But in the company of David and Armand, she had lost all contact with her former world, living here in New York, as the worst winter in fifty years came down, a snow from Heaven—living here among the relics and listening to them, their soft comfort, their wondrous tales, uncertain of what she meant to do, believing still in God....

All that was the latest news.

I took the blanket from them and walked, one shoe gone, through the flat.

I went into the small room. I wrapped the blanket around me. The window here was covered. No sun would come.

"Don't come near me," I said. "I need to sleep a mortal's sleep. I need to sleep the night through and the day and then I'll tell you everything. Don't touch me, don't come near me."

"May I sleep in your arms?" Dora asked, a white and vibrant blood-filled thing standing in the doorway, her vampiric angels behind her.

The room was dark. Only a chest was left with some relics in it.

But there were statues still in the hall.

"No. Once the sun rises, my body will do whatever it will to protect itself from any mortal intrusion. You can't come with me into that sleep. It's not possible."

"Then let me lie with you now."

The other two stared over her shoulders at my empty left eyelids fluttering painfully against each other. There must have been blood. But our blood is staunched fast. The eye had been torn out by the root. What was its root? I could still smell the soft delicious blood I had from her. It laid on my lips, her blood.

"Let me sleep," I said.

I locked the door and lay on the floor, knees drawn up, warm and safe in the thick folds of the blanket, smelling the pine needles and the soil that clung to my clothes, and the smoke, and the bits and pieces of dried excrement, and the blood, of course, the human blood, blood from battlefields, and blood from Hagia Sophia when the dead infant had fallen on me, and the smell of the horse manure, and the smell of the marl of Hell.

All of it was wrapped up with me in this blanket, my hand on the bulk of the unfolded veil against my bare chest.

"Don't come near me!" I whispered one more time for the ears of the immortals outside, who were so confounded and confused.

Then I slept.

Sweet rest. Sweet darkness.

Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.

Chapter Twenty Three

I remained unconscious the full twenty-four hours, waking only as the sun died behind the winter sky the next evening.

There was a fine outlay of my own good clothes for me displayed on the wooden chest, and a pair of my own shoes.

I tried to imagine who had made this selection from amongst all that David had earlier sent here for me from the nearby hotel. Surely he was the logical choice. And I smiled, thinking of how often in our lives David and I had been utterly entangled in the adventure of clothes.