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I was glad to be home in Venice within minutes, though my beloved city was also cold.

No sooner did I reach my bedchamber than Amadeo came into my arms.

I covered his head with kisses and then his warm mouth, taking the breath from him, and then with the smallest bite, giving him the Blood.

"Would you be what I am, Amadeo?" I asked. "Would you be changeless forever? Would you live a secret for eternity?"

"Yes, Master," he said with a feverish abandon. He laid both his warm hands on the sides of my face. "Give it to me, Master. Do you think I've not brooded upon it? I know that you fathom our minds. Master, I want it. Master, how is it done? Master, I'm yours. "

"Find the heaviest cloak to protect you against the winter," I said, "And then come up to me on the roof. "

It seemed scarcely a moment before he joined me. I looked out towards the sea. The wind was strong. I wondered if it hurt him and I did fathom his mind, and I measured his passion.

And looking into his brown eyes I knew that he had left the mortal world behind him more effortlessly perhaps than any other mortal I might have plucked from my garden, for those memories still festered within him, though he was disposed completely to believe in me.

I wrapped him in my arms and, covering his face, I carried him with me down into a wretched district of Venice, in which thieves and beggars slept where they could. The canals reeked of refuse and dead fish.

There I found a mortal victim within minutes, and to Amadeo's amazement caught the miserable fellow with preternatural speed as he sought to stab me, and brought him up to my lips.

I let Amadeo see the cunning teeth with which I pierced the throat of the wretch, and then my eyes closed and I became Marius, the blood drinker, Marius, the slayer of the Evil Doer, and the blood flowed into me, and it did not matter to me that Amadeo was witness, that Amadeo was there.

When it was finished, I dropped the body silently into the filthy water of the canal.

I turned, feeling the blood in my face and in my chest and then slowly moving into my hands. My vision was dim, and I knew that I was smiling¡ªnot a vicious smile, you understand, but something secretive and beyond anything the child had ever beheld.

When at last I looked at him, I saw only amazement.

"Have you no tears for the man, Amadeo?" I asked. "Have you no questions as to the disposition of his soul? Without Sacred Rites, he died. He died only for me. "

"No, Master," he answered, and then a smile played on his lips as though it were a flame which had sprung from mine. "It's marvelous what I saw, Master. What do I care for his body or his soul?"

I was too angry to respond. There had been no lesson in it! He was too young, the night too dark, the man too wretched, and all that I had foreseen had come to nought.

Once again, I wrapped him in my cloak, covering his face so that he could see nothing as I traveled through the air silently, moving over the rooftops and then breaking deftly and silently through an upper window that had been shuttered against the night air.

Through the rear chambers of the house, I moved from this breach till we stood together in the shadowy and sumptuous bedroom of Bianca, and through the salons before us, I saw her turn from her guests. I saw her coming to us.

"Why are we here, Master?" asked Amadeo. He looked towards the front rooms fearfully.

"You would see it again to understand it," I said angrily. "You would see it among those whom we claim to love. "

"But how, Master?" Amadeo demanded. "What are you saying? What do you mean to do?"

'T hunt the Evil Doer, child," I said to him. "And you shall see that there is evil here as rich as there was in that poorling whom I committed to the dark water, unconfessed and unmourned. "

Bianca stood before us, asking us as gently as she could, How had we come to be in her private rooms? Her pale eyes looked at me searchingly.

Quickly I accused her.

"Tell him, my beloved beauty," I said, my voice muted so that the company should take no notice, "tell him what awful deeds lie behind your gentle composure. Tell him what poison guests have drunk beneath your roof. "

How calm she was as she answered me.

"You anger me, Marius. You come improperly. You accuse me without authority. Leave me and come again in the gentle manner in which you have come so many times before. "

Amadeo was trembling. "Please, Master, let us leave here. We have nothing but love for Bianca. "

"Oh, but I would have more of her, rather than love of her," I said to him. "I would have her blood. "