“Now that my blood is in your veins, Leonore, you cannot die. You’re not like us. We don’t have souls. But you do have one, and my blood has bound it forever to your body.” She glanced around the room, tossed her head. “This is your fate.”

Leo stood up. She backed away from Miriam. She had to get out of this awful place; she had to find a cure for herself. This was—it was unimaginable. And she had to kill—to stop this from happening to her, she had to kill and kill for the rest of her . . . time.

“Sarah’s become servile. She’s not an independent soul. She’s boring and I hate to be bored. I hate it!”

“Bored?”

“You have no fucking idea! This isn’t life, always hiding, creeping in the shadows. I’m a princess, not a damned sneak thief! I want the philosophers, the kings about me, not the sleazy gaggle of decadents I attract now.”

Leo had never known a thought this strange, this subtle, but her mind at last grasped the terror of her situation. “You’ve stolen me from myself,” she said. She felt wonder at the evil, the cunning of it. “I’m a slave.”

“No! No! Not like her, you aren’t. When I resurrected her, her will was gone. She knows it, but there’s nothing she can do about it. She even went to Haiti, to try to learn about zombies, to understand her predicament.” She laughed a little. “By all the stars in heaven, she’s boring!” She yanked Leo’s hand. “You’re going to be great. You’ve got a mind of your own. You went out there and fed, against my specific rule. You did it your way. You know how that makes me feel?” She grasped Leo’s hand, glanced back toward John’s coffin. “Ever since he died, I’ve been alone. Now I’m not.”

“What about Sarah?”

“You are foolish, though. But never mind, you’ve got excellent basic intelligence. I will educate you. Do you know what you’re going to be? Why I’ve taken you into my home?”

“God that I did.”

“You’re going to be governess to my son.”

“Husband,”the vampire said,“you’re awake at last. Welcome, welcome back!”

He didn’t have any idea how to react to that particular gambit. But you never knew what an animal as smart as these things might come up with.

The vampire took his hand in the same slim fingers that he had kissed. He felt his gut wobbling at the thought that he had ever touched his lips to its skin . . . let alone the other things he had done. It pressed his hand against its belly.

“Do you feel him?”

He looked up at it. It was all aglow, like a real woman asking you to feel a real baby.