“I know I try your patience,” said Marius.

“And haven’t I tried yours?” asked Daniel. “Would I be here or anywhere if it wasn’t for you?”

“We’ll do things,” said Marius as though placating a restless spouse, a demanding spouse. “We’ll go out tomorrow; we’ll hunt together. There are films we should see, I don’t remember the names now, I can’t think—.”

“Tell me what’s the matter?”

From the living room came the voice of Benji Mahmoud. “Go to the website. See the images for yourselves. See the photographs being posted hourly. Death and death and death to our kind. I tell you it is a new Burning.”

“You don’t believe all that, do you?” Daniel asked.

Marius turned and slipped his arm around Daniel’s waist. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. But he managed a reassuring smile. Seldom had another blood drinker ever trusted in him so completely as this one, this one salvaged so easily and so selfishly from madness and disintegration.

“Whatever you say,” said Daniel.

I have always so loved the flowers.

“Yes, humor me for now,” said Marius. “Stay close … where …”

“I know. Where you can protect me.”

Marius nodded. Again he saw painted flowers, but not the flowers of tonight in this vast tropical city but flowers painted long ago on another wall, flowers of a green garden in which he’d walked in his dreams, right into the shimmering Eden that he had created. Flowers. Flowers shivering in their marble vases as if in some church or shrine … flowers.

Beyond the banks of fresh and fragrant flowers in the lamp-lit shrine sat the immovable pair: Akasha and Enkil.

And around Marius there formed the gardens he had created for their walls, resplendent with lilies and roses and the twining of green vines.

The twining of vines.

“Come inside,” said Daniel gently, coaxingly. “It’s early. If you don’t want to go out again, there’s a film I want you to see tonight. Come on, let’s go in.”

Marius wanted to say yes, of course. He wanted to move. But he stood still at the railing staring out, this time trying to find the stars beyond the veil of the clouds. The flowers.

Another voice was talking from the laptop on the coffee table behind him, a young female blood drinker somewhere in the world pleading for reassurance over the wires or airwaves as she poured out her heart. “And they say it happened in Iran, a refuge there up in smoke, and nobody survived, nobody.”

“But then how do we know?” asked Benji Mahmoud.

“Because they found it like that the next night and all the others were gone, dead, burned. Benji, what can we do? Where are the old ones? Are they the ones doing this to us?”

Chapter 9

The Story of Gregory