I could see it in her face. I reassured her, and reminded her in quick words of the vision I'd given her before.
"This is brief pain, nothing compared to what you've known. It will be gone in a matter of hours, maybe less if we drink now. " She nodded, more impatient with it than afraid. We came out into a little square. In the gateway to an old house a young man stood, as if waiting for someone, the collar of his gray cloak up to shield his face. Was she strong enough to take him? Was she as strong as I? This was the time to find out.
"If the thirst doesn't carry you into it, then it's too soon, " I told her.
I glanced at her and a coldness crept over me. Her look of concentration was almost purely human, so intent was it, so fixed; and her eyes were shadowed with that same sense of tragedy I'd glimpsed before. Nothing was lost on her. But when she moved towards the man she wasn't human at all. She had become a pure predator, as only a beast can be a predator, and yet she was a woman walking slowly towards a man-a lady, in fact, stranded here without cape or hat or companions, and approaching a gentleman as if to beg for his aid. She was all that. It was ghastly to watch it, the way that she moved over the stones as if she did not even touch them, and the way that everything, even the wisps of her hair blown this way and that by the breeze, seemed somehow under her command. She could have moved through the wall itself with that relentless step. I drew back into the shadows. The man quickened, turned to her with the faint grind of his boot heel on the stones, and she rose on tiptoe as if to whisper in his ear. I think for one moment she hesitated. Perhaps she was faintly horrified. If she was, then the thirst had not had time enough to grow strong. But if she did question it, it was for no more than that second. She was taking him and he was powerless and I was too fascinated to do anything but watch. But it came to me quite unexpectedly that I hadn't warned her about the heart. How could I have forgotten such a thing? I rushed towards her, but she had already let him go. And he had crumpled against the wall, his head to one side, his hat fallen at his feet. He was dead. She stood looking down at him, and I saw the blood working in her, heating her and deepening her color and the red of her lips. Her eyes were a flash of violet when she glanced at me, almost exactly the color the sky had been when I'd come into her bedroom. I was silent watching her as she looked down at the victim with a curious amazement as if she did not completely accept what she saw. Her hair was tangled again and I lifted it back from her. She slipped into my arms. I guided her away from the victim. She glanced back once or twice, then looked straight forward.
"It's enough for this night. We should go home to the tower, " I said. I wanted to show her the treasure, and just to be with her in that safe place, to hold her and comfort her if she began to go mad over it all. She was feeling the death spasms again. There she could rest by the fire.
"No, I don't want to go yet, " she said. "The pain won't go on long, you promised it wouldn't. I want it to pass and then to be here. " She looked up at me, and she smiled. "I came to Paris to die, didn't I? " she whispered. Everything was distracting her, the dead man back there, slumped in his gray cape, the sky shimmering on the surface of a puddle of water, a cat streaking atop a nearby wall. The blood was hot in her, moving in her. I clasped her hand and urged her to follow me. "I have to drink, " I said.
"Yes, I see it, " she whispered. "You should have taken him. I should have thought . . . And you are the gentleman, even still. "
"The starving gentleman. " I smiled. "Let's not stumble over ourselves devising an etiquette for monsters. " I laughed. I would have kissed her, but I was suddenly distracted. I squeezed her hand too tightly. Far away, from the direction of les Innocents, I heard the presence as strongly as ever before. She stood as still as I was, and inclining her head slowly to one side, moved the hair back from her ear.
"Do you hear it? " I asked. She looked up at me. "Is it another one!
" She narrowed her eyes and glanced again in the direction from which the emanation had come.
"Outlaw! " she said aloud.
"What? " Outlaw, outlaw, outlaw. I felt a wave of lightheadedness, something of a dream remembered. Fragment of a dream. But I couldn't think. I'd been damaged by doing it to her. I had to drink.
"It called us outlaws, " she said. "Didn't you hear it? " And she listened again, but it was gone and neither of us heard it, and I couldn't be certain that I received that clear pulse, outlaw, but it seemed I had!
"Never mind it, whatever it is, " I said. "It never comes any closer than that. " But even as I spoke I knew it had been more virulent this time. I wanted to get away from les Innocents. "It lives in graveyards,
" I murmured. "It may not be able to live elsewhere . . . for very long. " But before I finished speaking, I felt it again, and it seemed to expand and to exude the strongest malevolence I'd received from it yet.
"It's laughing! " she whispered. I studied her. Without doubt, she was hearing it more clearly than I.
"Challenge it! " I said. "Call it a coward! Tell it to come out! " She gave me an amazed look.
"Is that really what you want to do? " she questioned me under her breath. She was trembling slightly, and I steadied her. She put her arm around her waist as if one of the spasms had come again.
"Not now then, " I said. "This isn't the time. And we'll hear it again, just when we've forgotten all about it. "
"It's gone, " she said. "But it hates us, this thing. . . "
"Let's get away from it, " I said contemptuously, and putting my arm around her I hurried her along. I didn't tell her what I was thinking, what weighed on me far more than the presence and its usual tricks. If she could hear the presence as well as I could, better in fact, then she had all my powers, including the ability to send and hear images and thoughts. Yet we could no longer hear each other!
3
I found a victim as soon as we had crossed the river, and as soon as I spotted the man, there came the deepening awareness that everything I had done alone I would now do with her. She would watch this act, learn from it. I think the intimacy of it made the blood rush to my face. And as I lured the victim out of the tavern, as I teased him, maddened him, and then took him, I knew I was showing off for her, making it a little crueler, more playful. And when the kill came, it had an intensity to it that left me spent afterwards. She loved it. She watched everything as if she could suck up the very vision as she sucked. blood. We came together again and I took her in my arms and I felt her heat and she felt my heat. The blood was flooding my brain. And we just held each other, even the thin covering of our garments seeming alien, two burning statues in the dark. After that, the night lost all ordinary dimensions. In fact, it remains one of the longest nights I have ever endured in my immortal life. It was endless and fathomless and dizzying, and there were times when I wanted some defense against its pleasures and its surprises, arid I had none. And though I said her name over and over, to make it natural, she wasn't really Gabrielle yet to me. She was simply she, the one I had needed all of my life with all of my being. The only woman I had ever loved. Her actual death didn't take long. We sought out an empty cellar room where we remained until it was finished. And there I held on to her and talked to her as it went on. I told her everything that had happened to me again, in words this time. I told her all about the tower. I told everything that Magnus had said. I explained all the occurrences of the presence. And how I had become almost used to it and contemptuous of it, and not willing to chase it down. Over and over again I tried to send her images, but it was useless. I didn't say anything about it. Neither did she. But she listened very attentively. I talked to her about Nicki's suspicions, which of course he had not mentioned to her at all. And I explained that I feared for him even more now. Another open window, another empty room, and this time witnesses to verify the strangeness of it all. But never mind, I should tell Roget some story that would make it plausible. I should find some means to do right by Nicki, to break the chain of suspicions that was binding him to me. She seemed dimly fascinated by all of this, but it didn't really matter to her. What mattered to her was what lay before her now. And when her death was finished, she was unstoppable. There was no wall that she could not climb, no door she wouldn't enter, no rooftop terrain too steep. It was as if she did not believe she would live forever; rather she thought she had been granted this one night of supernatural vitality and all things must be known and accomplished before death would come for her at dawn. Many times I tried to persuade her to go home to the tower. As the hours passed, a spiritual exhaustion came over me. I needed to be quiet there, to think on what had happened. I'd open my eyes and see only blackness for an instant. But she wanted only experiment, adventure. She proposed that we enter the private dwellings of mortals now to search for the clothes she needed. She laughed when I said that I always purchased my clothes in the proper way.