Free Dark Heart by Margaret Weis;David Baldwin

in the shadows, wondering why his master had sent him here, when the alarm had gone off, indicating somebody was about to open the kitchen door into the alley.
    Then he’d seen the cop find the skin, seen the fight with the Dropka disciple. From the moment the Dropka had appeared, he’d lost the option of dealing with the cop alone. And even then he’d known what the Dragon would demand. From the moment the cop touched the scales of the dragonling cocoon, his fate was sealed, no matter how much Justin fought it. Not killing him then and there had simply been a precautionary tactic—a mysterious, monstrously murdered corpse was the last thing he needed in an alley behind his home.
    Justin rose, shivered. He often hated what he’d become, but he saw no way to change it.
    Perhaps a shower would pull him out of the depression that always followed a kill.
    The shower didn’t help. Afterward, he crossed to the closet. Throwing the door open wide, he pulled out a robe and put it on. The warm cotton settled over his wet skin.
    You are my scalpel, Lord of Sterling.
    The Dragon’s words echoed in his mind from long ago, from the day when Justin had first voiced his doubts about his mission.
    Scalpels must cut deep to save the whole.
    That was undoubtedly the truth. But why did those words never give him comfort?
    He understood intellectually that his immortal master had a plan for the world, one which resulted in actions that seemed on the surface to be deadly, brutal, and hideous, but which served the greater good of the whole of mankind; but as the tool who carried out those terrible acts, his soul lived in torment. He could neither take comfort in the larger goals his master pursued, for his master rarely shared his plans with underlings, nor could he shake the guilt for his dreadful deeds.
    His mind understood. But his soul shrieked in unbearable pain.
    Justin looked about the room and saw an accusing gallery of ghostly figures whose deaths he had arranged over the centuries. They weren’t truly there, merely figments of his overwrought imagination, but they were still as real to him as they’d been on the day they died. They lived on in his memory as surely as they ever had in real life, forever trapped in that moment when they took their last breath while he watched. On the nights he killed, the images were most vivid, but the gallery of the dead never entirely vanished from his mind. Seeing them now, he knew there was no help for it. Sometimes he could hold them at bay, but not tonight.
    Ghostly faces stared at him like death masks, each one contorted in fear and pain. Justin tried to ignore them. He wished desperately that he could sleep. He could escape them if only he could reach that oblivion. Justin’s nightmares were always waking ones, for he slept the sleep of the dead.
    Mortals dreamed, but not Justin. He tried to remember what dreaming was like, but since the day he’d made his choice, he’d never again felt the soaring joy of a good dream, the terror of a nightmare. No warm summer days. No grave-cold horrors. His ghosts found him when he was awake. Tired, defenseless against them, but awake nonetheless.
    When he did sleep, it was as though he ceased to exist. Justin wondered sometimes if his lack of dreams meant his soul had left his body forever on the day he became immortal.
    If so, there was little he could about it now.
    Except regret the loss.
    And he supposed the Dragon had provided a substitute for dreaming—of a sort.
    The master’s appearances in the mirror were strangely spaced. Those glowing red eyes would look out at Justin three times in the same day, every day for months at a time; then Justin would go decades without ever seeing the long, spike-toothed face of his Dragon lord in a reflection.
    But the master often overwhelmed Justin’s sleeping mind. The Dragon had settled there long ago and the weight of its demands were crushing. Although Justin never dreamed as mortals did, he did have