Benedict sat back in the chair, his long brown curly hair mussed and falling into his eyes, his boyish mouth quivering. Of course his face was smeared with blood and so were his clothes, his wool sweater and his tweed jacket. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Vampires who spilt blood on their garments either from victims or tears were anathema! Nothing so revolted Rhoshamandes about modern fictive and film vampires as their utter unrealistic sloppiness.

And Benedict looked perfectly like a cheap television vampire with that blood all over him.

He’d be the image of an eighteen-year-old youth forever because that is what he was when he’d been made a blood drinker, just as Rhoshamandes would always look like a man a few years older than that with a fuller chest and heavier arms. But Benedict had always had a childlike personality. No guile, no cunning. He might never have outgrown it in mortal life. Something to do with Christ’s command, “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Benedict had not only been a monk in his youth, he’d been a mystic.

Who could know?

Rhoshamandes, on the other hand, if it mattered, had been the eldest of ten mortal children and a man at the age of twelve, protecting his mother. Palace intrigue. The day she’d been murdered, he’d run away to sea and survived by his wits, amassing a fortune before he journeyed up the Nile to trade with the Egyptians. He had fought many a battle, survived unscarred, but made his wealth by instinct rather than violence—until the Queen’s blood drinker slaves captured him and dragged him from his boat.

Rhoshamandes and Benedict were both comely and fine boned, chosen for the Blood on account of their seeming physical perfection. Rhoshamandes had brought over dozens of such beauties as Benedict into the Blood, but none had survived with him, stayed with him, loved him as had Benedict, and when he thought of the times he’d driven Benedict away, he shuddered inwardly and thanked some dark god of the blood-drinking world that he’d always been able to find Benedict and bring him back.

Benedict was sniffling and now and then moaning in his inimitable charming fashion, trying to regain possession of himself. Benedict’s mortal soul had been formed in kindness and gentleness and true faith in goodness, and these traits he’d never lost.

“All right, that’s better,” said Rhoshamandes. “Now recall it all for me.”

“Surely you saw it, Rhosh, you saw the images. All those blood drinkers couldn’t have perished without your catching images.”

“Yes, I did, of course,” said the other, “but I want to know just how it got the jump on them when they’d been warned. They had all been warned.”