On they went, faster and faster, the piano and the violin singing of gaiety and glory as if they had always been one.

A random noise pierced his thoughts. Something wrong. Be en garde. The music had stopped.

Over the top of the brick wall to his left, he saw a human crouched in the darkness, incapable of seeing him there as he saw the human. He heard the soft stealthy sounds of Sybelle and Antoine drawing near to the glass porch that ran along the back of the three townhouses. He heard the mortal intruder’s labored breath.

The intruder, dressed in black garments and black skull cap, dropped down into the wet grass. With deft feline movements he darted out from the shrubbery and into the dim yellow light from the house.

Scent of fear, scent of rage, scent of blood.

He saw Louis now, the lone figure on the bench beneath the tree, and he stiffened. Out of his slick black Windbreaker jacket he raised a knife that shone like silver in the semidarkness.

Slowly he came towards Louis. Ah, the old menacing dance.

Louis closed the book but he didn’t put it aside. The scent of the blood made him faintly delirious. He watched this emaciated yet powerful young man come closer. He saw the malignant face infinitely more clearly than the man, hardened with purpose, could see his. The man was sweating and breathing raggedly, crazed with drugs and seeking for anything he might snatch to find the anodyne for his twisting gut. Such beautiful eyes. Such black eyes. Why these walls and not some other garden meant nothing in the scheme of things to this one, and before Louis could utter a word to him, the man had resolved to sink the knife into Louis’s heart.

“Death,” Louis said now loudly enough to stop the man, though he was only a few feet away. “Are you ready for this? Is this what you truly want?”

A sinister laugh came from the intruder. He stepped forward crunching the lilies, the stout white calla lilies, underfoot.

“Yeah, death, my friend!” the man said. “You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Ah, but for your sake”—Louis sighed—“would that were true. But it has never been less true than it is now.”

He had the man in his grip.

The knife was gone, lost in the wet leaves. Sybelle and Antoine waited in the shadows behind the wall of glass.

The man fought and kicked in a small useless fury. Oh, how Louis had always cherished the struggle, young muscles straining against him and the inevitable strangled curses like so much unwitting applause.