I let him do this, let him hurl his full force at a body that did not yield even by a quarter of an inch. And there he was, trying to press his fingers into my neck and utterly impotent to make the slightest indentation in my skin and staring into my eyes.

He backed up, calculating, and took another tack. Did I want money? He had plenty of money. All right, he was dealing here with something he hadn’t encountered before. Yes, we weren’t human. He saw that. But he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t a fool. What did we want?

“Tell me,” he roared at me in French. His eyes moved feverishly over the ceiling, the floor, the walls. The doors.

“I want you,” I said in French. I opened my mouth and ran my tongue under my fangs.

He didn’t believe what he saw, of course he didn’t believe, that was preposterous that such creatures as that were real. “Stop trying to frighten me!” he roared again.

He fell into a crouch, shoulders hunched, arms at the ready, fingers balled into fists.

“You’re enough to take my mind off anything,” I said.

I moved closer, sliding my arms around him, sliding them right against that delicious salty sweat, and drove my teeth swiftly into his neck. That’s the least painful way to do it, go right for the artery and just let that first pull on his heart quiet his fear.

His soul broke open like a rotten carcass, and all of the filth of his life spent in smuggling and thievery and random murder, always murder, murder after murder, poured out like black viscid crude oil in his blood.

We were on the floor of the cell. He was still alive. I was drinking the last dregs slowly, letting the blood drain from his brain and his internal organs and pulling it towards me with the steady slow cooperation of his powerful heart.

He was a little boy now, a trusting little boy filled with curiosity and dreams and roaming some countryside very like my own fields and slopes in the Auvergne, and there was so much he wanted to know, so much he wanted to fathom, so many things that he would do. He would grow up and discover the answers. He would know. The snow fell suddenly on the place where he was playing, running, jumping, and spinning in circles with his arms out. And he threw his little head back to swallow the falling snow.

The heart stopped.

I lay there for a long moment, still feeling the warmth of his chest against me, the side of his face under me, feeling some last quiver of life pass through his arms.

Then the Voice spoke.

The Voice was there, low, confidential, right there. And the Voice said: