose, or she took them home and dined there.
    She gave them a lovely time. They died in ecstasy.
    She sucked a cigarette hard, blasted the smoke out of her nose. If she didn’t feed soon, she would slow down, she would lose her edge. Then she’d have to find some weak human and do a thin feed. This would only stave the hunger off for a few days, no more. So there would be a second hunt in Paris, and more danger.
    She ought to race straight back to New York and the hell with the rest of the Keepers. They probably wouldn’t appreciate her efforts anyway.
    But she couldn’t, not when the greatest disaster she had ever known had befallen an entire continent. Of all the Keepers, how could it ever have been the Asians who would be attacked by man? Many of them were true ancients, more than ten thousand years old. Immensely wise, extraordinarily careful, not moving so much as an inch except to feed, they would stay in their black lairs, shadows with gleaming eyes and slow, slow breath, amusing themselves for months by gazing at a bit of intricately woven cloth or some subtly reflective gem.
    When these Keepers walked among their herds, the humans would stir in their sleep, sighing with the sighing wind, clinging to one another without knowing why.
    They had seen vast ages of man pass, empires rise and fall and be forgotten, thousands of human generations go to dust. More effectively than any other group in the world, the Asians had managed their herds, inducing migrations in order to evoke new strains, breeding their stock for beauty and intelligence and succulence. Humans called it famine and war and migration. Keepers called it stock management.
    The more she thought about it, the more uneasy she became. How much of the secret of their Keepers had the humans involved understood, and who were these creatures? How could cattle enjoying the riches and ease of the feedlot ever realize the truth about their lives? Especially when not one in a hundred thousand of them would ever come into contact with a Keeper. But human beings were not cattle, and it was a mistake to think so.
    Somehow, they had used their clever little brains to discover a secret that was larger than they were. They had used their damned science. They never should have been given the wheel, let alone electricity and — God forbid —