“For nine months, Nash and I read Dickens together. We spent the early part of every evening at it, before I went to hunt, and while I was still safe from Goblin’s attacks. We occupied the two chairs by the fireplace in Nash’s room and traded off reading out loud to one another. We went back through Great Expectations, David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop. We also read Hamlet, which set me to secretly weeping about Mona, and Macbeth, King Lear and Othello. We usually parted company by eleven p.m. and on those few days when Aunt Queen forced herself to endure daylight in order to shop for cameos or clothes, Nash accompanied her.

“Other nights Nash watched films with Aunt Queen, Jasmine, and Cindy, the nurse, and other assorted folks. Even Big Ramona got into the spirit of it.

“Then Nash went back out to California to finish his Ph.D. and when he returns he’ll be Aunt Queen’s escort again. She sorely misses him, and, as she’s told you herself, she has no one just now and it hurts her.

“Patsy is doing well on the drug cocktail they’re giving her for AIDS and she’s been able to do a little work with her band. We settled out of court with Seymour for a huge sum of money, but he died shortly after receiving it. Patsy’s sworn she doesn’t infect people. Two more lawsuits have been brought against her by former members of her band.

“All this has worn out Patsy. She likes being in the big house in the front bedroom across the hall. I don’t talk to her very much because every time that I come up those steps I have the overpowering urge to kill her. Every night. I can read her mind without wanting to, and I know she has negligently run the risk of infecting numerous people with AIDS and even now she would do it except that everyone is wise to her. I feel the urge so strongly to take her life that I stay away from her.

“But let me go on.

“From the first night of my return, I have tried to increase my skill and learn my powers.

“I control my telepathy around my family, and around everyone but my victims, really, because it feels obscene to me, and also it feels like noise.

“I have traveled through the air, I have practiced speed. I have come and gone from the Hermitage to far-flung taverns and highway beer joints to hunt for drifters and Evil Doers, or to make a staple of the Little Drink, and I’ve been successful. Even when I’ve drunk my fill I’ve almost always left the victim alive. I’ve learned, as Arion said, to go with the evil, to make it part of myself for those important moments.