“Let me dream that I would have broken off with Stirling, but I wasn’t just frightened of him, frightened of him knowing about me, I was hungry for his death. I’m not sure how it would have gone. He was fighting me with an elegance of mind. He has that, an elegance of mind. Yes, I think I would have taken his life. It was tangled with my love for him. I would have been damned for it forever, and I would have found some way to put an end to myself right away. I’m damned for almost doing it. I’m damned for everything. I live, I live in a fatal frame of mind.”

“How so? What do you mean?” he asked, but he wasn’t surprised by what I’d said.

“It’s as if I’m forever in the grip of Last Rites or dictating a Last Will and Testament. I died the night my Maker brought me over; I’m like one of the pathetic ghosts of Blackwood Manor who doesn’t know he or she is dead. I can’t come back to life.”

He nodded, raising one eyebrow and then relaxing. “Ah, well, you know that argues much better for a long existence rather than recklessness and devil-may-care behavior.”

“No, I didn’t know,” I said quickly. “What I know is that I have you here and you helped me with Goblin, and you see what Goblin can do. You see that Goblin has to be . . . has to be destroyed. And maybe me too.”

“You haven’t the smallest idea of what you’re saying,” he returned quietly. “You don’t want to be destroyed. You want to live forever. You just don’t want to kill to do it, that’s all.”

Now I knew that I was going to cry.

I took out my pocket handkerchief and I wiped at my eyes and my nose. I didn’t turn away to do this. That would have been too cowardly. But I did look about me without moving my head, and when I looked back at him I thought, what a staggeringly beautiful creature he was.

His eyes alone would have done the trick, but he’d been gifted with so much more, the thick massive blond hair, the large finely shaped mouth and an expression eloquent of comprehension as well as intelligence, and under the light of the gasolier he was the matinee idol drifting before me, carrying me out of myself into some unmeasured moment in which I relished his appearance as if he couldn’t or didn’t know.