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"Is it all true, child?" she asked. "Did you sit in a box at the Opera? Did you stand there before the footlights of the Theatre-Francaise? Did you dance with the king and queen in the palace of the Tuileries, you and this beauty you made so perfectly? Is it true you traveled the boulevards in a golden coach?"

She laughed and laughed, her eyes now and then scanning the others, subduing them as if she gave forth a beam of warm light.

"Ah, such finery and such dignity," she continued. "What happened in the great cathedral when you entered it? Tell me now!"

"Absolutely nothing, madam!" I declared.

"High crimes!" roared the outraged boy vampire. "These are frights enough to rouse a city, if not a kingdom against us. And after centuries in which we have preyed upon this metropolis in stealth, giving birth only to the gentlest whispers of our great power. Haunts we are, creatures of the right, meant to feed the fears of man, not raving demons!"

"Ah, but it is too sublime," sang the old queen with her eyes on the domed ceiling. "From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries, I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil's Road through its heart. "

The gray-eyed boy was beside himself.

"Dispense with the trial," he said, glaring at the leader. "Light the pyre now. "

The queen stepped back out of my way with an exaggerated gesture, as the boy reached for the torch nearest him, and I rushed at him, snatching the torch away from him, and heaving him up towards the ceiling, head over heels, so that he came tumbling in that manner all the way down. I stamped out the torch.

That left one more. And the coven was in perfect disorder, several rushing to aid the boy, the others murmuring to one another, the leader stock-still as if in a dream.

And in this interval I went forward, climbed up the pyre and tore loose the front of the little wooden cage.

Nicolas looked like an animated corpse. His eyes were leaden, and his mouth twisted as if he were smiling at me, hating me, from the other side of the grave. I dragged him free of the cage and brought him down to the dirt floor. He was feverish, and though I ignored and would have concealed it if I could, he shoved at me and cursed me under his breath.

The old queen watched in fascination. I glanced at Gabrielle, who watched without a particle of fear. I drew out the pearl rosary from my waistcoat and letting the crucifix dangle, I placed the rosary around Nicolas's neck. He stared stuporously down at the little cross, and then he began to laugh. The contempt, the malice, came out of him in this low metallic sound. It was the very opposite of the sounds made by the vampires. You could hear the human blood in it, the human thickness of it, echoing against the walls. Ruddy and hot and strangely unfinished he seemed suddenly, the only mortal among us, like a child thrown among porcelain dolls.

The coven was more confused than ever. The two burntout torches still lay untouched.

"Now, by your own rules, you cannot harm him," I said. "Yet it's a vampire who has given him the supernatural protection. Tell me, how to compass that?"

I carried Nicki forward. And Gabrielle at once reached out to take him in her arms.

He accepted this, though he stared at her as if he didn't know her and even lifted his fingers to touch her face. She took his hand away as she might the hand of a baby, and kept her eyes fixed on the leader and on me.

"If your leader has no words for you now, I have words,"

I said. "Go wash yourselves in the waters of the Seine, and clothe yourselves like humans if you can remember how, and prowl among men as you are obviously meant to do. "

The defeated boy vampire stumbled back into the circle, pushing roughly away those who had helped him to his feet.

"Armand," he implored the silent auburn-haired leader. "Bring the coven to order! Armand! Save us now!"

"Why in the name of hell," I outshouted him, "did the devil give you beauty, agility, eyes to see visions, minds to cast spells?"

Their eyes were fixed on me, all of them. The gray-haired boy cried out the name "Armand" again, but in vain.

"You waste your gifts!" I said. "And worse, you waste your immortality! Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past. "

Perfect silence reigned. I could hear Nicki's slow breathing. I could feel his warmth. I could feel his numbed fascination struggling against death itself.

"Have you no cunning?" I asked the others, my-voice swelling in the stillness. "Have you no craft? How did I, an orphan, stumble upon so much possibility, when you, nurtured as you are by these evil parents," I broke off to stare at the leader and the furious boy, "grope like blind things under the earth?"

"The power of Satan will blast you into hell," the boy bellowed, gathering all his remaining strength.

"You keep saying that!" I said. "And it keeps not happening, as we can all see!"

Loud murmurs of assent!

"And if you really thought it would happen," I said, "you would never have bothered to bring me here. "