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There was more. Apologies, assurances, particulars . . . it ceased to make sense.

I put the letter down on the desk. I stared at the wood and the pool of light made by the lamp.

"Don't go to him," she said.

Her voice was small and insignificant in the silence. But the silence was like an immense scream.

"Don't go to him," she said again. The tears streaked her face like clown paint, two long streams of red coming from her eyes.

"Get out," I whispered. The word trailed off and suddenly my voice swelled again. "Get out," I said. And again my voice didn't stop. It merely went on until I said the words again with shattering violence: "GET OUT!"

Chapter 4

4

I dreamed a dream of family. We were all embracing one another. Even Gabrielle in a velvet gown was there. The castle was blackened, all burnt up. The treasures I had deposited were melted or turned into ashes. It always comes back to ashes. But is the old quote actually ashes to ashes or dust to dust?

Didn't matter. I had gone back and made them all into vampires, and there we were, the House de Lioncourt, whitefaced beauties even to the bloodsucking baby that lay in the cradle and the mother who bent to give it the wriggling longtailed gray rat upon which it was to feed.

We laughed and we kissed one another as we walked through the ashes, my white brothers, their white wives, the ghostly children chattering together about victims, my blind father, who like a biblical figure had risen, crying:

"I CAN SEE!"

My oldest brother put his arm around me. He looked marvelous in decent clothes. I'd never seen him look so good, and the vampiric blood had made him so spare and so spiritual in expression.

"You know it's a damn good thing you came when you did with all the Dark Gifts. " He laughed cheerfully.

"The Dark Tricks, dear, the Dark Tricks," said his wife.

"Because if you hadn't," he continued, "why, we'd all be dead!"

Chapter 5

5

The house was empty. The trunks had been sent on. The ship would leave Alexandria in two nights. Only a small valise remained with me. On shipboard the son of the Marquis must now and then change his clothes. And, of course, the violin.

Gabrielle stood by the archway to the garden, slender, longlegged, beautifully angular in her white cotton garments, the hat on as always, her hair loose.

Was that for me, the long loose hair?

My grief was rising, a tide that included all the losses, the dead and the undead.

But it went away and the sense of sinking returned, the sense of the dream in which we navigate with or without will.

It struck me that her hair might have been described as a shower of gold, that all the old poetry makes sense when you look at one whom you have loved. Lovely the angles of her face, her implacable little mouth.

"Tell me what you need of me, Mother," I said quietly. Civilized this room. Desk. Lamp. Chair. All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old as men. Nicki had lived to be thirty.

"Do you require money from me?"

Great beautiful flush to her face, eyes a flash of moving light-blue and violet. For a moment she looked human. We might as well have been standing in her room at home. Books, the damp walls, the fire. Was she human then?

The brim of the hat covered her face completely for an instant as she bowed her head. Inexplicably she asked:

"But where will you go?"

"To a little house in the race Dumaine in the old French city of New Orleans," I answered coldly, precisely. "And after he has died and is at rest, I haven't the slightest idea. "