"What are you?"

Rephaim focused his burning gaze on the girl. "Begone, apparition."

Instead of fading as she should have, the child narrowed her eyes to study him, appearing intrigued.

"You're not a bird, but you have wings. And you're not a boy, but you have arms and legs. And your eyes are like a boy's, too, only they're red. So, what are you?"

Rephaim felt a surge of anger. With a flash of movement that caused white-hot shards of pain to radiate through his body, he leaped from the closet, landing just a few feet before the ghost - predatory, dangerous, defensive.

"I am a nightmare given life, spirit! Go away and leave me in peace before you learn that there are things far worse than death to fear."

At his abrupt movement, the child ghost had taken one small step backward, so that now her shoulder brushed against the low windowpane. But there she halted, still watching him with a curious, intelligent gaze.

"You cried out for your father in your sleep. I heard you. You can't fool me. I'm smart like that, and I remember things. Plus, you don't scare me because you're really just hurt and alone."

Then the ghost of the girl child crossed her arms petulantly over her thin chest, tossed back her long blond hair, and disappeared, leaving Rephaim just as she had named him, hurt and alone.

His fisted hands loosened. His heartbeat quieted. Rephaim stumbled heavily back to his makeshift nest and rested his head against the closet wall behind him.

"Pathetic," he murmured aloud. "The favorite son of an ancient immortal reduced to hiding in refuse and talking to the ghost of a human child." He tried to laugh but failed. The echo of the music from his dream, from his past, was still too loud in the air around him. As was the other voice - the one he could have sworn was that of his father.

He couldn't sit anymore. Ignoring the pain in his arm and the sick agony that was his wing, Rephaim stood. He hated the weakness that pervaded his body. How long had he been here, wounded, exhausted from the flight from the depot, and curled into this box in a wall? He couldn't remember. Had one day passed? Two?

Where was she? She'd said she would come to him in the night. And yet here he was, where Stevie Rae had sent him. It was night, and she hadn't come.

With a sound of self-loathing, he left the closet and his nest, stalking past the windowsill in front of which the girl child had materialized to a door that led to a rooftop balcony. Instinct had driven him up to the

second floor of the abandoned mansion, just after dawn, when he'd arrived. At the end of even his great reservoir of strength, he'd thought only of safety and sleep.

But now he was all too awake.

He stared out at the empty museum grounds. The ice that had been falling for days from the sky had stopped, leaving the huge trees that surrounded the rolling hills on which sat the Gilcrease Museum and its abandoned mansion with bent and ruined branches. Rephaim's night vision was good, but he could detect no movement at all outside. The homes that filled the area between the museum and downtown Tulsa were almost as dark as they had been in his postdawn journey. Small lights dotted the landscape - not the great, blazing electricity that Rephaim had come to expect from a modern city. They were only weak, flickering candles - nothing compared to the majesty of the power this world could evoke.

There was, of course, no mystery to what had happened. The lines that carried power to the homes of modern humans had been snapped just as surely as had the ice-burdened boughs of the trees. Rephaim knew that was good for him. Except for the fallen branches and other debris left on the roadways, the streets appeared mostly passable. Had the great electric machine not been broken, people would have flooded these grounds as daily human life resumed.

"The lack of power keeps humans away," he muttered to himself. "But what is keeping her away?"

With a sound of pure frustration, Rephaim wrenched open the dilapidated door, automatically seeking open sky as balm to his nerves. The air was cool, and thick with dampness. Low around the winter grass, fog hung in wavy sheets, as if the earth was trying to shroud herself from his eyes.

His gaze lifted, and Rephaim drew a long, shuddering breath. He inhaled the sky. It seemed unnaturally bright in comparison to the darkened city. Stars beckoned him, as did the sharp crescent of a waning moon.

Everything within Rephaim craved the sky. He wanted it under his wings, passing through his dark, feathered body, caressing him with the touch of the mother he'd never known.

His uninjured wing extended itself, stretching more than a grown man's body length beside him. His other wing quivered, and the night air Rephaim had breathed in burst from him in an agonized moan.