ON TV, INTERROGATION rooms are roomy and have big windows so that you can watch everything. In reality, the rooms are pretty small, and there are almost never big picture windows; that's why real police footage is grainy and black-and-white, rather than Technicolor gorgeous. The interrogation room was painted pale beige, or maybe it was taupe, I'd always been a little fuzzy on the difference between them. Either way it was a bland color described by real estate agents as a warm neutral; they lied. It was a cold, impersonal color. The small table was all shiny metal, and so was the chair. The idea was that the prisoners couldn't scratch their names, or messages, in the metal like they could have in wood, but whoever thought that had never seen what a vampire, or a wereanimal, could do to metal. There were plenty of scratches in the shiny tabletop, most done with just fingernails, superhuman strength, and the boredom of hours of sitting. The vampire sitting at the small table wasn't trying to carve his initials on anything. He was crying, so hard that his thin shoulders shook. He'd slicked his black hair back from his face in a widow's peak that I was betting was a haircut and no more natural than the ink-black color. He was mumbling in a tear-choked voice, "You hate me because I'm a vampire." I spread my hands flat on the cool metal table. My jacket's jewel-tone blue