Chapter 2

***

The first and last time Diana saw Catherine, it was not a pleasant experience.

It was before she had met Vincent, almost before she’d really agreed to take the case. Her heart had been sore from a case she felt she had failed, which had resulted in the death of a six year old child. It was Joe Maxwell’s sense of desperation that had really prompted her to look into the case of the death of Catherine Chandler.

Diana had gone to the hospital demanding to see Catherine Chandler’s body. The results of her autopsy had been missing several key elements, and she had gone in threatening to take the hospital to court and expose their malpractice. Eventually they had taken her to a room of cold storage and showed her the body of a woman of the approximate right age and size and coloring, and Diana had pursed her lips, told the attending physician that she wasn’t a fool, and that this was not Catherine Chandler.

She did look rather similar. If she had been any other investigator called in on the case she wouldn’t have noticed the difference. But she was Diana Bennet, and she had memorized Catherine’s face.

After two hours of increasingly strident demands she was led into a private office. Someone of official status had explained that she could not see Catherine Chandler’s corpse, no matter the circumstances. Diana had stood up then, announcing she would return with a court order, and possibly the press. "You can’t do that," the director said. He took a deep breath. "May I take you to see someone else?"

Diana frowned. "I have no desire to see anyone other than the body of Catherine Chandler."

"Yes, I understand that," said the director. "And you have seen the body of Catherine Chandler. But due to your stance on this subject I have placed a few calls to some members of your bureau. With their agreement, on your honor, I would like to show you one of my patients." He pressed a button on the intercom. "Ms. Carson, I’d like to arrange a team to visit Ms. Bird."

"Ms. Bird?" said the voice on the other end. She sounded trepidatious.

"Yes. She has a visitor."

"Very well, sir," said the secretary.

The director turned to Diana. He pulled a thick file from a locked drawer on his desk. "I’d like you to look at this file," he said. The name on the file was Aurora Bird.

"Why are you showing me this?"

"No reason," said the director. "I simply think your investigation might benefit from a visit to Ms. Bird."

Diana was led through the hospital, through a locked door that sounded like a jail cell. Behind this door were wild eyed men and women, and the orderlies roved in squads. Ms. Bird was kept in a room at the furthest edge of the psychiatric ward. This was where the special cases were kept, where there were two doors you had to pass through. There was no security on Ms. Bird’s room, but the amount of security they’d already had to pass would have daunted most people, anyway.

Diana took a deep breath before she peered through the narrow window. It was dark in the little room. There was a window to the outside, but it was curtained. "Why is it dark?" she asked.

"She’s nuts," said the nurse without concern. "She draws the curtains. She screams if we turn on a light. Screams herself horse. She likes it cold too, beats at the thermostat until we bring it down to sixty." The nurse looked around, and then pressed a couple of somethings into Diana’s hand. "Don’t tell anyone. It’s against policy, but this is the only light she doesn’t scream about. I can’t leave them in there, but sometimes I’ll sit in with her. She seems to find it comforting."

Diana opened her hand. A candle and a book of matches nestled in her palm.

"Go on in."

"Is she dangerous?" Diana asked.

"Only if you try to touch her. If you back away, she’ll leave you alone."

Diana blinked and opened the door. A quiet muttering stopped as she stepped inside. "Hello?" Diana said. There was no response except a quickening of breathing in the corner. "My name is Diana Bennet. I’ve come to see you," she said.

"Faith in their hands shall snap in two," muttered a quiet voice. "And the unicorn evils run them through."

A chill ran up Diana’s spine as she heard those hollow words. "I’m going to light a match now," she announced quietly.

"Split all ends up, they shan’t crack," said the voice.

Diana took that as a statement to go ahead. She struck the match and held it to the candle. A hunted figure in a hospital gown and sweater cowered on the floor, in a nest she had made from the bedclothes. The bed itself was on its side, used as a barrier between the woman and the outside world. She cringed as Diana held the light closer.

Diana swallowed. The sallow, worn face before her might once have been human. Now it was pasty and almost blue, even in the dim flickering light of the candle. Her eyes sank as if cut into her face. Where angels once danced, now devils ran. Her hair was cut short, presumably because no one could maintain it, and the creature in the nest was clearly past trying. Diana didn’t recognize the figure before her at all. The single line of the scar on the side of her face was the clincher. Diana felt a little ashamed. The corpse she had rejected as not looking like Catherine Chandler looked far more like Catherine than this tormented wraith. "Though lovers be lost, love shall not."

"Cathy?" she asked. "Cathy, Joe sent me to look into your case." Catherine looked over toward the light, her haunted eyes narrowing. "You remember, Joe? From the district attorney’s office. Your friend."

"And death shall have no dominion," Catherine whispered.

Diana swallowed. This woman was so far from sane she was no longer human. What had they done to her? "Cathy?" she whispered, taking a step toward her.

And Catherine roared. She lunged out at Diana with her nails raised, leaping over the bed. Her nails had been blunted, roughly, probably by the hospital staff, as a precaution against just this. Diana scuttled back, expecting the nursing staff to jump in to protect her, but they stayed behind the door. Apparently, this kind of behavior had been expected. Catherine did not pursue. As soon as Diana was a few steps farther away Catherine crept to the far end of the room and began pacing, walking back and forth like a tiger in a cage. "Where blew a flower may a flower no more lift its head to the blows of the rain," she muttered to herself. Then she stopped. She looked directly at Diana and said in a clear voice, "Though they be mad and dead as nails. Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, and death shall have no dominion."

Something happened between them then. Those wild green grey eyes were straight and true for the first time. They bored into Diana, and after a moment two tears slowly leaked from them, running gently down the sunken cheeks. Diana felt something inside her twist. She had already decided to take the case, but something in this mad woman’s voice or eyes made a connection. From that moment on they were bound together. A sister. Another self. "And death shall have no dominion," Diana murmured.

Then Catherine looked away, back down at the floor, and resumed her pacing. "With the man in the wind and the west moon. Though they go mad they shall be sane. Though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again. Though lovers be lost... though lovers be lost... lovers be lost...."

Diana stepped back. There was nothing more she could learn here. Her hands were shaking as she stepped out of the dark room.

***

"What’s wrong with her?"

"We don’t know," said the director. "Clearly she underwent extreme mental and physical trauma. The autopsy report we gave you was accurate, such as it was. Her body only barely survived the morphine, and that can cause brain damage, but it doesn’t seem to fit. The narcan we injected her with counteracted the morphine fairly quickly. We suspect much of it might be an acute form of postpartum depression."

"Wait, postpartum?"

"Yes. Aurora Bird was pregnant."

"Pregnant?" Diana blinked. That one fact hadn’t been in the official autopsy report. "Was she pregnant before or after she was captured?"

"We aren’t sure," said the doctor. "She’d only been gone six months. In theory this should mean she was pregnant before she was abducted, but if that was the case..." The doctor paused. "Take a look a this."

"What’s this?" Diana asked, looking at the print out he handed her.

"This is a DNA spectrum analysis of the amniotic fluid from the baby she was carrying. She still had traces inside her."

Diana raised her eyebrows. "Nothing but the best technology for this hospital," she said.

"Yes. This is the baby’s DNA. And this is Cath... Aurora Bird’s. This strand therefore must have come from the father, but you see these inconsistences?" Diana did. "They don’t follow any pattern we’ve ever seen before. This baby had substantial differences deep in its DNA. Either the father carried some very interesting genes... or this baby was genetically engineered. And if that was the case, it is most likely that she was impregnated by her captors, and kept as a carrier for this baby. Which would mean either the baby was premature, or grew at a faster rate than normal."

Diana shook her head. "No wonder she’s gone mad," she said. She looked at the doctor. "She knows she’s mad. She keeps mentioning it."

"Perhaps. We’ve identified the poem as Dylan Thomas." He handed her a xerox of the poem. Diana's eyes fixed on the lines that Catherine had repeated, but hadn't finished, Though lovers be lost, love shall not. And death shall have no dominion. "Everything she says comes from those twenty some odd lines. Other than that she seems to have no words. She’ll roar and growl like an animal, paces, you’ve seen, like a tiger. She hides in darkness, refuses touch. She grows weaker by the day." The doctor looked grave. "We aren’t optimistic for her recovery."

When Diana spoke to the doctor a few days later, asking for more information on "Aurora’s" condition, he told her that "Aurora Bird" had finally died indeed, and that Catherine’s body was to be released for burial. Diana was actually glad to hear it. Catherine had stayed alive long enough to bind herself to Diana, to give to her the burden of justice. Now she was finally at peace.

As Diana sat through the funeral, eying a dozen weeping, nameless strangers, she was tempted to make her own statement. "Though they be mad and dead as nails, death shall have no dominion."

***

When Diana had seen Catherine before, she had been acting mad, yes, but it was a madness similar to something else Diana had seen. Catherine had been acting like Vincent.

She did some mental calculations. When Catherine had first been revived, at the height of her madness, Vincent had been in the deepest depths of his grief. Diana had seen Vincent when he was ill, injured. He too skulked in the deepest shadow, shied from true light, roared and lashed out if one should get too close. The poetry didn’t make much sense, but the thermostat did. Catherine might have been trying to duplicate the conditions Below, coolness and candlelight. Diana wondered if anyone had tried her with classical music, or more poetry. It didn’t matter. If the woman at the Maplewood Institute was indeed Catherine Chandler, she might not truly be mad... or not so mad that Vincent couldn’t bring her out of it.

***

"Charlotte" sat in a threadbare robe in an impersonal room. She knew that she had once had money, once been accustomed to finer clothing. But the witness protection program hadn’t bothered to try and preserve her assets through her relocation, and she didn’t care enough to pursue. She had a memory of a Will, arranging for her assets, such as they were, to be donated to a trust kept in the name of a Margaret Chase, whose interest was doled out to benefit people she once cared for very much. But she was pretty sure she’d made up that memory to make herself feel better about having lost everything. She supposed her personal effects were with Jenny or Joe, and she’d just as soon they got to keep them. Her finances probably reverted to her father’s law firm, or were tied up in a dozen banks. She didn’t actually care.

The room had a radio, which Charlotte kept on permanently to a local classical station, even at night. Sometimes what she would listen to would cause her to choke up, but she didn’t try to turn it off, or change the station. Three wide candles sat on the bedside table. It was the only decoration she had collected. This was a minimum security, voluntary asylum, so she was allowed matches to light the candles, so long as she kept them locked in the drawer. She lit them the moment the sun set, never allowing true darkness to descend in her room. There was a small collection of paperback books, mostly classics, and she was known to check books from the library trolley which came through once a week. Sometimes in the evening she could be persuaded to open the window to her room to let in some fresh air. After a few months the institution insisted that she eat her meals in the dining room like all the other inmates, but other than that, she kept to her room, and brooded.

"You missed your appointment," said a voice at the door.

Charlotte looked up. "I’m sorry, Dr. Malachy," she said tiredly. She turned to look out the window again.

Dr. Muriel Malachy had at first thought that "Charlotte’s" reluctance to go outside, even to go outside her room, was a product of fear. She had undergone severe trauma and undoubtably suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She had all the symptoms: hyper-vigilance, difficulty sleeping, nightmares, depression. The original trauma of the abduction had been compounded by the trauma of her subsequent madness, and it would have been no wonder that she feared the outside world. After a year as Charlotte’s doctor, Muriel was beginning to have another theory. Yes, Charlotte was probably wary of the world outside. But now she believed that Charlotte simply had no love for it, that its horrors and sadnesses were too much for her, and that its wonders and joys held neither for her.

Charlotte was still a clearly intelligent woman. She even possessed a sense of humor, if it was a bit black. But she had no enthusiasm, and showed no interest even in the pastimes she permitted herself. Muriel was used to people with severe, psychotic depressions, and had originally steeled herself for suicide attempts, but there were none. The depression was pervasive and encompassing, a severe dysthymia more than a major depression. To be listless and disinterested and sad was a fact of life for Charlotte, and, it seemed, this would always be the case.

Muriel crept into the room bearing a tulip in a glass. "I thought you might like this," she said.

Charlotte pulled her eyes from the window and gave a polite smile. "Thank you," she said sincerely. She set the tulip on the table and touched a petal with her finger. "It’s lovely." Then she turned back to the window.

Muriel sat down in the other chair and pulled it closer to Charlotte. "You want to tell me why you missed our appointment?"

"I didn’t know what day it was," Charlotte said without inflection.

"That’s the third monthly appointment you’ve missed. I’ve had to put that in your report."

"I’m sorry," Charlotte said, but she didn’t sound so.

"Have you made any progress this month?" Dr. Malachy asked.

Charlotte glanced at her. "Do you mean have I recovered any true memories?" she asked. "No." She looked back out the window. "I can make them up, but they don’t feel any more real than the fantasies. I don’t even try anymore."

"Why not?" she asked. "Why don’t you try to reclaim your life."

"It’s not my life anymore," Charlotte said. "I’m not that person anymore, not even on paper." She shrugged. "I don’t think I liked it all that much, to tell you the truth."

"Do you think you were always like this?" Dr. Malachy asked. "Without interests, without passion?"

Charlotte hesitated and then said, "Yes, I think I might have been. If I had passion in my life, why would I have had to make it up?"

"Due to loneliness."

"So why try to recover loneliness?" Charlotte asked. She fingered the stem of the tulip. "At the end of the day, my dream world licked the real world hollow."

"That’s probably true," Dr. Malachy said. "Fantasies are usually better than the reality, or we wouldn’t need to fantasize. But the real world, here, is where you belong."

Charlotte gazed up at her. "Is it?" she asked. She looked back out the window. "I can’t do any good in the world. Why reach out for something that has hurt me at every turn?"

Dr. Malachy stood up. She couldn’t help patients that wouldn’t help themselves, and that was a proven fact. "I don’t suppose you’ve been writing in your journal?" she asked, knowing the answer to be no. Ever since that one entry at Halloween last year, she hadn’t touched the thing.

Charlotte shook her head. "I’m not allowed to write the fantasies down," she said. "There’s nothing else I want to think about."

Dr. Malachy pursed her lips. "Perhaps I was wrong about that," she said, sensing a possible opening. She had insisted when she gave Charlotte the journal that she only write about the real world. But there wasn’t much in Charlotte’s real world to write about, even if she had been vivacious and engaged in the life of the institution. Even if Charlotte was only writing down her fantasies, at least she’d be doing something, not this torpid waiting for death. "You can write about whatever you want in your journal," she said. "It’s yours." She turned to go, and then paused at the door. "I read in your nurse’s report that you thought some boy recognized you?"

Charlotte shook her head. "I haven’t seen him since. I’m not worried about it."

Muriel sensed there was more to it than that. If people still wanted her dead, Charlotte was just as content to let them finish her off. She frowned. "What were you doing out of your room?"

Charlotte looked up a little ruefully. "You won’t like the answer."

"What is it?"

"One of the characters in the story he was reading was named Vincent."

Charlotte was right. Dr. Malachy didn’t like it.

After Dr. Malachy left, Charlotte stood up and pulled out the blank journal. The first page was the poem that had seen her through her madness. After that there wasn’t much except musings on that moment when she had thought she’d seen Vincent on the lawn. There was something she wanted to say. She knew it was madness. She knew Vincent only ever existed inside her. But if that was the case, she might still get a message to him.

It took her a long time to write it. The sun had set by the time she realized that all that was in her heart could be distilled down to three words.

She looked down at the entry she had written, and wished with all her heart that her message would travel down the labyrinthine passages of her mind (which Dr. Malachy said the tunnels Below represented) to the protected, safe and beautiful place she’d imagined (which Dr. Malachy said represented her peace of mind) filled with diverse and gifted, amazing people (who represented different aspects of her personality) to the beautiful, sensitive personification of her animus (the inherent male aspect of her psyche, the protector, and that which she, as a female, could love about herself.)

She added the date, May 1^st, above her entry. Ah, May day. Was that why Dr. Malachy had given her a tulip? Charlotte really had no personal sense of days.

The entry consisted of only one line:

"Vincent. I miss you."

***

Vincent. I miss you.

Vincent closed his eyes. Those haunting words, such as he’d used to hear just after her death, when she called out to him, asked him where he was. It was too much. He wished to God that Jacob would come to accept Catherine’s death soon. Vincent couldn’t take it much longer.

The constant requests for his mother were getting more insistent. Today handing out May baskets of flowers, (collected from discards outside flower shops by the older children), Jacob had insisted they save one for Mommy. Vincent had agreed, and they tucked the tiny basket at the base of Catherine’s portrait, but that hadn’t truly mollified the child. Jacob’s demands had begun to haunt Vincent. It made him restless and unhappy. He had wondered, at first, why Jacob insisted on doing this. For everyone else, Jacob was like Vincent, tailoring his responses to create a smile or a laugh. Vincent was beginning to suspect that Jacob wanted him feeling anxious, pacing the corridors and feeling dissatisfied, as if making Vincent unhappy would force him to go and fetch his mother.

He had made another request for Catherine as Vincent had put him to bed in the alcove he had carved out for him with his own hands. (It had taken him over a month, and his room was covered with rock dust nearly half a year.) "You know I can’t do that," Vincent said. "But I’ll sing you her song." Jacob took a deep breath and reluctantly agreed.

Vincent’s voice was more suited to poetry than to song, but he had adapted it for this lullaby.

Sleep, my pretty one.

Rest now, my pretty one.

Close your eyes;

The day is nearly done.

Rest your head;

Tomorrow will surely come.

Vincent knew poetry backwards and forwards, and he knew these were not the most eloquent or beautiful lyrics in existence. That hardly mattered. Catherine had once told him her mother sang that song to her when she was a girl. She suspected her mother had made it up. Vincent was determined that the lullaby would continue for another hundred years, if he had anything to say about it. Anything that reminded him of Catherine’s life was a precious treasure.

Jacob was still restless. Vincent pulled another song from his limited lullaby repertoire. It was a song he’d first sung for Jacob when he was nothing more than a baby. The lyrics were Byron, with a haunting melody. In truth, though it was Jacob who listened, Vincent really sang this song to Catherine.

So we’ll go no more a’roving

So late into the night

Though the heart be still as loving

And the moon be still as bright;

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself must rest.

Though the night be made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Still we’ll go no more a’roving

By the light of the moon.

As soon as he was certain Jacob was asleep he donned his cloak and went Above. He was too restless to stay in the tunnels, and the bright May basket beneath the portrait mocked him. At first he walked the park, but that didn’t satisfy him. He often found himself walking past Catherine’s old apartment building, and that just made him sad. So he fled to a spot he’d begun to visit regularly about a year ago.

It was no place special. Just a place he’d liked to come increasingly in the last year, a tall building where he could look out across the dark bay, over to New Jersey. Before he had preferred watching the wild lights of New York, but now he preferred that line of blackness in the water. Or something. He felt more peaceful in this place, anyway.

After a few hours of contemplation he grew restless. The black line of the river wasn’t so comforting tonight. Perhaps he should go see Diana. She – and whatever horrific case she was working on – could usually shock him out of feeling sorry for himself.

Vincent found his way to Diana’s studio apartment, climbed to her roof terrace and knocked on her window. She was still awake, of course. When she was on a case she almost never slept at night, preferring the peace of the empty streets for her concentration. Diana started and shifted some papers on her table. Then she came up to the roof. "Vincent," she said, sounding a little startled. "What are you doing here?"

"Restless," he said. "Did I interrupt a breakthrough?"

Diana shook her head. "No. Just more dead ends." She looked out over the city. "I can't see this one in my head, and I'm... well. I'm letting myself get distracted, and that's dangerous."

"Should I look?" Vincent asked.

Diana nodded. "Yes. I'm stuck." She returned to her loft, and Vincent followed her, silent as a cat. The first thing she did was return to her table and began stacking papers. "Come in."

Vincent slid in gently and gazed at the board which held the salient details of the case she was working on. He tended to show up at least once a case. He knew a lot about the underworld of the city, and sometimes knew a lead that she could follow. The picture prominent on the board was a pretty, dark skinned girl of non-exclusive race, who smiled in a conservative blouse in a school portrait. "Who is she?" he asked.

"Her name’s Alisha. Fourteen, cops say runaway, parents insist she’d never do such a thing. I’m inclined to believe the parents." She shook her head. "I’m starting to follow a lead on an amateur porn ring. If she’s with them, she’s in bad enough, but I first I need to find out if she’s somehow gotten involved in that company which is branching out into snuff films." She shook her head. "Sometimes I hate this job."

"You have a gift for it," he said quietly.

"I know," she said. "Or a curse to it."

Vincent gazed at her. She felt... different, somehow. More intense. He hadn’t felt this from her in a long, long time. "Something’s wrong," he said.

Diana shook her head, refusing to look at him. "It’s nothing," she said. "I loathe these cases. Most of the time you find the girls too late."

Vincent sensed a lie, but he let it go. The role Diana had to play was a difficult one. She absorbed people, absorbed the horror they were undergoing in the hopes of finding them. She made them a part of her. He had thought his empathy sometimes made for a difficult road. Diana’s absorption of people was a constant drain on her soul. And the worst of it was, if she didn’t do it, her psyche slowly starved to death. She had confessed that she couldn’t live for long without a case to solve, another’s life to immerse herself in. She grew restless and anxious and snappish if she went without a case for more than a week.

And it was a true immersion. When she had been on Catherine’s case he could almost smell her, almost felt the same pull he had felt when Catherine was with him. She had created a true fragment of Catherine’s spirit and held it deep inside herself. It modified her behavior, affected her emotions, opened her mind to possibilities that Diana alone would never have considered. Once she had shifted to another case that shadow pull had faded, but he still felt a sympathy. They were the same. Diana held as much magic as himself and Narcissa, something inexplicable. In many ways she would fit better with the people Below, who accepted such differences. Yet at the same time, her gift would be wasted Below. She was needed here, in the corrupt world Above. And in thanks for her work on behalf of Catherine and Jacob and himself, he would continue to help her as much as he could.

He frowned at the many images and charts and connections on her board. This time, he thought he could help. "I know this man," he said, pointing at a seedy looking man with a red bandana around his head. "I’ve seen him in Alphabet City."

Diana’s head shot up. "Where?"

"Avenue Q. Two or three thousand block."

Diana ran to the board so quickly her hip bumped into the table. She pulled a marker from the bottom of the board and wrote, "Ave. Q" beside the man’s picture. For a few brief moments she rearranged strings and pulled a picture from a file that lay beside the board. Vincent knew she’d be busy for another ten minutes at least, trying to map out the connections so that she could zone in on the next place she needed to be. He backed up to give her her space, and his eye caught on one of the papers she had knocked off the table in her hurry to get to the board.

It was a photograph which made his heart twist. He wasn’t sure why, as he didn’t recognize the image until he picked it up. He had thought, at first, it was simply the pitiful condition of the figure in the photograph. She was crumpled in a ball on the floor, her short ragged hair unkempt, her eyes wild as she stared in terror at the bright flash of the camera. But it didn’t take long for him to recognize the face. Catherine. It was Catherine. But Catherine in a state he had never before seen her. Hair short, eyes wild? Even in those last terrible moments on the roof as she died in his arms, she hadn’t looked so pitiful as this.

How long he stood there staring at the image of the wretched remains of the woman he adored he did not know. Long enough for Diana to realize he had picked it up. She had the decency not to try and snatch it away, or to ask what he was doing meddling in her things. She knew she had dropped it carelessly in her eagerness to tie Avenue Q to the missing girl. She wondered if her subconscious had done it intentionally.

Diana sighed. "Well, that’s decided that."

Vincent found his voice. "Decided what?" he asked quietly. "When was this taken?"

Diana got a curious look on her face, and he sensed indecision.

"Why are you looking into Catherine’s case again?" he asked. Now he understood the intensity he had felt in her before. Catherine had been resurrected in her again. "Tell me."

Diana feared telling him the truth. "It may be nothing," was the first thing she said. "You need to understand that first. I didn’t want to keep things from you. If there was anything to tell, I’d have made sure you knew all by tomorrow night."

"Knew all of what?" Vincent said. He seemed to be on the edge of a blade; one wrong move and he would fall and be cut in two.

"Someone told Father they might have seen... Catherine... at the Maplewood Institute in New Jersey. He wanted me to check it out before they tried telling you. It might not have been her."

Vincent let his hand holding the picture drop, sorrow clouding his face. "It was not," he said evenly. "Though I can see how Father might have worried." He shook his head. "He cannot understand in his heart that I am no longer a child. Catherine died in my arms. I am not foolish enough to believe she could be resurrected."

Diana swallowed. "There’s something you need to know. I didn’t tell you this," she said, "because by the time I met you, it no longer mattered."

Vincent looked up at her. "Tell me what?"

"Catherine did not die in your arms."

A horrible frisson passed through his torso at those words. No! No, what was happening here? Was this some horrible nightmare? "She did," he said, his voice deepening in a growl. "I sat vigil by her bed until dawn. I kissed her cold lips and felt no life in her flesh. Her last words were to me. Though lovers be lost, love shall not."

"And death shall have no dominion?" Diana said, surprising him. Come to think of it, she had pulled those words from nowhere when he had first met her. Where had she gotten that? "I know," Diana said. "She was alive. Barely, but alive."

He could not take this. He surged forward and threw the table Diana had been working on against the wall, knocking down half a book shelf and breaking the frame of one of her prints. Diana stepped back. Dealing with Vincent, she decided, was not conducive to having nice furniture. If he wasn’t what he was, she’d never be friends with him. "She was not!" he roared.

"Vincent, control yourself, I have neighbors," Diana hissed.

He growled under his breath and began to pace. She was right. Through the turmoil in his heart he spared one thought on Diana’s forbearance. She felt no fear of him. Of course, she had built herself her own fragment of Catherine’s spirit; Catherine felt no fear, either.

"I know this is hard for you," she said. "Believe me, I can imagine how hard."

"She was dead," he growled.

There was something here she wasn’t getting. "Why do you have to believe that?"

He stared at Diana in supplication. "Because if she was not, than I abandoned her!" he groaned.

"It’s not your fault. Everything abandoned her, Vincent, her own breath, even her own senses. Everyone thought she was dead. The EMT injected her with narcan almost on a whim, thinking it already too late."

"Narcan?" Vincent asked.

"Counteracts morphine," Diana said.

Horror widened his eyes. "You mean a simple injection could have brought her back to me?"

Diana didn’t dare say anything. Death waited less than an inch behind his eyes.

Nausea struck him. His stomach surged and bile filled his throat. He bent over, clutching his convulsing stomach as he panted in horror. He should have taken her to a hospital and hang the risk, should have taken her to Father, to Peter, he should have looked more carefully, he should have....

Diana cut through the torment. "She got the injection in time, Vincent. And only because you brought her home. You saved her."

Barely. It was cold comfort. "But she’s gone."

"It wasn’t only that, Vincent. From what I saw of her, she may as well have died that day."

Vincent twitched. "You saw her?"

"Yes. I’m afraid I did. The day I took the case. I went to see her body, but they couldn’t fool me with a replacement. They took me to see another patient. Her," she added, pointing to the now crumpled photograph in Vincent’s hand. "They were hiding her, trying to protect her, by giving her a false name. She was mad, Vincent. She frightened me. She broke my heart... and I knew I had to find justice for her. I knew I had to find you."

Horrified wonder touched Vincent’s eyes. "She sent you?" he whispered.

He was right. Diana shook her head very slightly, unwilling to admit to what had passed between Catherine and herself. It felt as intimate, in its way, as a kiss. "She may have tried to. She had no words left. Or almost no words."

"And you did not tell me?" he whispered, his voice raw.

"She was dead, Vincent. By the time I found you, they told me she had already passed. I wasn’t surprised. She looked half dead already when I saw her."

Vincent’s head tilted back and he sank to the floor. "What have I done?" he whispered. His own words were fading fast. He gripped his fists so tightly that his claws drew blood from his palms. He didn’t dare move, for fear of alerting Diana’s neighbors, for fear of accidently hurting the woman who had helped him retrieve his son. The woman who had acted for Catherine when he was merely couched in despair. He sank his head onto his knees.

Diana sidled up behind him and knelt down. The part of her that was currently Catherine couldn’t leave him alone in this. Gingerly, she stroked the back of his hair. "Should I tell you what I saw?" she asked. "Or is it too much for you?"

"Every moment," Vincent murmured.

Diana wasn’t quite sure if he meant she should proceed or not, but her conscience pricked her. She told him everything, every moment, every line that fell from Catherine's mad lips. They were all burned into her memory, and if her memory had flagged, she could have refreshed it with the poem, a copy of which was now buried under the rubble of what had once been her table. She even spoke of the relief she had felt when she heard "Aurora" had finally died. "I’d never seen anyone act like that. The doctors said it might be an acute form of postpartum depression, compounded by trauma, possible brain damage from the morphine overdose. But now... I’m thinking there was even more to it than that. I think she was trying recreate the conditions Below. Darkness, candlelight, cold. And more... those would have been the early days, when you had... just lost her. If the state of my furniture is any indication, you probably weren’t at your best. If you still shared a bond, as you told me, it is possible...."

"She became like me," Vincent said. "Her words had fled." He looked down at his clenched hands. "And that is how she died. In darkness, alone and insane." He had thought these words a thousand times since she first disappeared, but he had never felt them as deeply as he did now. "It should have been me."

Diana hesitated before she spoke, and when she spoke, he could swear these were Catherine’s words. "It was, Vincent. You’ve died a thousand times since then. I’ve watched you die again tonight."

But this horror was only the first of the night. "You said someone thought they saw her? Alive? Is it possible?"

Diana didn’t want to raise his hopes, but she couldn’t lie to him. "It is possible. They assured me that the body they released was Catherine Chandler’s, but it was a closed casket funeral. Knowing the state she had been in, that didn’t surprise me, but truthfully... I never saw her corpse."

Vincent flinched at the word, and Diana wished she had used something less graphic. "Who saw her?"

Diana shook her head. "Father didn’t tell me that. If it wasn’t her, we didn’t plan on telling you anything. If it was her, Father wanted to warn you before you tried to go to her."

"Father said that," Vincent whispered, incredulous.

"Among other things," said Diana carefully. "He worries about you."

Vincent pulled away slightly from the hand which was stroking his hair. He did not want to be comforted, and a fragment of Catherine’s spirit was not Catherine herself. There was a time he might have let himself be comforted by it, but not when there was even the faintest glimmer of a hope of Catherine’s survival. Diana sat very still. He was very quiet.

"I’ll let you know tomorrow," she said. "After I go to see."

Vincent stood up very quickly then. "Yes," he said. "I’ll meet you at the drainage tunnel."

Diana wasn’t so easily fooled. Vincent had no intention of waiting through the night for someone else to go and see if it was indeed Catherine at the institute. She knew full well she couldn’t begin to stop him. "Be careful," she said instead.

"I shall," he whispered. He paused at her window. "I understand why you did not tell me before," he said. "It would likely have driven me mad, as well, when the wound was still so raw."

"And it wouldn’t have helped anything," Diana said. "She wouldn’t have wanted that. She wouldn’t have wanted you to know she had been in that state." Vincent closed his eyes, hearing echos of himself. The tiny fragment of Catherine’s spirit which Diana had created was true as stone. Which meant she held a sliver of him, as well. "I’m still sorry." She swallowed. "If it isn’t her?"

Vincent shook his head, afraid to hope, afraid to despair. "I go home."

Diana stood up very slowly. "And if it is?"

Vincent regarded her. She looked very frightened. "I don’t know."