I made it all the way into my apartment on that outburst of energy, walked in -- and started seeing every visit he'd ever made. Vachon stooped over to look at zucchini and radicchio and yogurt and tomatoes and oranges and soda in my fridge; Vachon leaning on the counter and staring down at my hips and thighs, imagining, and remembering something he refused to tell me; Vachon the one time he decided to cruise into my bedroom to see what it looked like, picking up my old stuffed animals and turning to face me without a word, just a quizzical, teasing look. Vachon on the sofa, where I could never really get him to settle in and stay and talk like I wanted....

The sofa is where I threw myself down and let the tears come. They kept coming all day.

I've seen death; it goes with being a cop. I'm not good at it, though. It still upsets me even when it's a total stranger who's sprawled on the street with a look of terrible surprise frozen into his eyes, or a pretty girl just going cool, with one pathetically naked foot poking out from under the crime scene sheet, or a carefully investigated body at the morgue.

And this was Vachon not dead, Vachon with his incomprehensible 500-year-old personality shining out of a young man's humorous eyes. A Vachon who couldn't even lift his hands any more to tweak my hair. Vachon who had saved my life for a fourth and last time that very day -- protecting me from himself.

And I let him order me out of there so he could die alone. "You don't want to see this, Trace"-- is he going to burn? Turn into smoke? Suddenly look like the 491 years old that he really is? But he wanted me gone, and his desire got the better of my selfish desire to stay, to cling, to try to help according to my idea of helpfulness, and I got out.

I cried, wondering: Is it now? Is this the moment he dies? Did it happen an hour ago?

When I ran out of tears, I just lay there, like you do when you're too sick to even want to move. After a while, I was able to cry again, and did. I saw the light change as the day waxed and waned, looked at my watch occasionally and noticed the hours were going by without really feeling the time pass.

I called in another personal day. I didn't want to show up at the precinct. I didn't want to face Nick's abstractions or his little jokes or his blue moods or whatever he was going to be today. I didn't give a rat's ass about the Wyatt case, or whether Natalie figured out I stole two pints of blood and reported me. I didn't want to explain to her, or Nick, or Reese, or anyone why I blew off a hot homicide investigation. I didn't want to talk to another human being.

And there was only one vampire I wanted to talk to, and he had died this afternoon.

The hours rolled by, and the sky went black outside. In the past five months, I've come to look at night skies differently; somehow they mean good exciting possibilities -- night is Vachon's time, he might be around, something could happen, who knows? So now I looked at his black half of the daily round and thought of night without him, city lights with no possibility of a Spanish vampire flying around unseen, someone who could turn up with the cold breath of night air and his long hair wild with what the wind did to it while he flew. Dead night.

Eventually, I sat up. Inertia is foreign to me, really, so I sat up for no reason the same way I'd been lying still for no reason. I was cried out, and felt hot and cracked and brittle. I still didn't want anything except to see Vachon. I was too tired to think anything else. Someone should take of him. Who would bury him ? Why after 500 years was he so alone?

Well. Screed had been on his own, too, except for Vachon happening to show up with me. Maybe that's what vampires all are, lone wolves. Maybe that's why Vachon said that thing about burying mortal friends; maybe vampires ... can't be friends with each other? He never told me, and now I'd never know. But a mortal friend could return the favor on behalf of the others, just once.

So I picked up my coat and my car keys from where I dropped them, and walked out to my car, and drove over to the church.

No lights. No candles. All disarray; it had looked like he was moving anyway, but I had been too focused on him being sick to ask. He'd put a bed where one of the statues used to be ... a bed to die in.

"Vachon?" Nothing. I hadn't expected ... but now I realized I'd hoped. I listened as hard as I could, but there was no rasping breath, no rustle, no anything.

I had a good flashlight with me, so the problem wasn't lack of light, it was lack of will. I couldn't bring myself to pull the beam up onto the bed. It had been such a normal bed, upper sheet, lower sheet, nice red wool blanket, pillows in crispy white cases ... my Mom would make a bed like that. (So what did you expect, Trace? Dirt in a coffin? An antique four-poster and medieval tapestries? Black silk sheets?)

A minute later, I found the will to do it. I did it like a cop, just lifted my wrist, played the beam in a crescent, the regular sweep of an illum pattern.... Oh my God.

Nothing there. Just blankets and sheets.

My breath seized up, but I made myself walk over and look. Nothing. No trace. No ash, no scorch marks, no bones, no ... nothing.

And the tears came again. Of all the stupid things, I had wanted one more little bit of Vachon. Just to bury him, just to care for his body, even if I had to do it in some terrible secret way. Just so he could be a little bit taken care of. I leaned over on that bed and cried like a little girl.

There were a couple of hairs on the pillow. Had other vampires come and taken him away? Why hadn't they come to keep him company instead? "Our community ... us" -- had they flickered in to carry off the last of him to some kind of vampire ... what? cemetery? Funeral pyre? There were no clues, just the two strands of black hair. I took them, and that was the last of the man I had seen blink his eyes open for a split second amid the wreckage of a Boeing 707.

At home, all I felt was exhaustion. I didn't want to die with him, do some exotic swan dive off my balcony for love.... I would have liked to be able to go to a memorial, or write my name in some book of people who had loved Javier Vachon, or could have loved him; I would have liked to be able to tell stories at a wake, but those were just tired, sad feelings, not the passionate grief that had been working its way out earlier.

I went back to the sofa, lay down on it again, and was asleep in less than a minute.

I don't know how long it was before I woke up. That sixth sense woke me, you know, the thing that tells you in the dark that nothing has happened but something has happened? I woke up wary, instinctively working on where my gun was, stretching my senses into the dark trying to figure out what it was.

There was cold air in the room. There shouldn't have been. I don't leave any windows cracked for fresh air in January.

And maybe I heard a breath? or just a curtain in that little drift of air?

I slid backwards off the couch ultra-quietly, and got my gun out of my coat pocket. I'd carried it when I went over to the church, even though bullets and vampires mix just fine.

I stood up. I still really didn't give a damn about anything, but instinct and training will carry you through almost any situation.

I held the gun out two-fisted at where I thought the breath had been. "I'm a police officer."

"I know."

A humorous, slightly cracking voice. The only voice ... I'm hallucinating. It's a ghost. It's Vachon. It's a dream.... I almost fired a few rounds from sheer shock.

He turned on the light. It was him all right ... black raincoat, black messy gorgeous hair ... he looked ... fine. "Are you a ghost?" My voice came out crooked and squeaky.

He smiled and shook his head slowly side to side. "Sorry. Just a vampire."

I was still pointing the gun at him, and he raised his eyebrows, looking at it. I let my hands drop, but otherwise I couldn't move. Not at all, not my left foot or my right foot or anything. And in my mind, I was running into his arms....

His face shifted from joking to sweet in that instant; it became suffused with the tenderness that he'd shown me while he was immobile, in the hours when he was past hunger, when his voice rattled because of the fluid in his lungs, the hemorrhaging in his throat. His voice now was smooth, quiet, as tender as his eyes.

"My bed smells of apricots and mortal tears," he said.

Oh god. I still couldn't move. "Someone...." all I could do was whisper. "I wanted...." I frowned hard, trying to find what I wanted to say, but could only get to, "you were alone." It was almost accusing, the way it came out.

He came forward to me then, and wrapped his arms around me, burrowed his nose under my hair; I could hear him inhaling the scent of me over and over, and his breaths blew out softly on my ear, both a tickle and a caress. His arms were locked around me so tight, but it wasn't a crushing embrace, this wasn't that kind of passion, just this absolute holding and breathing me in over and over ... and I was still holding the gun, of all the silly things. I flicked it over toward the sofa, not even really caring if it was going to go off, and wrapped my arms around him just as hard and just as softly, and we stood there who knows how long, and every once in a while he'd murmur, "Tracy. Tracy."