But what, what is your name, under God, who are you?

He was dead. I dropped him and stepped back. Talking to me! Talking to me during the kill? Asking me who / was? Piercing the swoon?

"Oh, you are so full of surprises," I whispered. I tried to clear my head. I was warmly full of blood. I let it stay in my mouth. I wanted to pick him up, tear open his wrist, drink anything that was left, but that was so ugly, and the truth was, I had no intention of touching him again! I swallowed and ran my tongue along my teeth, getting the last taste, he and Dora in the truck, she six years old, Mommy dead, shot in the head, with Daddy now forever.

"That was the fifth killing!" he'd said aloud to me, I'd heard him.

"Who are you?"

"Talking to me, you bastard!" I looked down at him, ooh, the blood was just flooding my fingertips finally and moving down my legs; I closed my eyes, and I thought, Live for this, just for this, for this taste, this feeling, and his words came back to me, words to Dora in a fancy bar, "I sold my soul for places like this."

"Oh, for Godsakes, die, damn it!" I said. I wanted the blood to keep burning, but enough of him, hell, six months was plenty for a love affair between vampire and human! I looked up.

The black thing wasn't a statue at all. It was alive. And it was studying me. It was living and breathing and watching me under its furious shining black scowl, looking down at me.

"No, not true," I said aloud. I tried to fall into the deep calm that danger often produces in me. Not true.

I nudged his dead body on the floor deliberately just to be sure I was still there, and not going mad, and in terror of the disorientation, but it didn't come, and then I screamed.

I screamed like any kid.

And I ran out of there.

I tore out of there, down the hall, out of the back and into the wide night.

I went up over the rooftops, and then in sheer exhaustion slipped down in a narrow alley, and lay against the bricks. No, that couldn't have been true. That was some last image he projected, my Victim; he threw that image out in death, a sweet vengeance.

Making that statue look alive, that big dark winged thing, that goat-legged....

"Yeah," I said. I wiped my lips. I was lying in dirty snow. There were other mortals in this alley. Don't bother us. I won't. I wiped my lips again. "Yeah, vengeance; all his love," I whispered aloud, "for all the things in that place, and he threw that at me. He knew. He knew what I was. He knew how...."

And besides, the Thing that stalked me had never been so calm, so still, so reflective.