“Yes, you do. You feel cold when I feel cold and it takes more than this.”

“You just don’t understand how or what I feel,” he said dejectedly. “You don’t understand how the world looks to me through your eyes, or feels to me through your hands. Or why I want innocent blood.”

“So you’re the one who wants innocent blood,” I replied. “And that’s why I’m thinking of it all the time, night and day, the boss man who’s telling the Children of the Night all over the world that they can’t drink innocent blood.”

“I loathe and detest you.”

“How big was the city?”

“How should I know? You saw it. It was big like the city of Manhattan and packed with towers, overgrown with towers, towers of pale azure and pink and gold, the most intricate and delicate of towers. You couldn’t see all of it in those flashes. You couldn’t see the flowers and the trees that lined the streets—.”

Silence.

I didn’t dare to say a word. But he was not continuing….

“Yes?” I asked. “What kinds of flowers?”

I felt a small convulsion in my neck.

Did that mean he was feeling pain?

“Yes, that’s what it means, you imbecile,” he said.

I remained quiet, waiting. Far down the hill, more and more of the tribe were arriving. I would not rest until Viktor and Rose had returned. And they could not possibly reach the Château before sunrise. It was night in San Francisco, but five in the morning here. I prayed they had gone to New York as they’d promised. I couldn’t bear to think of Rose and Viktor most of the time, out there, newly Born to Darkness, determined to roam the planet free of all guardians, Rose gone back to explore her old home and her school and find that devoted mortal bodyguard who’d once saved her life, and bring him over into the Blood if she and Viktor could manage it.

That had been Rose’s only request: to offer the Dark Gift to her beloved Murray. And I had acquiesced though I gave all the predictable stodgy warnings of my generation in the Blood that it could spell disaster. Rose had vanished into our world leaving the mortal Murray bewildered and hurt that his precious charge, the college girl he’d guarded with such love, had simply abandoned him.

Of course I’d investigated Murray. He was a complex man, of deep feeling, a lover of things of the mind to which he’d made his way only through comic books, fantasy novels, and television, but a lover of the spiritual, and moral to the core of his being. He had been in awe of Rose’s education and refinement; in awe of her ambition. Maybe it would work, this invitation to Murray.