She lay back on the little sofa where she so often read and worked. Sarah knelt beside it. “Please forgive me, Miri.”

Miriam gazed at her. “I forgive you, child,” she said. “But you must help me with this.”

“Miri, he hates you. And he’s a killing machine.”

“He has a heart, Sarah, a huge heart. I want my chance to try to reach his heart.”

“When he wakes up, Miri, God knows what’ll happen.”

“I want you to help me. Both of you.”

“Of course we will. That goes without saying.”

Miriam went over and picked up the encaustic painting of her lost Eumenes. “I left my happiness in another world.”

“We have happiness.”

She smiled a little.“I’m the last of my kind, you know—the last Keeper.”

“There are others.”

Miriam looked at her. “Living in holes? That’s not being a Keeper—a true ruler of mankind.” She gazed at the portrait of the handsome young man in his white toga. “I’m lost in time.” She put it down and came back to Sarah. “But I have a baby. I have hope.”

Sarah did not know what Miriam had in her belly, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out. If this much-shattered heart took another blow, it was even possible that Miriam would join her peers in the shadows, living like an animal and waiting—no doubt hoping—to die.

“I want a pregnancy test.”

Sarah played for time. “As soon as Paul recovers.”

“No, no,” Miriam said. “You’ll do it immediately.”

“I need the resources of the infirmary for him.”

Miriam came to her. “You can do the test and we both know it.”

Sarah took her in her arms.

“I have to know,” Miriam whispered. Sarah hugged her tight.

They stayed like that, in the declining light of the afternoon.

Leo paced to the wall and back to the door, and she remembered chocolate icebox pie and blinis and blintzes and beluga. She went to the back windows and wiped off her sweat and remembered Mommy’s chicken fricasee and Aunt Madeline’s molasses cookies. She slapped the wall and hugged herself and sweated rivers and remembered rib eyes at Sparks and smoked salmon at Petrossian.

But all that really mattered was the raw, delicious taste in her mouth and the smell in her nose of blood, blood, blood.

When she’d drunk his blood, she’d drunk his soul, and she was drunk on it and she had to have more of it.

Her jeans were soaked with pee, her underarms and hair were awash, and she felt as if she couldn’t breathe and couldn’t think because she needed more, she wasn’t finished—she wanted a lovely bowl of cherry cobbler, but she needed blood.