"What advice?" I demanded.

"That you leave Dora alone completely. Turn her affairs over to worldly lawyers. Get away from this place. We have more important things to discuss. This is all so distracting."

Then he was gone with a clatter down the lower stairs, and presumably out a side door. I heard it open and close.

And almost immediately following, I heard Dora come through the main rear entrance into the center of the building, the way I had entered, and the way he had entered, and she began her progress down the hall.

She sang to herself as she came, or hummed, I should say. The sweet aroma of womb blood came from her. Her menses. Maddeningly, it amplified the succulent scent of the whole child moving towards me.

I slipped back into the shadows of the vestibule. She wouldn't see me or have any knowledge of me as she went by and on up the next stairway to her third-floor room.

She was skipping steps when she reached the second floor. She had a backpack slung over her shoulders and wore a pretty, loose old-fashioned dress of flowered cottonwith long, white lace-trimmed sleeves.

She swung round to go up when she suddenly stopped. She turned in my direction. I froze. She could not possibly see me in this light.

Then she came towards me. She reached out. I saw her white fingers touch something on the wall; it was a light switch. A simple plastic light switch, and suddenly a flood came from the bulb above.

Picture this: the blond male intruder, eyes hidden by the violet sunglasses, now nice and clean, with no more of her father's blood, black wool coat and pants.

I threw up my hands as if to say "I won't hurt you!" I was speechless.

I disappeared.

That is, I moved past her so swiftly she couldn't see it; I brushed her about like the air would brush her. That's all. I made the two flights to an attic, and went through an open door in the dark spaces above the chapel, where only a few windows in the mansard let in a tiny light from the street. One of the windows was broken out. A quick way to make an exit. But I stopped. I sat down very still in the corner. I shrank up into the corner. I drew up my knees, pushed my glasses up on my nose, and looked across the width of the attic towards the door through which I'd come.

I heard no screams. I heard nothing. She had not gone into hysterics; she was not running madly through the building. She had sounded no alarms. Fearless, quiet, having seen a male intruder. I mean, next to a vampire, what in the world is as dangerous to a lone woman as a young human male?