Flavius and Davis appeared in the doorway. At once the doctor, Fareed, greeted Flavius and began asking as to the leg, the miracle leg, and they were lost now in conversation. But Seth had taken one of the many small gold music chairs against the wall and was staring at Sybelle and Antoine as they played together. He seemed oblivious to everyone else. Davis too had been distracted and drawn by the music.

Chrysanthe suddenly asked Marius if he cared to dance, and he, quite surprised, immediately accepted.

This startled Gregory. Indeed it shocked him.

“If you don’t know how to waltz,” Chrysanthe was saying, in her naïve and innocent fashion, “I’ll teach you.”

But Marius did know how, he confessed with a playful smile, and suddenly they were dancing in wide circles across the hardwood floor in the vast empty room, two stately and charming figures—Chrysanthe with her shimmering bronze hair threaded with pearls and spilling down her back in waves, and Marius staring right into her eyes as he guided her effortlessly in time with the music. He had cut his pale-blond hair short for this evening, and wore the simplest of male attire, a dark dinner jacket and trousers with a white turtleneck sweater.

He is the most impressive immortal here, Gregory thought, and my Chrysanthe is as beautiful as any, as beautiful as Pandora who is just now coming into the room. I don’t like it, their dancing. I don’t like it at all.

When had he ever seen blood drinkers dancing? He and Chrysanthe went out into human society frequently and always had, and they had danced, yes, on many a polished dance floor, passing for mortal, but this was wholly different. This was a gathering of immortals, and the dancing of immortals was different.

Suddenly the music was too loud for him, and he felt his pulse in his veins, and he didn’t want to watch Marius with his Blood Wife, Chrysanthe. But he didn’t want to walk away either.

From far beyond these walls there came voices in the night, the young blood drinkers out there arguing with one another in the park, and suddenly one of them was fleeing from another in terror.

The tempo of the music became ever more rapid. Pandora had begun to dance with Louis, the ancient one with the inevitable living-marble demeanor and the younger, more human Louis beaming down at her as if she were in fact an ingénue in his care. Recent infusions of ancient blood had not entirely altered Louis. He was still perhaps the most human-appearing immortal in the house.

Davis moved out onto the dance floor, alone, his head slightly bowed, left arm raised in an arc, right hand on his waist making his own little private dance to the waltz music with exquisite feline ease. His heavy-lidded eyes were dreamy, and his dark brown skin gorgeous in the light of the chandelier.